Michael Meacher was Minister of State for the Environment for six years, though for some reason Tony Blair did not appoint him to the Cabinet. Meacher gained a fine reputation, well-respected as a skilled negotiator and a minister with full command of his complex brief. He helped John Prescott to clinch the Kyoto agreement to limit carbon emissions in 1997 and was one of the first in Government to come to grips with the issue of global warming.
Meacher notes in his recent Global Research article , that after hi-jacking the party down a route utterly alien to its founders, in order to ingratiate himself with corporate and financial leaders on their terms . . . Tony Blair appears not to understand why the Corbyn earthquake is happening or the passionate resentment which he and New Labour created:
by laying the foundations for the financial crash of 2008-9 and making the squeezed middle and brutally punished poor pay for it,
by aligning New Labour alongside the Tories in pursuit of austerity from 2010 onwards, though Osborne’s policy (to shrink the State) has been unsuccessful in reducing the deficit,
by taking Britain without any constitutional approval into an illegal was with Iraq,
by introducing into politics the hated regime of spin and manipulation,
by indulging now his squalid lust for money-making
and by clearly having no more overriding desire than to strut the world with Bush.
He then asked three searching questions about Blair’s conduct:
Why did he urge the Blairites to support the government’s welfare bill which opposed every tenet of the real Labour Party?
Why did he push for privatisation of the NHS and other public services?
Why did his ally Mandelson say “New Labour is “relaxed at people becoming filthy rich”, and proved it by letting inequality balloon to even higher heights than under Thatcher?
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