When Gordon Brown surrendered the post of Prime Minister to his Conservative opponent, David Cameron, he signaled the fall of the Labor Party from its heady days of the 90s, when Margaret Thatcher stepped down.
In 1997, when Tony Blair took power, he gave an extraordinary speech to the Labor Party Conference, saying to those assembled, “Since this is a day for honesty, I’ll tell you, my heroes aren’t just Ernie Bevin, Nye Bevan and Ackley. They’re also Keynes, Beveridge, Lloyd George. Divisions amongst radicals almost 100 years ago resulted in a 20th century dominated by conservatives. I want the 21st century to be the century of the radicals.”
Blair became the youngest PM [Prime Minister] since 1812, an heir to a party that only ruled for 25 of the past 100 years. He ruled for a decade and turned over his post in 2007 to Gordon Brown, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, a kind of finance minister. When Blair first ran his party won with the biggest landslide in the postwar era since 1935, making Labor virtually indestructible as a political force.
The Iraq war soured big slices of the populace on Labor and small parties of Right and Left took pieces out of it. Blair and his supporters turned their government into an instrument of corporate power and an extension of U.S. power and betrayed, not just their party, but their class and their nation, for Britain became a junior partner to a major breakage of international law, sowing global discord and reaping little. Blair did not, and perhaps never will, see the century of radical ascendancy, unless that of the Right. Their policies led to the reemergence of Conservative power in Parliament, albeit in coalition, and a crippling loss for Labor. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
