Right here’s the deal for those who don’t already know.
Blair has stated that if he wins the next election (pretty much a racing certainty) he will serve the whole term and quit at the end of it.
This means that he has put himself in a similar position to a second term American president.
There are a variety of reasons for this, some fact some speculation.
The first is that he wanted to end speculation about his future. His health has been a matter of speculation as has stresses in his family (As a paid up chattering class bloke I do know what the story is – it’s to do with his daughter and pretty unpleasant but should remain private). This gets rid of any TB to quit stories from the press.
Another is that it is a way of giving other members of the party time to get an anti-Brown platform together, and of course it just plain annoys Gordon Brown (texture like sun)
So how are things likely to play out?
Will he actually last the full term?
Who will follow him? Will the next government be paralysed by infighting for position?
As Mrs Merton would say; “Let’s have a heated debate”
There will be a lot of jockeying for position around likely leadership candidates (who to me seem to be Gordon Brown (through my mind she runs) Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn and a few outside choices like Hewitt). Each will be seeking to set themselves up as the “stop Gordon” candidate.
Will he last the full term?
Not a chance. He wants out ASAP for all sorts of reasons, family, health, general disillusionment etc. He just wants there to be a safe (non-Brown) hands to pass “the project” onto
Who will win?
Dunno. I wouldn’t rule out a late charge by a compromise anti-Brown challenger Like Hewitt, Blears or even Milliband.
This is the most interesting for me. If Blair remains PM until the election before handing over the reins for the campaign, it, at least partially, negates one of the main advantages that a governing party has - the actual proof of being able to govern. Surely better to hand over say a year before and allow the new leader some time to proof him or herself as PM before being forced to go before the electorate.
Depends on the size of the Labour majority and the positions that potential candidates take with regard to the current leadership. I would have thought that anyone with serious aspirations would have to give the appearance of not rocking the boat and will keep their supporters in fairly tight check.
I’m not entirely certain how things will play out, and it doesn’t strike me as Blair’s doing this specifically to piss Brown off. It doesn’t quite seem his style. I’d say that he’s done it to end the press BS about his future, and perhaps to alert the Blairites that they need to stop the in-fighting. I certainly don’t think he’ll be a sitting duck.
Ithink that pissing off Gordon is at most a bonus for TB, not the main motive.
However “an aide close to Gordon Brown” was in the Observer on Sunday saying that GB felt that he had deliberately waited until he was out of the country before launching “an African style coup”. Not the sounds of a happy Chancellor.
What would be seriously interesting is if GB decided to take the fight to TB and resigned to the back-benches where he could speak freely.
I’m no expert on this but I believe it’s next to impossible to get rid of a Labour leader, lots of anti-Bennite measures to stop this sort of thing. Anyone know better?
Blair will enter the third term knowing that the next 4-5 years in UK politics will essentially be all about one thing: Europe. He knows that, whenever he goes, he is handing his successor a chalice so poisoned that it’s taste would even make Gordon Brown’s expression more sour, if that is possible.
I simply do not know what this crucially important third term will throw up. The first visible hurdle is the referendum on the European Constitution, which the aphasic australopithecines at duh Sun and the plutocratic xenophobes in the UK Independ…sorry, Conservative Party will turn into a referendum on joining the Euro. Eddie Izzard truly has his work cut out to get anything but an Ian Paisley-esque bellow of “NO!” from our enlightened isle of patriotic knobends.
The cycle is coming around again, as it always does: three terms is, I believe, as many as a modern political party can realistically expect these days no matter how well the economy ticks over or how incompetent the opposition. I believe Blair will sign off by almost deliberately losing the 2009 (or whatever) election with a strongly pro-EU stance. He will engineer something that can only be avoided by joining the Euro, thus allowing the Tories to inherit a world of shit for a single term, the electorate to see the error of their bovine ways, and Labour to return in 2013 with an electoral mandate to become a full member of the EU which might be then have the constitution and democratic procedures in place to realistically look forward to a United States of Europe.
I’m neither Labour nor Tory, me, so I don’t give a toss.
P.S: What do you think of the new Tory symbol, owl? Steve Bell made me get funny looks on the bus this morning when I literally laughed out loud at this.
Thing is, pissing off Brown is not politcally expedient, and no matter what else Blair is, he is politically astute.
Europe will be the main issue, in the next few years I think, once the Iraq controversy has blown over. However, the only way we’re going to stop becoming the outsider looking in at Europe is going to be once people realise that the old days of Empire are gone. They don’t exist anymore, and to have any chance of surviving economically and politically, we are going to have to join Europe, or else…
I think you may be onto something with Europe. Assuming Blair lasts as long as St Margaret did, he will want a similarly large page in the history books.
At the moment all he’s got is, for better or worse, Iraq (at least Margaret (peace be upon her) could actually win wars!
So he needs some lasting legacy to put him alongside Thatcher (thatcherism), Attlee (Welfare State), etc. At the moment he’s more Eden and MacMillan.
The only thing that could get him anything like this is getting UK into the Euro. So he’ll do anything to do this. This could be the “point of principle” that GB uses to go back to the back-benches and plot his own coup d’etat.
Of course the one thing that MacMillan did get right was his description of what goes wrong to political careers “events dear boy, events”
I can’t find anything nice to say about the EU and would leave in a heartbeat, yet there are always these dark warnings about the terrible things that would ensue should we ever go back to being a nation state.
I really have no idea what these things are (and I’m not being inflamatory I really can’t see a down side getting out of or at least as far from the centre of the EU)
I don’t really know. We may end up being a political non-entity, or come more under the wing of the States, I don’t honestly know. I do believe however, that not joining the EU wholeheartedly will probably be worse for us economically in the long run.
I really don’t see that it could be any worse than giving other countries large sums of our cash so they can improve their infra structure to compete with us.
I work in venture capital and I can tell you that there is sod-all difference in doing business within and outside the EU.
Still maybe this is stuff for another thread…
Back to Blair: What pretexts could he use to quit before time is up - My guess is a “health scare”.
Blair could somehow engineer a wobble in the UK economy during his third term. After an overly pro-EU stance loses the 2009 election, that wobble should have developed nicely. Then, when the Euro subsequently did well against the pound, joining it would appear as a good deal - “look, we’re the ones on the receiving end for a change!”
(And no, I didn’t learn my politics in 16th Century Florence. They were amateurs!)
You believe that the UK economy is currently “buggered up”? By any reasonable global criterion it appears none too shabby. Are you sure your patented Howard the (Lame) Duck spectacles aren’t distorting your view somewhat?
It’s bad and getting worse by the day, indeed by the hour. This is what Labour governements do - they spend money they haven’t got on their client classes (dole-moles; spongers; povs; sweaties; public sector “workers” and anyone with a grievance and an outstretched hand) and the other lot then have to spend years rebalancing the economy to make it competitive again.
According the the IMF IRELAND (yes IRELAND for fuck’s sake) is more competitive than the UK.
That’s what Labour have done to us - made us worse than IRELAND
Every generation has to learn about tye Labour party the hard way - it’s taking longer than usual this time.
Do you recall at all the mess that the “other lot” made? Does the name “Lamont” mean anything??? And no-one could accuse the Tory government of spending money on their 'client classes, huh? :rolleyes: Give away privatisation anyone??? Any large companies around with space on the board that fancies a public asset at a knock-down price?
No matter how much a prat Blair has been, and we’ll be glad to see the back of him, you cannot fault what Brown has done with the economy.
Or perhaps Ireland have simply been better than us these last 10 years. No need to talk down their achievements.
Ireland has irisen* up the table quite dramatically, as you well know owl - it is disngenuous of you to suggest that the UK has dropped appreciably.
Personally, I believe that raising the GDP per capita health and education spending such that the UK is more like Europe than the US is a good thing, which would of course be ruined by the plutocrats in the blue corner. That is why your lot are utterly detested outside of the higher tax-bands and the sister-drilling bumpkinside. Of course, I detest Blair and his Conservative B team too, just not as vehemently.