New polls chart Blair's withering support - 50% - Blair resign

[dArKeR]

Half of Britain wants Prime Minister Tony Blair to step down, according to a poll in the Financial Times.

Blair's popularity and trust ratings have nosedived in the messy aftermath of the Iraq war. On the eve of his tenth party conference as Labour leader, two separate polls suggested Blair was in trouble both with the public and his own party members.

The FT survey by pollsters Mori asked people whether they agreed with the statement: "It's now time for Tony Blair to resign and hand over to someone else."

Fifty percent agreed, 39 percent disagreed and 11 percent were unsure.

Twenty-nine percent said they were satisfied with Blair's performance, compared to a peak of 47 percent at the end of the Iraq war.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/24by7panews/page.cfm?objectid=13453721&method=full&siteid=50143

[radfringe]

1. check this out

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=415669

[SodoffBush]

2. The chimp and the poodle's popularity is falling like lead balloons

It's time they both quit their positions of power and joined the circus.

[T_i_B]

3. And the sad thing is

I don't think the Blairites give two shits about the fact that they are hugely unpopular and they are causing huge damage to Britain. All that matters to Blair and his cronies is that they cling onto power at any cost, regardless of how silly it makes them look.

Blair's 2 landslide majorities have made him essentially unaccountable to the people who put him there. It's time we showed him that what we can give we can also take away.

[10digits]

4. Blair?

Help me here. Has Blair's party not kicked him to the gutter? Is there not a better PM?

I really thought someone in the party would challenge his leadership.

Many here in the USA think that Tony has been bought off and has a big time money future with the Carlye Group or whatever.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. See this other thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=135076

Basically, about 200 Labour MPs were asked (most of those not on the government payroll); 100 replied; about 25 thought he should go now; another 25 or so thought he should do a managed handover.
Since the Blair government asked them not to speak to the Guardian, it's reasonable to assume that most of those who didn't reply support him (and the same for those on the payroll). So he still has the support of well over half of his party's MPs.

[AP]

6. How many Labor MPs are ther? over 400, right?

?

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. From the Guardian article:

409 Labour MPs
262 backbenchers (rest on government payroll, assumed loyal to Blair)
246 asked by The Guardian
108 replied
24 said Blair should go now
25 wanted a 'peaceful transition'
29 offered unconditional support for Blair
9 wanted him to stay if he changes his style

[AP]

11. I bet that Blair's support goes up after Labour conference...

...but that news reports it in a cynical manner (if at all).

[T_i_B]

19. Well why has Blair's support gone down then?

And why did "new" labour get slaughtered in Brent East by the Liberal Democrats?

[AP]

21. Uh, because the press is attacking him

and, incidentally, that election was BEFORE the conference. All I'm saying is that Blair, when he talks directly to the people, unmediated by the press, tends to get a decent response. He'll almost definitely get a bounce. Then the press will go after him again, and he'll get attacked from the right and the far left. And he'll have to hang on until a Democrat gets elected president in the US.

In fact, I suspec that the closer we get to Nov 2004, and the more it looks like Bush will lose, the less anxious Brits will be about Blair.

Now, I have a question for you. If Bush losing meant that Blair could hang on, would you rather see Bush win?

[T_i_B]

24. And why would he be getting attacked?

Might it be because he has lied us into a war which we did not want and which 2 million of us marched against?

I suggest you look in the mirror for answers as to why Blair is going down with the British people like a french kiss at a family reunion. It was not the press attacks which lost you lot Brent East, it was the Liberal Democrats attacking you.

As to your question, I want to see BOTH go. This is not an either or question. Both Bush and Blair are corrupt and both are liars. Britain and America deserve better than Bush & Blair.

[0007]

25. It sure appears to me that Blair

is being influenced by the Carlyle gang.

'Tis hard to believe Blair could be manipulated!

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Good morning (PDT), TiB

I should be about 4 pm where you are.

I noticed that you resonded skepically to my thread about Blair being in trouble with Labour MPs, as reported in Saturday's Guardian.

How many more Brent Easts are there going to have to be before New Labour gets the message? How long are Blair and his people going to hang on to this Fountain-of-Youth quest for Saddam's lost biochemical arsenal before they realize that the war was a loser? How many more voters must Labour lose before they see that people used to vote Labour because they wanted an alternative to Thatcherism?

[AP]

9. If a Democrat wins in US in 2004, the sabotage of Blair will probably end

and he can go back to doing what he did before Iraq -- building up a wealth and politically powerful middleclass to be a bulwark against Tory fascism.

[Jack Rabbit]

12. I don't agree with that

New Labour is very much like New Democrats on this side of the Pond: a kinder, gentler version of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. If their policies were nonsense, then a watered down version isn't much better. Policies should be persued because they work, not because they are ideologically pure or perceived as trendy and popular.

What sabotage of Blair do you mean? There was none. Blair is in hot water for, among other reasons, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush and PNAC. He didn't have to do that. He sabotaged himself.

[AP]

13. New Labour was the result...

...of devestating losses by the Labour Party in '83. In '83 the Labour party actually had a plank in their platform that promised public ownership of the means of production in the UK. Not even people who laboured for a living thought that that was sensible (it was the same situation agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan confronted when urban working class people saw his populism as a threat to their jobs).

It saddens me that people can't see through the propaganda and realize what's really going on in the UK. Labour is constantly changing and reforming British society in increments. Britain is so deeply, structurally conservative, nobody should be surprised that Blair was the first Labour politician ever to win a second term. My god, they still have a monarchy! It's not easy to undo that kind of structural conservativism. If you do it quickly, you suffer the fate of every other liberal gov't in Britian -- one term followed by long period of Tory entrenchment and misery for the working class.

And, by sabotage of Blair, I mean, on the Dianne Rehm show, she gave an hour to that Greek diplomat who quit the Bush administration. He said that one of the worst things Bush is doing is intentionally sabotaging Tony Blair. He said that Blair is a patriot with the best interests of the British public in mind, and Bush is intentionally trying to sabotage him.

By sabotage, I mean that I believe that when the CIA said that they planned to blame the uranium claim in the SOTU on the British, that, what they meant, was that they had an elaborate plan to create a media storm to bring Blair down.

When I say sabotage, I mean that when David Kelly calls Judith Miller a good friend, something very suspicious is going on.

[T_i_B]

17. Will they ever listen?

I don't think that they will listen. They keep saying that they are listening but if they were then they would not be carrying on their extreme right wing course. When all is said and done the contempt these scumbags have for the people they are supposed to serve really is is quite something. Allow Greg Palast to explain.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=236&row=1

How did Blair get into this fix? The answer is, he can't help himself: Blair's an 'Ameriphiliac.' I noticed the Prime Minister's mad affection for all things American in my job reporting from London for BBC and the Guardian/Observer. As a Yank in King Tony's court, I've seen during Blair's six years in office, what began as puppy love for Bill Clinton degenerate into pathetic poodledom at the heel of George Bush. The Prime Minister's need to pad along behind Bush is the result of the strange pathologic politics that Blair calls, 'modernization.' Blair, you see, hates Britain.

This Prime Minister despises his storybook countryside and its grumbling farmers with their two little pigs and their tiny fields edged with dry stone. He cringes at the little bell ringing over the door of the village post office - so quaint and so maddeningly inefficient. He cannot fathom a nation that weeps when he shuts the last filthy coal pits.

Blair is frustrated to tears by what he sees as fossilized trade unions which chain workers to dead industries, rather than building new ones. Britain's Prime Minister dreams of birthing the Entrepreneurial State. Instead, he finds himself caretaker of a museum of nineteenth-century glories made somnolent by easy welfare and low ambitions.

So Tony gazes across the water with almost erotic envy at a thoroughly ‘modernized' America Inc., where Wal-Marts and McDonald's and Microsoft roam free, creating a shiny New Economic Order.
I saw Blair's America-mania up close and inside in 1998 when I went undercover to investigate US corporate influence on his government for the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday paper. Working out of an expensive hotel suite overlooking the Tower of London, my confederates and I pretended to represent Blair's favorite American corporation, a Texas company called, 'Enron.' We wanted to find out how much it would cost in 'consulting fees' to overturn England's environmental laws for the benefit of our US client.

[AP]

8. What's the huge damage Blair is causing?

There's record high employment and record high wages (among public servants, at least, and probably in the private sector too). He's creating a lot of wealth and spreading it among the middle class. Where's the damage. I know you think PFIs are causing future damage (and I admit that I don't like PFIs in the same way I didn't like Clinton's welfare reform), but if we're talking about damage to Britain now, I have a hard time seeing it.

Things sucked real bad before '97, and it was going to take a lot of effort to pull Brits up from the muck of years of Tory domination, and I think Blair is doing a brilliant job of improving the country at the fastest pace possible considering what it was coming out of (ie, a slow pace), and improving it in a way that will entrench a more firm bulwark against Tory fascism in the future.

[AndyTiedye]

14. I Think the BFEE is Blackmailing Blair

I don't know how or what they have on him, but nothing else makes sense.
Why should Blair support Bush in the first place, when everything Bush stands for
should be anathema to him? Why lie for him over Iraq?

Meanwhile Bush wins another trifecta: 1. Gets an ally when no sensible country would go along with him except under extreme duress. 2. Destroys Tony Blair utterly. 3. Ushers in the triumphant return of the Tories and another generation of Thatcherism in the UK.

[AP]

15. Not that it seems to have any influence here, but...

...perhaps "blackmail" not "bribe" is the operative descriptive term that applies?

We are talking about the Tory-loving Bush family, after all.

[thebigidea]

18. gee, maybe that whole lying about the reasons to go to war thing?

that upset, oh - millions upon millions of people.

[AP]

22. "upset millions" who have more jobs and money, and who

will be less likely to see their economy sabotaged by America as a result of Blair being in a position where he can have a greater influence over what's going on in Iraq.

[T_i_B]

20. You can't see iit because you don't have to live with it

Poverty and inequality is if anything even worse than under Thatcher, record debt levels (thanks in no small part to Blairite policies such as tuition fees) public services that have if anything deteriorated under Blair, racism is on the rise, numerous cororate cronyism scandals under Blair, British troops stuck in a quagmire in Iraq for no good reason, and masses upon masses of British people are compeletly disconnected from the democratic proccess.

As to your claim about pre and post 1997. I honestly can't see that much that Blair has done to really improve things. Why should I vote "new" labour when my local tory MP belives in all the same things that Blair does, from foundation hospitals to immigrant bashing?

All you are doing is proving my own assertion that "new" labour is arrogant, out of touch and holds the British people in utter contempt.

[AP]

23. muriel voleslaughterer posted a report that says poverty is down in the...

...bottom two quintiles.

Blair is doing for the British economy at least what Clinton did for the American economy. We live in a world in which the rich dominate and it is very hard to stop their increasing concentration of wealth and power.

Blair and Clinton have been able to ensure that the gains have been made by the poor and middle class. And Blair, to his great credit, has been able to do this in what has been a totally shitty global economy.

Inequality is hard to stop because the rich are so powerful, but it'sclear that it would have been worse in Britain if Blair weren't PM. Just look at how bad it has gotten in the US now that Bush is running things.

As for immigrant bashing, I hate that more than anyone. But I see what Blair is doing. There is a very strong anti-immigration sentiment in Britain. It's very hard to drive a pro-immigration message from the top down. If Blair had done that, I think he wouldn't have been reelected in 2002. What Blair did do was, after he got elected, he sent Jack Straw out to sound like a fascist on immigration. Behind the scenes, they changed a ton of laws which made it harder for immigrants to live in Britain. In fact, one of the first things Blair did (I think within hours of becoming PM) was to change the rule where, if you moved to the UK before you were married and married someone in the UK you had to bring your fucking love letters to some fucking government office and let some bureaucrat read them to prove that you had been in a long-term relationship prior to moving to the UK. That was one of the most dehumanizing things Tories did to immigrants, and bordered on psychotic. Blair changed that law. They didn't make a big deal in the press about it. People like you probably don't know about it. It's because Blair had way more to lose from RW'ers pouncing on pro-immigration actions, then he has to lose from the far left pouncing on anti-immigration laws.

And, incidentally, Tony Blair built his career on a similar strategy. He realized in '83 that Labour was doing so poorly because they get in power, do a thousand left wing things and then the Tories (with media assistance) would exploit all those things. So Blair decided he do an end-run. He said that crime was the big thing hurting Labour. Tories were getting a ton of mileage out of portraying Labour as being soft on crime every time they got their single term and changed Britain's draconian criminal code to something more familiar to more civilized citizens of 20th century nations. So Blair became shadow justice minister (or whatever the title is) and operated under the meta-message "we're hard on crime, but harder on the causes of crime". That's how Blair took Labour from almost being extinct to where it was before Bush put Blair in his crosshairs.

Just as Blair did with immigration, he did with crime -- he talked the agressive talk to take a weapon from the Tory arsenal, but, behind the scenes, out of view of T-i-B, did things to give people a dignified, rewarding, happy life.

And, just as I hate hard talk on immigration, I hate the privitisation of public services. But, I also feel that Blair had little choice on this front, as doing the best he can do to lessen the impact of something that has HUGE institutional momentum behind it. You may not believe it, but the bidding labour does for PFIs is actually fair and it isn't corrupt. If the Tories were running Britain today, you could be sure that people winning bids on this stuff would be Tory cronies. At the very least -- and this is no small thing -- if Blair can clear the deck of lots of inevitable projects during his term, he will ensure that the wealth spread from PFIs doesn't go towards entrenching Tory wealth, and, therefore, political power. At the root of Blair's Labour government's poliicies, is the notion that, if they can spread as much wealth as far down the income ladder, it will translate into political power and they can create a bulwark against future Tory fascism.

I know the real politik is very unsatsifying and very easy to attack. But the alternative to acknowleding it is to participate in the sabotage of Tony Blair, which will result in a Tory government, and the further entrenchment of all the things you really hate.

Finally, if you don't feel that the UK is better today than it was before 97, I can't do much to convince you. But I think if you walk down any street in any major city in the UK, you could see the differences. If you looked at a list of laws and policies that Labour has dumped in the trash bin, you could see the difference.

Incidentally, I remember a couple elections when the Tories decided to play the immigration card, and the next night, somebody went out a stabbed dead an immigrant. I'll be embarrassed if I'm wrong about this, but I don't think that a Jack Straw anti-immigration comment ever resulted in a race riot and a Pakistani immigrant getting murdered the next day. That is a huge improvement in the level of the debate on immigration matters in the UK.

[T_i_B]

26. Blair would still have won without immigrant bashing

Let's be honest here. Bl;air won because he had not f**ked up all that much, the tories under Hague were a shambles and also, Blair had his 180 seat majority from 1997. He didn't bneed to bash immigrants. And the immigrant bashing has got worse since Straw left for the FO and was replaced by David Blunkett, who got the job of home secretary by promising that he would "make Jack Straw look like a liberal". The problem has got worse since the last election and the hate crimes have gone throught the roof since Blunkett took control of the home office. The immigration debate has deteriorated markedly since 1997 and inparticular since 2001. As such I think it is fair to say that your defence of Blair holds very little water.

Plus your statement that Blair was "new" labour in 1983 is blatantly untrue. Back then Blair was right behind the admittedly loony plaftorm of Micheal Foot as much as anyone. Allow a fellow Wednesdayite called Roy Hattersley to explain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1051721,00.html

It has to be admitted that defenders of the Project make up in affrontery what they lack in probity. Yesterday Tony Blair, who came into parliament supporting nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Community and a massive extension of public ownership, announced that he had "always been on the modernising edge of the party". Perhaps Dr John Reid will soon claim that he has been Labour all his life. After his statement last week that critics of the government "come together under the banner FWW - Fed-up With Winning", we can only assume that he will say whatever is convenient at the moment.

There are some of us who fought to win, way back in 1983 - the year to which New Labour supporters always claim their critics wish to return. The extent of that year's defeat had two causes. One was the insistence that the manifesto contained policies that the nation would never accept - see above: nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from Europe and massive nationalisation. Where did last week's three critics of the bad old days - John Reid, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn - stand in 1983? The other reason for that year's debacle was the defection of the Gang of Four. How many No 10 advisers were SDP candidates who split the anti-Tory vote, therefore defeating sitting Labour MPs? Although I do not share the prime minister's Christian beliefs, I welcome sinners coming late to repentance. But I have doubts about their claim to a sudden monopoly of virtue.

[Garion_55]

16. Bush-tanic is dragging blair down with him.

poor guy.