• Tory Blair

    I once went out with a girl whose nickname was: "Tory Wife."


    She was the only female member of the Conservative Society that I joined during my first year at University. So not only did I fend off the competition - I also had the dubious honour of 'working my way' through the entire society's female compliment. All one of them!

    Anyway. I remember staying up with her all night during Mayday 1997, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister. Back then, as a Conservative (with a big C) I was dead set against Mr Blair and the Labour Party. I was a conservative!

    Little did I know that the following decade would reveal Tony to be a far more effective Conservative Prime Minister than anybody in the Tory Party could have been.

    Tony Blair reinvented the Labour party as "New Labour," shifting the traditionally socialist party to the centre of British politics. This nudged the wounded Conservatives out of their traditional place and the party has never since been able to recover.

    New Labour was able to do what the traditional socialists hadn't been able to do. Win an election. And in doing that, Tony Blair gathered enough momentum to perform what must be the biggest and most incredible political fraud in British history.

    New Labour became the New Conservatives.

    Socialism went out of the window. More and more traditionally Conservative values were adopted and instigated. Like a cuckoo, kicking the other eggs out of the nest, New Labour unseated the Tories and took their place.

    Never more so has this been evident than yesterday, when Tony Blair managed to win a crucial vote securing the future of Trident, Britain's nuclear submarine deterrent.

    It was a real landmark vote. The Labour Party, since the end of the Second World War, has traditionally been against nuclear proliferation and now the cold war is over, the official 'Party Line' has been that Britain's nukes must go.

    Yet here was Labour's Leader, calling for twenty billion pounds of investment in Nuclear Weapons. Whatever the ruling party had become, it was no longer the Labour we knew as children.

    Tony Blair only managed to win the crucial vote by calling on the support of David Cameron and the Conservative Party itself. 95 Labour MP's stood firm to traditionally Labour values and voted against the missiles.

    But Tony Blair won - with almost the entire Tory party backing his motion. Finally a man who has acted for a decade like a Conservative Prime Minister found himself standing at the de facto head of the real Conservative Party (what's left of it.)

    But the rebellion by those 95 labour dissenters, mostly hailing from the old school north of Britain, hinted at the reemergence of a new Labour movement. A return to the socialist roots that Tony Blair and New Labour abandoned.

    Old Labour could be making a comeback.

    What this will do to Britain's traditionally bipartisan political scene, who can tell? It will be interesting to find out.

    In the safety of another country.

    :-)

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