The dark secret of Tony Blair
Ivan Ansa is the pseudonym of the author who infiltrated the longest and darkest conspiracy in British history. Here is an extract from his sensational book The Worse The Better to be published by Hottotrot Books on 31 September 2011.
There is a dark secret at the heart of modern British politics. Once in the open, it makes sense of disasters which otherwise seem random and inexplicable, like an asteroid impact.
This is the dark secret: New Labour was the creation and the creature of Militant Tendency.
For the benefit of younger readers, Militant Tendency was an ultraLeft revolutionary group which achieved prominence and power through the British Labour party in the early 1980s. Following the tactic established by the exiled Russian Communist, Leo Trotsky, they practised entryism – joining the Labour party (which they secretly despised) to achieve positions of influence to propagate a revolutionary programme and mobilize the working class in its support. A prime aim of Militant Tendency was to discredit the institutions of Parliamentary and local democracy, including the Labour party itself, and make the masses lose faith in them.
At theirhigh pointin 1985 Militant Tendency took over the city council ofLiverpooland sought to make it bankrupt (to engineer mass protests against public service cuts by the Thatcher government). They were dramatically confronted by Labour’s then leader, Neil Kinnock, routed and expelled from the party. But I joined them at that time and discovered that their story was far from over.
Militant Tendency went underground and regrouped under new leadership with a clean, even whiter-than-white record within the Labour party. The key figure was Tony Blair and their master strategist was Peter Mandelson.
Militant Tendency never abandoned their basic strategy of entryism. The lesson they drew from their defeat was that they had made this strategy too obvious. Indeed, they were comic caricatures of ultraLeft insurrectionists – like the TV sitcom character, Citizen Smith (of whom more later).
For their next attempt at entryism, they went to exceptional lengths to conceal their ultraLeftism. They reinvented themselves as a new movement with a passion for unrestricted markets, personal wealth, flexible labour forces (ie non-unionized and with minimal rights), managerialism, religiosity and all things American. This new strategy owed much to the brilliance of Mandelson. It meant that Militant could pursue its dream of ruining the British state while ensuring that all the odium fell on the ideology of their opponents.
In this new guise, they re-entered the Labour party in the early 1990s, gaining impetus from the shock defeat in 1992. (It was no shock to them: by spiking his soft drink Militant ensured that Neil Kinnock would get over-excited on camera at the infamous Labour party rally inSheffield. It was not only a political masterstroke but delayed vengeance on their arch-enemy).
As in the 1980s, they placed their people in key positions, took over decayed local parties or sections of the party machine, and raised a great deal of money from secret sources. As in the 1980s, they had a small, highly disciplined core of people who knew and rewarded each other. As in the 1980s, they could be recognized by their empty, repetitious speech patterns, packed with jargon and drenched in fake empathy with the masses. As in the 1980s, they used this to bore party opponents into inanition. As in the 1980s, they produced a prodigious amount of political literature, read only by themselves.
Militant’s ultimate objective was exactly the same as before, to destroy faith inBritain’s democratic institutions. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They first seized the Labour party and then the apparatus of government. As previously, the public face of the leadership was a duumvirate – one extrovert and charismatic (Derek Hatton/Tony Blair), one dour and dictatorial (Tony Mulhearn/Gordon Brown). But unlike the empty-headed Hatton, Blair (beneath the banalities and bromides of his public speeches) was as ruthless as his mentor, Trotsky, at his peak.
Reinvented as “New Labour”, the Militants sought to repeat on a national scale their tactic of driving Liverpool into bankruptcy. It took them much longer to achieve this – theUK in 1997 was much better endowed thanLiverpool in the 1980s. Militant inherited a rising economy and a benign world economic environment. No matter how much they spent, the country simply couldn’t run out of cash. Eventually Militant hit on the brilliant idea of placing some of their people in key positions in the financial sector. With the help of international comrades in similar positions, Militant engineered a massive banking collapse. The subsequent bailout did finally bankrupt the country. This tactic ensured that the masses not only hated their political system but also the financial sector which had kept the country afloat. It was a sensational double-whammy for Militant and showed how well they had learnt from the 1980s.
For Militant knew by now that it was not enough to make the masses turn against their Parliament and their government. They did these things extremely well, by filling both with stooges or out-and-out sleazeballs. They devised an expenses system which was a standing temptation to MPs and peers and slyly encouraged members in all parties to take advantage. They invented a parallel government of quangoes and commissions and task forces, all colonized by their own people. They pumped out their own propaganda – and this time they could make the taxpayer fund it rather than the straitened Labour party of the 1980s. They issued endless laws and decrees, and forced through dozens of useless and expensive projects.
To complete the process of discrediting the British system of government, Militant arranged the succession of Brown to Blair.
The visible feud between the men was almost entirely irrelevant. They had genuinely come to hate each other, but the final succession was exactly as provided on Mandelson’s masterplan. Blair had done a very good job of persuading the masses that their government was dishonest and wrong-headed, but his leadership continued to inspire a degree of loyalty and respect. It would still be possible to engineer a demand for his recall when the British state finally collapsed. To complete the alienation of the masses from government, Militant needed a leader who could complete Blair’s destructive agenda and alienate the British people at a personal level. Brown was programmed to make the masses look more favourably on Tony Blair. To make certain that Brown fulfilled his allotted role, Mandelson joined the government himself. By careful presentation and gestures in policy, Mandelson also took care to enhance his own personal reputation, creating the illusion of competence and decisiveness in a government where these qualities were generally lacking. (However, one rival remarked that it took longer to read out his titles than his achievements.)
But even putting Brown in charge would not be enough to destroy faith in the British state. Militant needed also to destroy faith in all its institutions, especially those which were sources of historic wisdom and values. As mentioned above, Militant succeeded in doing this for the City of London. By inserting the right people into power and cowing the remainder with endless decrees, targets and inspections, Militant also managed to destroy the influence of local government. With varying degrees of success, they also tried to capture and then discredit the higher civil service, the leadership of the armed forces, the judiciary, the clergy, the arts, and the media. They even attempted to nobble the Monarchy. Elements which resisted the Militant agenda were simply bypassed. Militant had special success in the civil service, raising up a whole series of managers who obeyed its orders and repeated its mantras of “modernization” and “delivery.” This culture became so prevalent that Militant had the confidence to allow repeats of Yes Minister to be shown on television. Sir Humphrey’s adventures with Jim Hacker had become relics of a lost age, as much a costume drama as Jane Austen or the Tudors.
In just thirteen years. Militant managed to persuade the citizens of a mature democracy that their institutions were no longer capable of providing good government. This ensured that the election of 2010 (which they were still obliged to hold by convention) would produce an either-way win for themselves. If Cameron won and tried to rectify the economic damage they had caused they would lead the masses to protest, as they had sought to do in the 1980s against Thatcher. But if Brown won, they would exploit the electorate’s subsequent despair to suggest that democracy itself was finished.
In either scenario, they would prime the masses to demand the return with emergency powers of their true leader and the heir of Trotsky – Tony Blair.
Blair a secret Trotskyite? It seemed impossible. But there were clues. One came from a puckish Militant casting director who needed an actor to play Blair on television. Whom did he choose? Robert Lindsay – the man who had played the wild Trotskyite Wolfie on Citizen Smith. Most obviously and ominously, Blair’s infamous “forces of conservatism” speech had deep echoes of Trotsky’s speeches to the Red Army at Drivelli and Rubishov during the Russian civil war.
Faith in Trotsky was the one constant core in Blair’s protean personality. Everything else was an act, although, as with some actors, some aspects of his role took him over. Blair really did become religious and he really did develop a craving for money. But with his boundless capacity for doublethink and treblethink (and beyond) he had no difficulty in worshipping God and Mammon while still serving the higher god of Leo Trotsky.
Once you realize that Blair and New Labour are agents of Militant Tendency, all kinds of things make sense. No government could make so many bad choices purely by accident. Fighting the Iraq war, wrecking the economy, trashing Parliament and local government, creating a more unequal and divided society, schools full of bored pupils and burnt-out teachers, hospitals which tick boxes and kill patients, the creeping extinction of civil liberties and personal privacy, preaching endlessly at the British people and then lying to them… No government would do such things unless it wanted the British people to be enraged into revolution.
Ivan Ansa August 2011
