It’s interesting to see what Tony Blair had to say about Michael Foot. I think it is fair to say that, despite their initial romance over the relevance of Marxism, it is difficult to find two more different figures under the roof of one tent, big or small.
Part of what makes this interesting is that the 1983 defeat played such a big part of shaping Blair into the man he later became. Even given the feelgood sunshine of 1997, Blair’s politics was always undercut by a deep vein of distrust, and in certain parts, pure contempt for what went before. On a certain level this is forgivable, given the size of defeat, but it also seems to me that this created a kind of fundamental irrationality in Blair’s thought processes, encouraged by those around him.
I am currently reading Alastair Campbell’s diaries, and have only made it up to the period of the campaign against Clause IV, as it was then. Blair seems to have been utterly bemused by the objections to the Trade Unions to removing public ownership as a party commitment.
What did he expect? It’s easier to organise unions in the public sector.
At a certain level, 1983, and what Blair associated with it, started many positive things. It’s not bad to want to campaign professionally, for example.
But it also began a long distancing from the Labour movement, which ended with big privatisation contracts, and unions gathering in hundreds of thousands to march against a war started by their own party. Trust the priests of moderation to bear the icons of overreaction.
