Sitting in a bookshop café, the other day having a chat with a couple of anarchists comrades, the conversation rambled from football to travel on trains and buses, the horror of airports, and a host of other equally important subjects. Then the matter of Jeremy Corbyn came up, to which I said he was the new Messiah that would lead the people to the promised land, only to find they were back where they started in the desert. Then other UK Messiahs came up, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, and the difference between them, though I think the difference is illusionary, to my surprise one of my comrades referred to Tony Blair as a “moderniser”. The reason for my surprise is that I consider this as 100% mainstream media propaganda language. Tony Blair was one of a bunch of careerist who decided, for their own ends , to move the Labour Party even more to the right, and to blatantly admit that they would do business with large corporations and the financial Mafia, this is modernising if you are a rabid neo-con, where the previous Labour Party hid behind the illusion that it opposed such institutions, only when in power to sit down and do business with them to “grow the economy”, which is a euphemism for improving the profitability of big business and the financial Mafia. If and when Our Saviour Jeremy Corbyn, comes to power, there may be a few slices of bread thrown our way, in the shape of improvements to social services and help for the NHS. These will not even make up for the ravages of the last decade of “austerity” and “balancing the books” ideology of the present political ballerinas. I know both my comrades agree, as long as we hold to the party political system, we will live in a system where big business and the financial Mafia will continue their efforts to turn every human action and activity into a profit making endeavour. The Messiahs will come and the Messiahs will go but exploitation will continue.
However, I think my comrade should find another label for Holy Tony, perhaps something along the lines of arrogant, right wing, careerist, lost in an illusion of grandeur and his dream of the Phony Tony legacy, a hollow shell of a self-centred fantasising dangerous dreamer. A moderniser, never.
