"The announcement has been trailed so many times, like a lot of
Labour announcements, sufficient to have taken the whole Cabinet with
him! Now there would have been an idea", he said.
Councillor Nellist believes that the overriding legacy the Prime
Minister will leave behind is that of the Iraq war.
"The general idea is normally only to send your troops abroad to
make your country safer. Tony Blair's backing for George Bush has
made the world in general, and Britain in particular, a far less safe
place", he said today.
"However much the Prime Minister tries to put a spin on the war
against Iraq and the four-year occupation of that country, it was
never done for democracy or out of any genuine concern for the lives
of people living there, it was done for oil. And also to send a
message to smaller countries throughout the world that the biggest
nations would protect their economic and political interests in the
most brutal fashion."
Cllr Nellist was also scathing about the Prime Minister's domestic
legacy, particularly with regard to public services and their
financing.
"No one in the early 1990s, before the election of Tony Blair,
could have foreseen just how far down the same road which Margaret
Thatcher initially travelled Tony Blair would take the privatisation
of public services, in particular education and health.
"And millions of young people, for whom education should be a
right not a privilege, now face the equivalent of three mortgages. A
huge mortgage, if they can even afford to buy a house; private
savings needed the size of a second mortgage to subsidise inadequate
pensions; and a debt almost the size of a mortgage, because of
student loans and tuition fees, to go to university."
"The gap between the Rich and the rest has widened under Tony
Blair, and the UK has become a top tax haven for foreign
billionaires. The rich are paying less and less towards society's
costs, which is probably why so many millionaires are prepared to
give or to lend money to the Labour Party!", he said.
Cllr Nellist will spend Saturday 12 May chairing a national
conference of several hundred trade unionists in London seeking to
find a way to build a new working class party capable of being seen
as a viable alternative for the increasing number of people turned
off by Labour's drift to the right.
"We don't have three parties in this country any more", said Cllr
Nellist. "It's more like one party which is artificially split into
three at election time, but which the rest of the time has
fundamental agreement on the main areas of policy, but manages to
have synthetic arguments at the margins.
Already we have 2500 activists who have signed our declaration for
a new party; our aim is to double that in the months ahead and to lay
the basis for a new mass party of the working class in Britain.
Tony Blair, as a political son of Mrs Thatcher, has contributed to
that process probably more than he imagines."
