Meacher’s Blair blitz

Reporter: Janice Barker
Date online: 03 September 2010

Oldham Labour MP Michael Meacher has launched a scathing attack on his former New Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Mr Blair, who left power three years ago, published his autobiography ‘A Journey’ this week.

But writing in the left-wing newspaper, the Morning Star, Oldham West and Royton MP Mr Meacher calls Mr Blair’s leadership a ‘tragedy’, and says he had ‘zero’ economic intelligence.

The MP was Mr Blair’s Transport Minister from 1997 to 2001 but was sacked as Environment Minister to 2003, and became free to criticise his own leader.

In 2005 he was one of 49 Labour MPs who inflicted the first Commons defeat on the Prime Minister after 1997 over his 90-day anti-terror detention plan.

Mr Meacher’s newspaper story claims the former Prime Minister’s self delusion comes across strongly in the book, so does his obsessive obsequiousness to former US president George W Bush.

Mr Meacher said his former boss started the war in Iraq ‘without a single shred of evidence’ and derides his claim that New Labour will be seen as a great reforming government.

Mr Meacher says: “In fact, history will judge it as a huge wasted opportunity between Thatcherism mark one and the Thatcherism mark two to which New Labour has now delivered us.

“His diaries abound with his self-righteousness, his constant spin to gloss over his real motives, his inability or dogged refusal to admit to his own considerable failings, his lust for wealth and global self promotion, his contempt for his party and for all others apart from those with power he couldn’t cross.”

And he adds: “He repeats the New Labour mantra that the party can only win by focusing on Middle Britain and voters in the south of England, when actually New Labour lost for precisely those reasons, by utterly alienating the working class vote in the rest of the country.”