{"id":18075,"date":"2015-08-30T17:37:46","date_gmt":"2015-08-30T16:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=18075"},"modified":"2015-08-30T17:37:46","modified_gmt":"2015-08-30T16:37:46","slug":"we-would-be-stupid-to-ignore-tony-blair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=18075","title":{"rendered":"We would be stupid to ignore Tony Blair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some people may not like Tony Blair; they might despise his inclusion of Britain in the invasion of Iraq; they may resent his warnings about the dangers of electing Jeremy Corbyn as the next Leader of the Labour Party.<\/p>\n<p>But the guy is the most successful leader that the party has ever had, taking it to three successive massive victories. Whatever you think about him, he cares for the party he once led and would like to see it back in power, able to help the less advantaged in our deeply unequal society.<\/p>\n<p>So it is worth listening to him when he writes in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2015\/aug\/29\/tony-blair-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn\">an article<\/a> in today&#8217;s &#8220;Observer&#8221; newspaper:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;There is a politics of parallel reality going on, in which reason is an irritation, evidence a distraction, emotional impact is king and the only thing that counts is feeling good about it all.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Blair compares the appeal of Corbyn in the UK to the current success of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in American primary races. This is something I did in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=17846\">a blog posting<\/a> a month ago.<\/p>\n<p>He mentions the appeal of simplistic political messages in countries like Greek and France and, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/democracy\">this article<\/a>, I examined the crisis in the older democracies.<\/p>\n<p>As Blair puts it in his article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;\u2026 it doesn\u2019t alter the \u201creal\u201d reality. It provides a refuge from it. Because Trump and Sanders aren\u2019t going to be president; Scotland did vote No and even if it votes Yes in the future, the pain of separation for all of us will be acute; Syriza may win but only by switching realities; and Jeremy Corbyn is not going to be prime minister of the UK.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some people may not like Tony Blair; they might despise his inclusion of Britain in the invasion of Iraq; they may resent his warnings about the dangers of electing Jeremy Corbyn as the next Leader of the Labour Party. But the guy is the most successful leader that the party has ever had, taking it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18075"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18081,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18075\/revisions\/18081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}