Tony Blair has risen from dead to anoint Starmer – but many of our issues can be traced back to him
THE most astute political pundits in the world – the bookies – will tell you that Labour are odds-on to win the next General Election.
Thursday’s three by-elections have done nothing to change those odds, despite the Tories just about hanging on to Boris Johnson’s vacated seat in Uxbridge.
Labour can smell power now.
So it was fitting that Tony Blair chose this week to rise from his crypt and bestow his patronising blessing on Keir Starmer at a Future Of Britain conference.
Because if Starmer does become Prime Minister, he will find that many of our most intractable problems — graduates who cannot find a job, our addiction to skilled foreign workers, the mounting housing crisis — go all the way back to the catastrophic mistakes of Tony Blair’s ten-year reign.
“We are all middle class now,” boasted John Prescott, that bluff human bridge between old Labour and New Labour, just before Blair swept to power in the 1997 General Election.
And this was more than just a cute soundbite.
The promise that we were all gloriously middle class under New Labour sounded aspirational, upwardly mobile — noble, even.
That was the euphoric national mood as Tony Blair gurned on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in 1997.
“Education, education, education,” promised Blair.
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What that education mantra meant in real life was that university — once the province of the brainy few — was now open to all.
It was under New Labour that university became “uni”.
Degrees for everyone — even when they are not worth the paper they are printed on!
“Uni” for everyone — as though “uni” was a musical festival you really shouldn’t miss.
And that profound social shift has been a disaster for the UK.
This year, the number of 18- year-olds applying to university was the second highest on record — 314,660.
It would be wonderful if those university degrees all led to great jobs for life. But they don’t.
Rishi Sunak said this week that “a university education is not the only way to succeed” (you could marry a rich woman. Just kidding, Rishi!) and plans to clamp down on “low quality degrees”.
Sunak is right to say that higher education can be a dead end that leaves a graduate with a Mickey Mouse degree and scant job prospects.
But the legacy of Blair does not end there.
The social engineering that shoved generations of young people into “uni” — and saddled them with debts that many will carry to their graves — has left the country with a devastating skills deficit.
The Government has a Shortage Occupation List full of jobs that would once have been done by the locals.
Caught in a trap
Bricklayers, roofers, carpenters, plasterers. The UK is pathetically unable to do these jobs in 2023.
And so, inevitably, visa rules are relaxed in order that skilled foreign workers can come in and do those jobs for us.
It does not matter if we currently have a net migration figure of 606,000, around the size of Bristol and double the pre-pandemic level.
We are caught in a trap designed by New Labour. We are a rich nation that is dirt poor when it comes to essential skills.
We did not train generations of roofers, plumbers and brickies and so we need to import those workers — and always will, until a British government empowers its own young people.
So much of what ails us goes back to Blair’s social experiment of packing young people off to “uni” when many of them would have been better off learning a trade that could earn them a six-figure salary for life.
We are definitely not all middle class now.
John Prescott must be shaking his croquet stick in fury.
NOEL A GRUMP CHUMP
WE all love a good Noel Gallagher rant but his attacks on Adele (“f***ing s**t”) and Harry Styles (“nothing to do with music”) are misplaced.
Both Adele and Harry are real songwriters.
They might not be from the venerable dad rock tradition that Noel and I grew up with, but nobody can deny they are masters of their craft.
Noel Gallagher was always the smartest member of Oasis. He should resist turning into a grumpy old Manc.
BLOC PARTY
DEBATE rages about the true meaning of Kemi Badenoch’s trade deal with Indo-Pacific trade bloc the CPTPP – the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The bloc includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam, Chile, Malaysia – and now the UK.
And those who still fly the flag for Remain or Leave argue about the merits of the deal.
Is it a game-changer or an exaggerated Brexit benefit?
But what nobody knows is who is going to join the CPTPP next.
The US? China? Or the European Union? They have all been mentioned as possible new kids on the CPTPP trade bloc.
Ironically, being in a Common Market – and nothing more – with our continental cousins is exactly what this country voted for in the first referendum on Europe, in the 1970s.
Funny old world!
I GREW up with a father who had a Distinguished Service Medal stuffed in the back of a dusty drawer and a torso covered in scar tissue from shrapnel.
The Second World War was always there when I was growing up.
So it is disappointing to report the BBC’s World War Two drama World On Fire is unwatchable garbage, full of sneering racist Brits turning their noses up at plucky refugees.
If the people who made this self-loathing tripe think the British were racist in World War Two, wait until they hear about the other side.
Jane’s je t’aime brought the 60s to Billericay
IF you were growing up in the Sixties, then your sex education was not complete until you had heard je t’aime . . . moi non plus (I Love You . . . Me Neither) by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.
Jane died in Paris this week at the age of 76.
It is difficult to overstate the impact that Je T’Aime – “the ultimate love song”, “the most erotic song ever recorded” – had on the generation of kids who felt the Swinging Sixties were happening somewhere else.
Birkin was a real icon.
Nudge-nudge
Looking now at photographs of Jane swanning round Paris in a see-through mini-dress, she looks exactly like God’s first attempt at Kate Moss.
The record itself – the first No1 to be banned – came swathed in lurid rumours. They were really, you know, doing it!
At the end, when that smooth old Gallic songbird Serge murmurs the command – “Maintenant viens!” – “Now come!” – it was truly the climax of the song.
Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Je t’aime . . . moi non plus airmailed the Swinging Sixties to my old home, Billericay in Essex, and to every small town and suburb in the land, where we felt we were missing out on all the groovy free-love fun.
Jane Birkin, best remembered now for the bag that Hermes sparingly made in her honour, was as important as The Beatles or the Stones to the spirit of the age.
CILLIAN STEALS SHOW
CILLIAN MURPHY is astonishing as Robert Oppenheimer.
The “father of the atomic bomb” was all skin, bones and cigarette smoke.
Murphy – who, in Peaky Blinders, was already as lean as Clint Eastwood – has transformed his body like no actor has done since Robert de Niro became boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.
As Oppenheimer, Murphy is all eyes and inner torment.
Christopher Nolan’s film brilliantly captures the physicist’s moral dilemma.
“I don’t know if we can be trusted with this weapon,” Oppenheimer said. “But I know the Nazis can’t.”
And the bitter irony is that the arms race to get the nuclear bomb before Hitler’s Germany was that it was never needed – because the Red Army had smashed their way into Berlin before Adolf got anywhere near his Nazi nuke.
But now the human race had a weapon that could wipe out a city.
And it was inevitable that it was used – on Hiroshima when Japan was almost a defeated nation.
Oppenheimer’s anguished cry: “I have blood on my hands,” only came after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and he heard American military chiefs talk openly about carpet-bombing Russian cities with nuclear weapons.
Robert Oppenheimer invented a weapon to save the human race – and knew it could also destroy it.
Astonishing stuff and, yes, probably the most important story ever told.
Give Murphy and Nolan their Oscars now.
IT is a historic misstep for the European Union to hand Argentina a diplomatic triumph by agreeing to refer to the Falklands as the Malvinas.
This is not just semantics – 255 British military personnel and three Falkland Islanders died when Argentina invaded in 1982.
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And 649 Argentines also wasted their lives for the military junta in Buenos Aries led by General Leopoldo Galtieri.
The EU never looked more petty, spiteful and stupid.