Today I want to talk about something else I saw yesterday. Yesterday morning I watched the following interview, where Camilla Tominey interviews Tony Blair's former Director of Political Operations, John McTernan.
It was incredible to watch, as he seems to embody to perfection the type of person that lives at the heart of New Labour. And not New Labour in the full Blairite sense, but genuine New Labour in the round - i.e. he exists on a spectrum somewhere between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He's the New Labour equivalent of white van man, which is fitting as they talked about white van man a bit in the interview.
If I was better at YouTube I'd do a reaction video, and give my responses blow by blow. As I'm not I'll just make my observations in bullet point. I do urge people to watch it though.
- Firstly, as he's from those New Labour circles you get a bit of inside baseball. He mentions that he thinks Tony Blair is backing Andy Burnham. You get the sense that he's high enough up to know this, but not quite high enough up to know he's not supposed to give the game away. Then later, when the question of Keir Starmer's life after being prime minister pops up, he says maybe he'll do a David Cameron and come back as foreign secretary. Giving another sense: that this is basically a Tony Blair reshuffle, rather than a real Labour revolution. As if the role of PM is just another cabinet position that the actual party leaders can shuffle people in and out of. (I'm being a little cynical and conspiracist again here, but it's hard not to be.)
- Getting to the debate, there was a bit about immigration. He was labelling Reform 'far right' for wanting to 'forcibly' deport 'two million people' [an addendum to this next bullet point]. CT (Camilla Tominey) was pushing back against this. He was very reluctant to concede any ground on the issue, but at the same time he didn't want to just advocate open borders. So he kind of accepted that illegal entrants into the country had to be dealt with, but in a very 'having his cake and eating it way.' CT asked, surely you have to use some force to remove people? What if they refuse to leave? He replied, well then the government can "assist" them. Which is incredibly wormy language. He just couldn't bring himself to use the word force, like it went against his sense of self in some fundamental way and his brain just wouldn't allow it. This is why the video is such an eye opener as to why these people shouldn't be running the country. They can't take responsibility. Obviously, none of us particularly like the idea of forcibly detaining another human being and removing him or her from the country, but someone has to do it at some point or you don't have a border. It's almost insane that someone in a position of power can't acknowledge this basic fact.
- [Addendum] I have to note here that the efforts to push Reform to use more extremist language on immigration, such as "Mass Deportations," has indeed damaged the party. As deporting two million people does just sound crazy to people. It was the one part of the interview where CT couldn't own the position. Again, because it sounds mad. Why put yourself in that position when you can just say, "We want immigration in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, and we will completely stop the small boats, sending any illegals who arrive back." Why get into hypotheticals about people that have been here for years before you've even fixed the core problem?
- [Anyway, back to the interview.] Another telling moment came when the issue of Chinese investment into Britain came up. He was pushed to acknowledge China's human rights record, which he did. However, he did it in such a blasé, unemotional way. He basically said, "Yes, they do have a terrible human rights record, and we always raise that with them, but they also have a lot of money." I'm paraphrasing, but that was the vibe. You would admire the pragmatism, were it not for the sentences that followed. As he then said, "China has a lot of capital, but America has a lot of capital." As if, in his mind, America and China are equivalent. The fact that America is a democracy, with the rule of law and free speech, that intimately shares our values, completely absent. Just a, "Well, if it wasn't China, it'd be America investing.. what's the difference," attitude.
- There was another bit where he touted the idea of having a public-private partnership scheme that helped every white van man in the country get a new electric van. The public-private partnership thing is obviously so New Labour. The fixation on green energy a more recent, but equally clichéd theme. I'm not against electric vehicles, but the thing is with this is that it's yet another example of focusing energy and money on things that don't need doing because of ideology, and because these people like the idea of doing something that feels modern. White van men already have vans, they're called white van men because they have the vans. They're not carrying their tools on the tube because they don't have a van. At some point in the future their vans will end up on the scrap heap and they'll have to buy a new van - maybe an electric one. This isn't something we desperately need government involvement in. Of course, I'm sure it would be very nice for the private companies in these public-private partnerships if perfectly fine working vans were prematurely scrapped and some fancy new electric ones prematurely entered the market. It's harder to imagine such an unfrugal use of resources being genuinely good for the environment though.
- Finally, there was also a bit where CT suggested that the high immigration levels have put pressure on younger people when it comes to finding jobs. McTernan was asked how Labour should help these younger people. He completely avoided answering the actual question and went off on a long-winded speech that ended with him sharing an anecdote about how a doctor he knows is using AI to help takes notes on consultations with patients. Saving time and making things more efficient. It was another example of not being able to focus on the real world and instead wanting to stroll off into talking points that the political class find fashionable. In the last example it was green technology. In this case AI.
I think that's it. I don't want to be too harsh. I don't think these people are evil, or have bad intentions or anything. They're just very secluded in some weird, modern ivory tower, that makes it impossible for them to get to grips with actual reality. And it's eye-opening when you see it on plain view.
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