Why has #Blair chosen today when we’re all melting from record May temperatures to tell #Labour to abandon #NetZero and just ‘drill baby drill’?

Does he never leave the confines of some air conditioned mansion now?

When was the last time he met someone earning the minimum wage?

Does he honestly want children from poor families to suffer for their parents deciding to give birth to them?

What’s his solution to AI taking huge swathes of jobs and endangering life as we know it?

I’ve thought for the last three decades this quote by Lord Acton (Victorian politician and historian) absolutely describes #Blair:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority."

#Blair never wanted to give up the reins of democratic power…so he decided instead to subvert it by creating the Tony Blair Institute. Opaque funding and furthering whose views exactly?

‘As prime minister, Tony Blair oversaw a few hundred Downing Street staff and one country. Sixteen years later, he is now responsible for more than 800 staff who help advance his policies in nearly 40 countries’

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/17/tony-blair-institute-rise

Can you judge a man by the company he keeps?

Yes, yes you can in the case of #Blair and his enthusiasm to join the so called #Trump Board of Peace.

He just loves hanging out with these guys who are also members:

Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel)
Mohammed bin Salman (Saudi Arabia) Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Qatar) Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (UAE)
Alyaksandr Lukashenka (Belarus)
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Türkiye)
Javier Milei (Argentina)

And until recently Viktor Orbán (Hungary)

Hmmm…’peace’.

In terms of his dismissal of #NetZero he thinks it’s unfair on public who he claims are being made to make ‘painful lifestyle choices for minimal reductions in global emissions’

I’ve yet to meet someone in social housing who was upset/angry because their home had been retrofitted to make it more energy efficient. They have greater thermal comfort and their home costs less to run.

It was ‘so painful’ charging my car from sun for free yesterday. How I wish I could get fleeced at petrol pumps.

#Blair also believes in throwing everything at #carboncapture - not proven at scale and insanely expensive.

Whereas #renewables are proven, scalable and coming down in price year on year.

It makes you wonder rather loudly whether he’s been captured by any of those leaders of the Gulf oil states that he so loves to be in the company of on the #Trump Board of Peace?

But ultimately #Blair ‘s 5700 word essay is not aimed at Starmer, Burnham or Streeting…I assume this is about retaining the favour and ear of whom he assumes will be heading up the UK government in the not too distant future…Nigel Farage.

For the Tony Blair Institute to continue having influence at the highest levels (which frustratingly it does despite this latest missive) it needs to be selling a vision of the world that appeals to future leaders.

So I decided to reread #Blair ‘s essay this morning.

He finds the latest #Labour leadership battle very retro and ‘20th century’…but his prescription is still to do what he did to the Labour Party in the 1990’s.

What I missed last night was his narcissism.

His fawning over rightwing populists who have a ‘project’ is grotesque.

This is a man who admires the Trumps, Farages and Milleis of this world…for they will advance his neoliberal views (which he pretends are the ‘radical centre’).

@JugglingWithEggs

Not a surprise, he's always been on the Right, there's a reason he was known as "Tory Plan B"

Almost his first act as leader of Labour was to repeal Clause 4 of the Labour Party's Constitution...

Even though nobody believed that it would be instituted at any point.

It was his government that disappeared down the "Public/Private Partnership" resulting in the UK saving a few pounds in the short term to pay massively for building hospitals etc for decades instead!