Michael Meacher MP

So Blair, possibly the most unpopular man in British politics, and Mandelson, the second most detested man, think Ed Miliband would be a ‘disaster’.   It takes some gall for the architects of Labour’s ruin to think they have any right to give us lessons on Labour’s prospects when their own record was – well, disastrous.   Labour won in 1997, not because of Blair or New Labour mantra, but because the electorate was heartily sick of the Tories and wanted them out at any price.   John Smith would have won by a huge margin too.   But having won in 1997 on the back of virulent hostility to the Tories, Blair in two further elections then achieved the biggest loss of voters of any party in modern times.  The Labour vote collapsed by almost 4 million from 13.5 million in 1997 to just 9.6 million in 2005.   For someone who was such a monumental failure to claim any credibility in predicting political success takes one’s breath away – like someone who’s engineered a train crash telling people how to cut the accident rate. (more…)