Tim Ireland’s ‘Backing Blair’ site continues to rattle various cages within the Labour Party.

This time it’s Blyth Valley Labour Councillor, Gareth Davies, who’s not happy with Tim and. as a result. is bandying around the usual tired old list of ‘bogeymen’ in a facile attempt pour scorn on the Backing Blair campaign.

In attacking Tim’s project, Gareth (excuse the familiarily, us netheads tend to be an informal lot) succeeds only in displaying everything that’s wrong with the Blairite wing of the party and with being ‘unremittingly New Labour’.

It’s all in there if only you look.

There’s the empty rhetoric of ‘ultra lefties, half baked trots and dilettantes’ (note - ‘Trots’ references a name and should be capitalised, someone needs to order a few copies of ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ for the campaign HQ), always a sure sign of the inability to formulate a cogent argument - stuff the issues where’s that list of ‘bogeymen’.

Then there’s the obligatory ’soundbite’ - ‘Trojan Horses of Toryism’ - a third-rate play on Spiro Agnew’s famous ‘nattering nabobs’ line and a horse that’s already bolted when Roy Hattersley, hardly noted for being a half-baked Trot, observes that Blair is “a far better One Nation Conservative than he (Michael Howard) can ever be”.

Like his political masters, Tony and Alistair, Gareth’s also not particularly net savvy otherwise he’d understand just how easy it is to shift a political website overseas and outside the jurisdiction of UK law, rendering his suggestion that online political commentary be regulated an utter nonsense. Let’s just hope no one’s given him a Blackberry…

Then again, that’s no real surprise given his obviously shaky understanding of International Law. His attitude to the legality of the Dubya’s recent Middle Eastern escapades beggars belief and comes straight out of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Big Book of International Relations and Diplomacy’ - just look in the index under ’screw you’. After all invading Irag was ‘probably legal’ and if it wasn’t well then that’s only because ‘international law is an ass’ so long as you illustrate your point with an analogy based on false syllogism. I hate to say this, Gareth, but there is a bit of distinction, even in international law, between going to war to oppose colonial occupation by a foreign power (Abbysinia) and invading a sovereign nation (Iraq).

Ultimately, its not the question of whether Cllr Davies is a ‘Labour stooge’ or the intellectual dishonesty of wrapping himself in the cloth of democracy while seeking nothing more than the absolute right to ‘know his enemy’ that grates, its the overweening pomposity he adopts in his exchanges with Tim coupled with with apparent inability to see the same faults in himself that he purports to see in others.

“…why not get on with some positive political campaigning instead of running a knocking campaign?” he cries, seemingly oblivious to his own opening gambit of describing Tim and others behind the Backing Blair site as ‘odd mix of ultra lefties, half baked trots and dilettantes” - Hiya, Pot, it’s Kettle here…

I think Orwell said it best…

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

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