Would you take a thousand quid from Tony Blair?
Labour’s Dundee East candidate Lesley Brennan said she didn’t want to get her hands grubby with it. Her now nationally reported tweet on Tony Blair’s donation of a thousand pounds to her campaign on Sunday said: “Received donation from Tony Blair. Instinct was to not accept. Discussed with team. Dundee East is not accepting the £1000.”
Her instincts were good, but not those of the Labour Party as a whole.
The former prime minister donated £1,000 each to 106 local Labour campaigns including Dundee East, East Dunbartonshire, Edinburgh West, Argyll & Bute and Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale. But with candidates being forced by the centre to accept donations from Tony Blair, even if it is against their will, many will think Johann Lamont’s description of Scottish Labour as a mere branch office still rings true.
The paragon of virtue that is Alistair Campbell, Mr Blair’s former director of communications at Number 10, reacted in a way that only he could:
“To attention seeking Labour candidate rejecting TB money 1. He won more Labour seats than anyone 2. Tories are loaded 3. Do you want to win?”
He was right in a way. Attention was sought and it was found. Ms Brennan’s tweets brought her under a spotlight that would otherwise have been unlikely to shine upon her.
Up against the SNP Deputy Leader Stewart Hosie MP she will seriously struggle, but at least she has judged correctly the mood of many in regard to Mr Blair and his New Labour project which has lost the party votes in Scotland for years.
In a “Blair Match Project” one SNP supporter, Scottish businessman Ivan McKee, has stepped forward.
Mr McKee, who was a Labour Party member for 20 years but left the party under Mr Blair’s leadership and has recently joined the SNP, was heavily involved with Business for Scotland during the independence referendum. He is giving £1,000 to each of five local SNP campaigns across Scotland, including Ochil and South Perthshire where the experienced Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh is bidding to oust Labour’s Gordon Banks.
This reinforces the battle ground as to what this election will be fought on the contrast.
Ivan, a campaigner, self-made Glasgow-born engineer and businessman donating as part of a wide-reaching grassroots initiative stands in comparison to a former Prime Minister who sells his name and services to goodness knows who in goodness knows where, dispensing cash from on high.
Mr Blair is the archetypal defender of the vested interests of the establishment. The SNP, who seem to have the tide of public opinion behind them, are standing to give the people of Scotland the power at Westminster, for a change. The SNP and the public, if the polls are anything to go by are right to directly challenge a failing Westminster system that has under and ill-served Scotland.
Now don’t get me wrong. Tony Blair of course achieved several things during his time as Prime Minister, but he did little to reverse the decades long direction of travel that has seen the UK become one of the most unfair and unequal countries in the world. And he will always be the man who lied to take us into an illegal war an act which has defined him.
Since leaving office he has sought to share in the wealth and privilege of the few hawking his contacts for eye-watering fees to the governments of oil-rich Arab states via his company Tony Blair Associates.
Arguably his most questionable contact is Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In its 2015 report on Kazakhstan, Human Rights Watch says the government “heavily restricts freedom of assembly, speech, and religion. In 2014, authorities closed newspapers, jailed or fined dozens of people after peaceful but unsanctioned protests, and fined or detained worshipers for practising religion outside state controls”.
Government critics, including opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov, remain in detention after unfair trials.
Not a single election since President Nazarbayev took office has been free and fair, according to the OSCE.
If I were a Labour candidate, or anyone else, apart from perhaps Mr Blair’s accountant, I’d find it hard to justify this. Labour has enough damage control to do to its reputation without this.
All six Scottish candidates Tony Blair has donated to must stand up and refuse the cash, particularly if they are to prove they are not run by London Labour. I certainly could not sleep at night knowing where the money had come from.