Holy Guacamole ('Mushy Peas')! The Machiavellian Lord Mandy - Famously "Intensely Relaxed" about the filthy rich. Friend of the Oligarchy
There’s a power struggle going on right now in ‘Labour’. If Progress can be seen off, perhaps we’ll be able to write Labour again. These people are not socialists, they are the neoliberal lackeys of The City and the 1%.
The sooner they fall, the sooner the Party will have a chance of being a true opposition again. There are people in the Tory Party to the Left of this lot. James Purnell is one of them!
Solidarity with our comrades in the GMB, Unite and PCS! Reclaim the party for the people! Rout these swine and don’t stop until you’ve finished the job!
Give into them now, and the only thing left to do to survive will be to break away and form a new mass movement.
Wipe the self-satisfied smirk off this scheming quisling’s face!
Let these people take their turn on the backbenches and concentrate on serving their communities as constituency MPs again. Progress are as arrogant as the Tories, they believe they’re ‘born to rule’. It’s time they took a back seat – its time for the Left to be in the ascendant.
If Progress prevail, ‘Labour’ is DEAD!
So while cowards flinch, and traitors sneer; let’s re-hoist all our banners here!
The Labour party will be led down a blind alley if trade unions succeed in banning Progress, a pressure group associated with Tony Blair, the former business secretary Lord Mandelson warned on Sunday.
As the Labour leadership dismissed the move by the GMB union, Mandelson warned of a danger of a return to the “divisiveness, falling out and rancour” of the 1980s.
Mandelson spoke out after Paul Kenny, the GMB general secretary, announced that his union was drawing up a motion to ban Progress from the party. A strategy document drawn up by the Unite union last year said that Progress, which is funded by Lord Sainsbury, promoted old thinking and neo-liberalism.
Ed Miliband has also spoken out against Kenny. The Labour leader told his party’s national policy forum on Saturday: “Progress is a good organisation, and I spoke to a Progress conference a few weeks back. I’m for a Labour Party that’s reaching out to all people and all organisations, not having fewer associations.”
Jon Cruddas, the Labour party’s new policy chief, told the Observer that he hoped to involve leading members of Progress in his policy review. Cruddas spoke of “reforming the band” as he said he would make contact with David Miliband and James Purnell who worked with him in Downing Street during Tony Blair’s first term in office.
Mandelson, a strong supporter of Progress, strongly endorsed Miliband. He told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1: “Trade unions need to rethink and remake themselves for a new century. If they become in a sense more representative of their membership as a whole they would not be leading either themselves or the Labour party down what I regard as a pretty blind alley.”
The GMB described Progress as a “party within a party” and likened it to the Militant tendency, the Trotskyite entryist group whose members sought to deselect a series of Labour MPs in the 1980s.
Mandelson first made his name as a senior aide to Neil Kinnock, who successfully drove Militant out of the Labour party, and he turned the tables on the GMB as he too warned of a danger of returning to the 1980s.
“We don’t want to have a political party of intolerance, of renewed divisiveness, of falling out and rancour of the sort we saw in the 1980s. I think that all of us want to put that behind us. Nor do I think is it right to view Progress as an organisation as some sort of Blairite faction. It’s not looking to the past, it doesn’t want to recreate the New Labour model of the past. It’s forward looking, it’s progressive, it’s modernising and it wants to commit to the best possible platform on which we can fight and win the next election. Perhaps that’s why the trade unions don’t like it.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Lord Mandelson: secrets of a filthy rich fortune
When Lord Mandelson said Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” he may have been talking about himself.
17 Dec 2011
His declarations on the House of Lords register of members’ interests give little clue as to how the 58-year-old career politician has made his fortune.
Neither his public speaking and writing firm Willbury, which collects proceeds from the sales of his memoirs, nor his consultancy firm Global Counsel have published accounts yet.
And the remuneration for his senior advisory role at Lazard investment bank has not been disclosed, although some reports have suggested it could be as much as £1 million a year. Under restrictions imposed on Lord Mandelson by Whitehall watchdogs, he was banned from lobbying ministers and civil servants after leaving government. But there are no restrictions on his work overseas.
He has developed close links with the rulers of oil-rich Kazakhstan and recently spoke at two events organised by the Kazakh investment company Samruk-Kazyna. He has also made shrewd property investments. In 1997 Lord Mandelson was living in a one-bedroom flat worth £250,000. Earlier this year, he and his partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, moved into an £8 million home in north London
5 Responses
Wtf is the party formerly know as (and representative of) Labour playing at? From here it seems to be doing its best to guarantee a triumphalist Cameron second term.
I do not see much of an opposition from a progressive Labour party right now, all i hear are sops the coalitions evil policies, lets get this straight, people are sick of the right wing and their profiteering destruction of the nation. Their hatred of the vulnerable, and their ‘born to rule’ attitude. So why should a group within the Labour party who support this way of thinking be tolerated at all ? The blair years are over, and thanks to him the tories have had it easy in their dismantling of the welfare state. Real progress will only be made when those who think like tories go where they belong, for they have no place in a party of the people and for the people.
go back to basic s labour listening to those on the right who i would suppose bring blair back get rid of them put in decent people who run us and the country the way it should be warned you could be out in the cold once again jeff3
All Division on One Hand and No Choice on the Other a Lousy Consensus For No
Choice which is why I can See the UK would be Better Off without Political Parties
The Welfare State should of been Constitutionally Protected so the Toff ” Born to
Rule ” Brigade could Not just of Railroaded through all their Rubbish without so
much as a Bye Your Leave
The ” Official Opposition ” by Not being a Real Opposition has Let Down the Poor
and Vulnerable who are Oppressed by this Capitalist State and Society and Allowed
in Effect a Dictatorship as Refelects the Current UK Political Situation
Any Human Suffering with Regards to the Poor/Sick/Vulnerable/Disabled is
too Much let Alone 2 Years 5 Years or 1.000 Years if the Con Dems go Un Challenged
over Matters of Welfare Policy
If Mandelson is for it: then there are very good reasons to be against. This is the man who left and returned to the Labour Government so many times, it seemed as if Blair needed to install a set of revolving doors! Indeed, Peter Mandelson’s numerous “resignations” and “re-appointments” were a matter for the Prime Minister’s embarrassment. Progress are not a ‘think-tank’ or even a ‘policy committee’ – they are just another ‘front’ – dedicated to the eradication of anything which seems to be remotely ideologically ‘Socialist.’ If there is one principle the Labour Party has lost, it is the principle that the Labour Party was established and paid for by the “Workers” and, by extension, those who become Unemployed who are (as we now know) being returned to a state of 1930’s penury. Anything else Mandelson says, can be easily treated as Machiavellian ‘scheming..’
There is equally, no place for disproportionately influential benefactors or their wealthy lackeys: no matter how much “support” they promise.
Mandelson is as dangerous and treacherous now, as He ever was in Government.
There is no place for the equivalent of the Russian “Dumas” in British Labour Politics – ‘parties within parties’ may work within more Dictatorial and prescriptive Organizations, but not here. Unless, of course, Mandelson’s intention is to create a form of New Labour “Tea Party?” The existing Shadow cabinet are already perceived as a being disgracefully aloof from the existing rank and file. Their New Labour ‘identity’ has little in common with the ordinary man and woman, struggling to live in Austerity Britain. Yet, the rich and powerful do NOT seem to be “In it” with us? Certainly Mandelson isn’t.. nor are any of his former Cabinet Friends.
The REAL question we ALL must consider and answer is this: is the WHOLE of Politics and ALL its Political Organizations now tainted by wealth and influence so much – they need to be purged, distinctions (and possibly ‘battle-lines’ ) drawn again and policies created which acknowledge and assert the representative authority of the real workers?
Does the Real Labour Party need to be rid of ALL the “Mandelsons?”