EcoLogics

Here’s a mathematical expression with which to characterise Tony Blair: T=Po/M+P

If the Daily Mail isn’t lying through its teeth—which it may well be doing—then news about Tony Blair provide us with the best evidence yet that Blair’s nothing but an apparatchik for big business.

According to the Daily Mail,

Tony Blair has been in talks with Tesco about helping them open supermarkets in the Middle East – allegedly in return for up to £1m. It is believed the discussions between the supermarket chain and the former PM ended after the two sides failed to agree terms.

Two thoughts on this. First, how naive of us to think that Tony Blair only got himself named as a peace envoy in order to pretend that he still mattered. We always knew that it was a bit rich for the man to pretend he was a peacemaker after he got Britain into two wars, and after it became clear that his power owed much to his shadowy relation with the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group. But to be honest, this blogger’s corruption radar never even contemplated the possibility that Blair might find a Middle East angle for the money side of his greed. It was bad enough that he was anything but a neutral figure in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations; to seek to make a fast million bucks on the back of his dubious role as peacemaker is truly emetic.

The second thought is that anyone who has done their homework will know that if indeed the Daily Mail isn’t lying, then the news not only confirm, but add proverbial insult to the injury of a pattern that began to emerge almost as soon as Tony Blair got into power. That pattern can be expressed by way of a simple mathematical equation:

Let T=Tony

Let P=Politics

Let M=Money

Let Po=Power

Here’s the equation:   T=Po/M+P. Put in less abstract terms, Tony is power divided by a combination of politics and money.

We first saw the curve of this equation during the Ecclestone Affair, when Blair welcomed to 10 Downing Street two characters who have since been revealed to have, shall we say, a Fascist sense of fun. We saw it again during the Iraq War, or what might be renamed the Cheney-Haliburton Conflict, when Tony not only bent right over for Cheney-Bush but then cashed in by taking a role as an ‘advisor’ with J P Morgan, part of the bankfia that did rather well from the Iraq war and whose bonus culture is still ripping off people across the world. And even now that Tony’s gone, the UK is still paying dearly for Tony’s cash–for–honours scandal. Witness, for example, Capita’s on-going role as the giant of government outsourcing of public sector IT.

So no, knowing what we know about Tony Blair’s and indeed New Labour’s corruption, it should not be surprising at all to confirm that Blair has indeed used his office in Jerusalem to drum up new business opportunities for himself in the Middle East. You can almost imagine him on the phone: Tescos! BAE! Capita! Join the Crusade!

No wonder that, shortly after it was announced that he would be making millions off his relation with the bankfia, Tony said that

Nowadays, the intersection between politics and the economy in different parts of the world, including the emerging markets, is very strong.

‘Emerging markets’, and ‘intersection’, indeed.

Two of the foremost figures at the heart of the neoliberal bankfia seem to be going down, and going down fast.

Silvio Berlusconi: the fortunes of that ‘thing’ so wonderfully described by José Saramago appear to be in terminal decline. The latest blow to his neo-fascist leadership has come in the form of a ruling by Judge Nicoletta Gandus: in an appeal to British lawyer David Mills’ conviction for bribery, the judge ruled that there is incontestable evidence that Berlusconi did indeed bribe Mills to lie about his (Berlusconi’s) business dealings in the All Iberian and Mediaset cases.

Berlusconi had previously tried to evade justice by passing a law that provided immunity to leading members of the Italian government. However, the Italian Constitutional Tribunal recently struck down the manifestly corrupt law, and so one day Berlusconi may join his servile lawyer where both belong: in jail.

This case has reverberations for Britain’s New Labour. Mills is the husband of a member of the New Labour nomenclatura, Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister. As this blog has noted in earlier posts, it seems a bit, well, Olympic that, despite having used the money of the bribe to pay off a huge mortgage, Jowell alleged that she knew nothing about her corrupt husband’s business dealings. And yet, as noted by newspapers at the time, David Mills was well known throughout the European jetset for his marvellous skills in helping the very rich to engage in Houdini-like forms of tax evasion. Are we still to believe that Jowell, herself a steely political operator, was no more than the victim of a deceiving husband?

And so to Anthony Charles Lynton Bliar: The Mills-Jowell axis has implications that go far beyond mid-level New Labour apparatchikery. Let us not forget that it was Tony Blair that not only exonerated Jowell, but spent many a happy day in Berlusconi’s infamous villa in Sardinia. Perhaps this ‘missing link’ (Berlusconi-Mills-Jowell-Blair) will be an additional factor in the Bilderberg deliberations when it comes to nominating a European ‘president’—a nomination that, as noted by George Monbiot, may yet provide us with the best opportunity to make Blair the cell-mate of Mills and maybe, just maybe, Berlusconi himself.