Tony Blair

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This article is written in the 'future' (2022) and thus does not reflect the state of affairs in the present day, 1954. It does however represent a premonition of what is to come.

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## Politics

### Ranks held

Chairman of the Union of Britain 1994-1999President of the Executive Committee 1990-1999 Leader of the Labour Party 1998-1999

**Anthony Charles Lynton Blair** is a British politician who served as the final leader and Chairman of the Union of Britain from 1994 to 1999. He was also President of the Executive Committee from 1990 as part of the Gang of Three, and was General Secretary of the Labour Party from 1998 to 1999.

Blair was born in 1953 in Edinburgh to Hazel Blair, the widow of Leo Blair, a TUC congressman and member of the Dyatt Street Conspiracy who had been killed five months prior in the Bloody Week purges. Leo's own adoptive father had been a dockworker who had fought and died in the Clydeside Uprising in 1937 - the young Blair was thus installed with a rebellious attitude from the moment he was born, as his mother took great care to educate her son on his elders' legacies.

The favourite child of his mother, Blair nonetheless grew up in the shadow of his older brother William; where Hazel strove to pull together the funds to send William to the Edinburgh State Boarding School, Tony was sent to the local general school. William was accepted into the Oxford Institute of Law; Tony applied but was rejected, and instead enrolled into a bureaucrat training program in London against his mother's wishes, who wanted him to remain in Edinburgh close to her. The news of her death four years later in 1975 from thyroid cancer deeply affected him.

Blair entered the state service that same year, amidst a time of major political upheaval following the resignation of Chairman Oswald Mosley who had ruled Britain for nearly 40 years. The young bureaucrat fell in with the Federationist wing of the TUC, and after distinguishing himself working in the Ministry of Justice he was selected as a Trade Union Congressman in 1981. His politics and familial background would act as an insurmountable barrier for any kind of real advancement in the Maximist government of Margaret Thatcher, but he quickly showed a skill for oratory and persuasion trained in his time as a lawyer that saw him gain notability amongst the anti-Thatcher opposition of the Congress. Blair increasingly became associated with the resurgent Parliamentarian wing of the Congress, who's senior members for their part viewed the dynamic young congressman with distrust, seeing a man of superficial charm but with little in the way of values or a moral compass. However, his performances on the TUC Judicial Committee, the site of various showdowns between Thatcher's increasingly controversial policies and an increasingly unhappy Congress, led to Blair winning the attention and respect of John Smith, the Parliamentarian wing's de-facto leader. He made another key ally in Peter Mandelson, a Congressman in the Ministry of Truth's Infodep and close ally of Smith.

Mandelson, though initially taking Blair under his wing in the Parliamentarian bloc, soon fell under the other man's spell. Towards the final beleaguered years of Thatcher's government, Blair rose rapidly through the faction's ranks to become its principle spokesman, becoming its most recognised face besides Smith himself. Many were bewitched by his charming, almost magnetic personality - others continued to complain that beneath the chummy exterior "lay cold, shrewd eyes". Events came to a head in 1990 when Thatcher's battered administration was finally brought down by the Sellafield disaster, sparking a hectic struggle for power amongst the assorted opposition groups of the TUC. A meeting at The Savoy saw the three largest blocs - the Federationists, the Syndicates, and Smith and Blair's Parliamentarians - form an alliance of convenience to freeze out the frantically-regrouping Maximists. A Triumvirate would be formed - Arthur Scargill of the Syndicates would take the top job of Chairman, and Tony Benn of the Federationists would become General Secretary. The Parliamentarians would hold the office of President of the Executive Committee - yet John Smith was seen as so reformist as to be reactionary. His appointment to the second-most-powerful position in government would be unthinkable; a proxy would have to be found. With the case made chiefly by Mandelson, Smith was persuaded to make this proxy Blair, who at only 37 years old duly became the deputy leader of the Union.

Blair was, initially, a safe vessel through which the Parliamentarian wing's desires could be enacted. Never a scholar of history, many felt he lacked the imagination or ingenuity to use his newfound office to his own advantage. Yet they underestimated the power of his own personal magnetism, and the extent to which the young and dynamic statesman began to capture the imagination of a public dissatisfied and angry with Britain's syndicalist regime. For many, Blair became the instrument for real change, a symbol of hope; large crowds greeted his first official public appearance as PEC at the 1990 May Day rally. Blair himself began to develop a messianic complex buoyed up by the public's support - with the backing of powerbrokers like Mandelson, he began to see himself as the fulcrum to push through the modernisation and reforms that the Union desperately needed. The rapid collapse of the USSA in 1991 began a period of political turmoil across the syndicalist world, that translated into rising support for the Parliamentarian wing amongst the population, compounded by Scargill's disastrous response to the BSE epidemic of 1991-93. Blair, with his allies, began to agitate that the Parliamentarian bloc should manoeuvre to seize total power in govt. This however was rejected by Smith, who feared a disastrous miscalculation and instead favoured progressively amassing power - a strategy dubbed derisively as "one more heave” by Blair's allies, who despaired at the bloc's "sleepwalking to oblivion".

Blair's opportunity came in 1994 with Smith's sudden death of heart failure. Unexpectedly shorn of their spiritual leader, many in the Parliamentarian bloc gravitated to Blair, the de facto second-highest-ranking member of the TUC wing. Those who continued to oppose him as a man of worryingly little principle found themselves ostracised and ultimately fell in line behind what Blair began to dub the Third Way bloc, a phrase coined by Mandelson. With control over his own bloc, Blair subsequently made a deal with Benn's Federationists, and in 1994 was able to hold a motion of no confidence in the TUC that successfully ousted Scargill - Blair was subsequently elected his successor, at 41 the youngest leader of Britain since 1783.

WIP