Embarrassing Spectacle Of New Labour’s Dotage

Posted on March 6, 2008
Filed Under Politics |

How old and tired and mentally incapable New Labour now looks.

Gone are the days when anyone thought that this was a party with a future, let alone a future connected with anything like the real world or a cross on a voter’s ballot paper.

We have the embarrassing spectacle of Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary (admittedly an appalling public performer even when things might be considered to be going well, if anyone can remember those days) trying to pretend that it is full steam ahead with ID cards, when the message is that they are quietly being dumped as too much of an electoral liability to be associated with, as the time between now and the next election starts to look decidedly short.

Does this sound brave, like the orchestra playing on as the Titanic sank, or stupid?

For most people, New Labour and stupid are synonyms.

John Harris, in The Guardian, says this:

Insiders reckon the loss of Peter Hain has contributed to a change of weather. The zealous James Purnell has been given his head at the Department for Work and Pensions; Caroline Flint and Andy Burnham have been shoved up the ministerial rankings; good old Hazel Blears is reportedly joining them in pushing the PM rightwards. Their agenda boils down as follows: continue the pro-private sector and “choice”-driven approach to the public services, attempt to out-nasty the Tories on crime and immigration, maintain the idea that an emphasis on “aspiration” (or “ambition”) should sit at the heart of your armoury - and reject anything proposed by the unions or the Labour left as an old-fashioned irrelevance.

Caroline Flint, Caroline Flint, Caroline Flint? Why is the name utterly insignificant and yet oddly familiar?

Oh, yes, of course, she is the one who proposed that people living in council houses should have to sign contracts in which they would give their agreement to being evicted if they ever found themselves without jobs.

And now a fully-blown cabinet minister?

Does this mean that the rumours that Gordon Brown may appoint the dead General Pinochet and the un-dead Margaret Thatcher to his cabinet may be true? Along with Peter Lilley and that smart looking young man from the National Front whose name nobody can remember, but who makes Fascism look almost respectable?

These are exciting times for everyone, except New Labour.

They seem like a party of enfeebled inmates being wheeled out into the sunshine of the old people’s home (with the secret wing for holding the geriatric criminally insane) for an afternoon of gaga conversation in which nobody listens and nobody remembers. Then, as the light fades and the chilly wind of change blows, the nurses take them back inside; but the idiot inmates have all been fiddling with their bathchairs and one by one, the wheels fall off.

How funny to think that this was once a party which people thought had new ideas.

Nah! Same old New Labour. Same old Tories in disguise. Same old Nasty Party.

For another year or so, anyway.

wuhudo!

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