Rich Seam Of New Labour Dross
Is there anyone alive today who can remember what that funny, old fashioned Labour Party did?
There was something about helping the poor and acting as a safeguard against the ravages which the rich might inflict upon them if left to their own devices. It was a party which stood up for the weak and made the voices of ordinary people heard against the clamour of the rich and privileged.
None of that nonsense now applies, of course, in this rich and brave New Britain, where everyone is on the make and only wants to be given “opportunity” and “empowerment” to exploit their “talents” to make money, or so says John Hutton.
As far as he is concerned, the rich should have no obstacles placed in their path to amassing more and more money and if poor people get in the way, they can just be mown down by the onslaught to create more and more millionaires.
“Over the coming months and years, we must be enthusiastic - not pragmatic - about financial success.
“We are, for example, rightly renewing our historic pledge to eradicate child poverty in Britain. But tackling poverty is about bringing those at the bottom closer to those in the middle.
“It is statistically possible to have a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60 per cent of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy. In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.
“So rather than questioning whether high salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country.
“Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people.”
To be enthusiastic, rather than pragmatic, sounds like a formula for idiocy, which is probably what John Hutton hopes will propel the rich to become richer. Pragmatic simply means guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory. The pragmatic experience of everyone trying to get rich quick is that the process tends to devastate both the body politic and the lives of the poor.
So, John Hutton, the one who has not heard that Thatcher’s wonderful world of market forces has been discredited, even amongst those foolish enough not to spot the gaping holes in the theory first time round.
Still, crazy guy, crazy, stupid ideas.
So, enjoy New Labour while you still can.
Come election time, it will not be coming to a town near you, but will be more forgotten than the old version is now.
Embarrassing Spectacle Of New Labour’s Dotage
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!
Bankrupt Legacies
When Mrs Thatcher was playing Oliver Hardy to Ronald Reagan’s Stan Laurel, everyone thought their time had come.
We were all going to live in lands flowing with milk and honey and riches and comfort would befall us all the days of our lives, even if we were going to have to behave like ravening wolves to achieve it.
To nobody’s great surprise, it did not quite work according to plan. Things just went on pretty much as normal, with the rich getting richer and the poor picking up the bill.
We all woke up to find we had been conned.
Then along came Tony Blair selling the same old claptrap and everyone got fooled again.
As that heavyweight of political thought, George Bush, would say:
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
No, it doesn’t make any sense, but you can see what his poor little brain is aiming at.
We all know that these bankrupt ideas have made a very few people repugnantly rich and the world in general a poorer place. As Polly Toynbee writing in The Guardian shows, people are now wise to all this nonsense.
The problem is, how soon will it be before the politicians catch up?
Tony Blair’s legacy is that he was a pantomime Mrs Thatcher in drag who managed to take the farce on tour for one long, last show before all the costumes and props unravelled and collapsed on the rickety stage and everyone saw the horror of the real ugliness of the players beneath the peeling and running greasepaint masks.
Not much to show for ten years in power.
What will Gordon Brown’s legacy be for the couple of years he will have at the big top of the political circus?
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