Though the lessons and conclusions are pretty much the opposite of what Blair promotes.
A decade of Blair has left the Labour party on its kneesServility to the market has alienated voters and eroded the traditional base. The last thing we need is more of the same
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/19/comment.politics
So Blairism adopted a strategy of hyper-realism. If this was indeed a conservative country, led by the Mail and the Sun, then they would define the terms of debate. Labour would accommodate itself to the forces of modernisation. New Labour was born, and the nation would be forced to accept the hegemony of the market, individualism and the US. Arch-Blairite Alan Milburn said we cannot allow the Tories to own the Me Generation. New Labour's strategy would be to do it first. This would mean continually defining itself against Labour's own ranks. One progressive step forward would be followed by two steps back. A combination of winning, spinning and the third way would paper over the cracks.
A decade on, all are left frustrated. Blair was trapped governing from within Labour and would always be constrained by it. On every issue he wished he could have gone further. The party welcomed the winning cuckoo into its nest and traded principle for power. But members have grown bitter at a relationship at best defined by being ignored, at worse by being abused.
Blair described his politics as "compassion and aspiration reconciled", as if inequalities of power and class interest could just be triangulated away. He really meant middle-class aspiration and charity for the deserving poor. All he has modernised is the biblical tale of the Good Samaritan. Tax cuts, tuition fees and trust schools put aspiration first and have led to the social recession of growing inequality that the nation now buckles under. The Blairites started off thinking progressive politics weren't feasible and have ended up believing they are undesirable.
~~~
If we go back to where it started, on that May morning when strangers smiled at each other and the possibilities of political change animated a nation, we can see a different future was possible. People voted in a landslide that encouraged the kind of political and economic change Blair had already ruled out. So the scale of the majority had to be downplayed. The party governed as if it was still on an electoral knife-edge. Places, people and principles that should never have been Labour were now in the tent.
Little wonder that Blair faced criticism from the "left" of his party. That was Labour's traditional base which New Labour abandoned. Do consider reading the full editorial. It was challenging to only quote four paragraphs since so much there resonated strongly.
Dead end for New LabourLeo Panitch: Labour Party will have to split before it can be renewed
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5083
JAY: Well, let's talk about New Labour, because Tony Blair ushered in the third way and a new vision for the left, supposedly, in UK. It's sort of ended ingloriously now with Mr. Brown. What do you make of what's happening? First at the political level, then let's talk about this whole ideology.
PANITCH: Well, it's significant. You know, Labour had a big, long run of 13 years, which is a very long run in British politics. It's equivalent to what the Tories had, Conservatives had, from 1951-64. It's close to what the Conservatives had from '79 through '97—not quite as long, but it was—you know, three successive elections is a big thing. So that's come to an end. They presented themselves as finding the answer to the problems of free-market Thatcherite capitalism, but essentially what they did was embrace it. They embraced it and said, we will be slightly more socially conscious than Mrs. Thatcher was. But in fact they weren't. They embraced the city of London and the banking system fully, including by taking a lot of money from them. Blair made a deal with Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, who owns a good part of the press in Britain, especially The Sun, and bought into his law-and-order line.
~~~
PANITCH: Who owns Fox. Exactly. The Australian newspaper magnate who owns large chunks of the Western media and bought himself an American citizenship in the process, 'cause it was difficult to own a major American news network if you couldn't own one unless you were an American citizen. So he bought himself American citizenship. So they had a good, long run. They were very pragmatic. They presented themselves as having this philosophy of kind of an egalitarian market society, but it was one that essentially embraced the Thatcher revolution. It's true that they spent more than Thatcher did, but they were able to show at the same time that Thatcher really didn't reduce the state nearly as much as she claimed. She just shifted the state's priorities around. They marketized the national health service—they didn't privatize it, but they introduced the kinds of competition, demands for efficiency that you would get in a privatized health service. You know, there were some progressive things, like child tax benefit, which Britain didn't used to have, which they borrowed from Canada. They came over here and looked at what the NDP and Liberals were doing with child's tax benefits for families and introduced that. But it has proven it was temporarily successful. But in terms of increasing inequality in Britain, in terms of leaving Britain very vulnerable to the power of financial capital, in terms of vast regional inequalities, it has certainly not been a success in social terms, and they ultimately paid for it.
JAY: And throw in a lying with George Bush on Iraq.
PANITCH: Well, I was just about to say. Of course. And, you know, the thing that may have hurt them most in the end was the Iraq War, their supporters in particular, but not only their supporters. Unlike in Canada, the parents of the people who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are very angry with the government. Nobody is buying this patriotic stuff as the Canadian families who suffer from this are buying it. And that has, I think—was also a very major factor in the unpopularity of New Labour. Now, what is so interesting, however, is that there was not this rush to the Tories, especially not in the north, especially not in Scotland, especially not amongst Labour's working-class constituency. There is this abiding fear and suspicion of the Tory party, more than there was, because a lot of working people did vote for Thatcher. But having seen what it represented, they don't want it again.
Hmm, Thatcherism with a smattering of social conscience. The more I read about New Labour, the more that sounds like an astute summation of New Labour's policies to me. The distinction between marketizing and privatizing is particularly interesting, especially when looking at other areas, such as education, where this also occurred.
Blair trumpets his re-election as validating New Labour's policies. Let's take a closer look, shall we?
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/10/labour-party-blair-election
But is it as simple as that? For one thing, those victories are less impressive the closer you look. In 1997, Labour won a landslide - of parliamentary seats, that is, roughly 64 per cent of them, but with only 43 per cent of the vote. In the exultation of that moment, not enough Labour supporters noticed that their party had won fewer popular votes than had the Tories under the much-mocked John Major in 1992. In 2001, Labour won again, and not very surprisingly: the electorate by now had a choice between William Hague, a conservative who couldn't win, and Blair, a conservative who could, and did the logical thing, though millions followed another logic by simply not voting.
The British were once enthusiastic voters, as other nations still are: the 84 per cent turnout at our 1950 election was matched in the latest French presidential election and Dutch general election. In the UK, in 1997, the figure fell to 71 per cent, but then plummeted to 59 per cent in 2001. If fewer people voted Labour in 1997 than Tory in 1992, then fewer voted Labour in 2001 than Labour in 1992; and fewer voted Labour in 2005 than for the Tories at their debacle of 1997.
By that last election, the 35 per cent of the electorate who voted for Labour as the "winning" party was for the first time easily outstripped by those who didn't vote at all. Over the past three elections, the Labour vote has fallen from 13.5 million to 10.7 million to 9.6 million; the last figure is several millions smaller than those who voted Labour when the Tories won in 1959 or 1970 or 1979. Blair gained his victories by default. Should the party really thank him for that?
That looks like many Labour voters stayed at home, perhaps for some of the reasons listed above, perhaps because additional promises weren't delivered.
Unequal Britain: richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the pooresthttp://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/27/unequal-britain-report
The report, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, scrutinises the degree to which the country has become more unequal over the past 30 years. Much of it will make uncomfortable reading for the Labour government, although the paper indicates that considerable responsibility lies with the Tories, who presided over the dramatic divisions of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Researchers analyse inequality according to a number of measures; one indicates that by 2007-8 Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality since soon after the second world war.
The new findings show that the household wealth of the top 10% of the population stands at £853,000 and more – over 100 times higher than the wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below (a sum including cars and other possessions).
When the highest-paid workers, such as bankers and chief executives, are put into the equation, the division in wealth is even more stark, with individuals in the top 1% of the population each possessing total household wealth of £2.6m or more.
Clearly Thatcher started this direction, but Blair continued it, leaving a fractured party with many of Labour's traditional voters disenchanted and a vacuum which would end up being filled by the odd couple Tory-Liberal Coalition.
But yeah, Blair just blames the left for that.
Just want to say: "Nice legacy, Blair" and food for thought for us.
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