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New Labour

What's new about New Labour?

Old Labour said it stood for socialism and advocated policies to run capitalism. New Labour says it stands for capitalism and advocates policies to run capitalism. The only difference between the "old" and the "new" versions is that Blair's Labour Party is more honest about its love affair with capitalism.

Back in 1925 George Lansbury, darling of the Labour Left, addressed his party's conference with a rousing declaration:

"Socialism is inscribed on our banners … We intend that the land of Britain and all its resources shall be owned and used in the service of the British people."

It was a peculiarly nationalistic version of socialism, but Lansbury and his followers clearly believed that they were standing for the principle of common rather than private ownership. Two years earlier 143 Labour MPs voted in favour of the following resolution which they proposed in the House of Commons:

Greasy Pole: Howard's End?

Greasy Pole

A collective shiver must have run down a few thousand spines at the news that Michael Howard, all ambition apparently spent, intends to retire from the Conservative Front Bench (or perhaps had been pushed off it by William Hague). For a lot of people his time as Home Secretary is remembered now like a nasty operation or a serious accident on the motorway—for Howard was among the grisliest of that gruesome lot who, until May 1997, were the government of British capitalism.

Stir Crazy

A new prison has just been completed near where I live, on the site of an old psychiatric hospital. There is something remarkably symbolic and ominous about demolishing an asylum in order to put up a prison. Of course, the hospital didn't close especially to make way for the prison (it had already become a victim of "care-in-the-community"), but the poignancy is undiminished. The unavoidable impression is that those who are dazed and confused in an incomprehensible world need not seek sanctuary, but should simply await retribution.

Prepare to meet thy dome

In the world of nightmarish apparitions, there can be few to match the vision of the future festering away in the imagination of Peter Mandelson MP. He is the high-priest of New Labour's dream of a New Britain in which the sordid realities of capitalism evaporate into a mist of slick presentation. Acclaimed architect of the Blairite victory of imagery over experience, Mandelson has become a veritable personification of the descent of politics from ideas (however wrong they ever were) to ever-evaporating froth.

Coincidental with the messianic rise of Tony, Saviour of New Britain, and his communications conjuror, Mandelson, is a mere accident of the calendar. The century is coming to an end. This is a cyclical regularity of history which even some economists can see coming every hundred years. But this century's end is different, being the end not only of ten decades but ten whole centuries. The Millennium is coming.

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