“Unremittingly New Labour” is certainly a phrase to chill the blood. Especially coming from a prime minister steeped in so much horror and death as Tony Blair. We can only guess at the cost of a third unremittingly New Labour government. But you can bet your last penny there won’t be an official count of the the bodies.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, with Blair and his ilk is their disturbing ability to view humanity as an abstract concept. How many times have you heard an minister in an interview say, “well of course, I can’t comment on specific cases”? It’s almost as if they see people as well, not really people. How else to explain their sanguine attitude to the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq? It doesn’t help that they’re aided and abetted by a complicit media. I bet you’d struggle to get mainstream publicity to raise money for the victims of the US assault on Falluja. There hasn’t been any poignant footage of the bloated corpses on the street of Iraq as there has been from Indonesia.

But the same can be said of ministers’ attitudes towards people at home. Apologist for New Labour talk about the minimum wage, the New Deal, Jobcentre Plus, Sure Start, Working Families Tax Credit et al. But this is all cosy middle class complacency.

Have these people actually spoken to somebody for who the minimum wage is still a poverty wage?

Or the people on the dole who can’t get advice at their job centre because there’s a shortage of advisers.

Or those on the New Deal, victims of a system operating for profit, overseen by undertrained and demoralised staff extolling a one size fits all approach that can’t accomodate those aspiring to a career and better life and not just a job stacking shelves.

Or those on Working Families Tax Credit who have been the victims of a poorly implemented computer system with its late payments, under payments, over payments and the only form of redress being through a network of disparate call centres again staffed by undertrained, demoralised and, in some case, disinterested staff.

But at least New Labour are doing something if only in a fuzzy abstract sense that massages middle class guilt about the proles. They can feel better about the poor getting a few extra quid a week and get back to discussing whether Germaine Greer was a sell-out for going on Big Brother.

And the people at the heart of this sausage machine are the kind of people who, if you got stuck next to them on the bus, you’d look for another seat:

Geoff Hoon, a man whose moral compass is so comprehensively knackered, once said that Iraqi victims of coalition cluster bombs might one day thank those who dropped them.

Or Jack Straw, the now Foreign Secretary who is not remembered as the most authoritarian Home Secretary in modern history only because his successor was worse.

Speaking of which. David Blunkett, a Home Secretary who boasted of his prodigious memory and grasp of the minutest details of his brief only to have these superpowers fail him when he was asked to recall the details of a grubby scandal that might have prevented him making a return to the cabinet after the general election.

And the Chancellor. A hulking sulk of man with his thwarted ambition, who sees the road to the Premiership as a right of succession and not a democratic process. A man who those on the left claim as saviour of their party and yet a man yoked to marketisation, PFI, multiple announcements and counting of the same expenditure and other post-Thatcherite sleights of hand.

The list goes on. A Culture Secretary calling those who didn’t want their towns inundated with casinos “snobs”. Whose best interest did she think building super casinos would serve? Who lobbied for these casinos? I bet it wasn’t the Child Poverty Action Group. And then there’s the Trade and Industry Secretary who wants to soften the laws on corporate bribery.

And at the centre of the web, the Prime Minister with his delusional Billy Liar stories about Jackie Milburn and stowing away on airliners (why did alarm bells not begin ringing the second these bon mots tripped from his mouth?). His love of a freebie and the thrill of the chase of a good headline. The half million pound property deal that was orchestrated by a conman and yet the Prime Minister knew nothing about. The Mittals and the Ecclestones. The bifurcated mind that can argue black is white, that can ignore the suffering of thousands in Iraq but lament the suffering of thousands in Asia and Africa, that can chair meetings about what to do with David Kelly but can deny having anything to do with the “naming strategy”. The moral hole at the heart of unremitting New Labour.

Posted on January 14th, 2005 at 10:23 am

See also • One fine day in the middle of the night • Words fail John Prescott yet again • Jack Straw: spare the rod, spoil the vote		• Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe • Print
• Filed under Blair, UK politics		•