Legacy Issues

Not made for these times is a Guardian CiF piece by John Harris on what I suppose we could laughingly call ‘The Blair Legacy’.

He says:

Blairism, it has always struck me, was an essentially iconoclastic creed, founded in the brief era of innocence that followed the fall of communism and chiefly defined by what it was not: Old Labour, leftwing, anti-American, pro-trade-union, you name it.

However, I think ‘The 'Winter of Discontent' is where it all started, if only we had realised. That showed - for sake of simplicity I'll call it – ‘the Left’ that their idea (for simplicity's sake) of a government-planned top-down economy did not work. This was further proved, and emphasised, by the collapse of communism and so on. I suppose the only credit that Blair and his cronies can fairly claim is that they saw and understood this.

However, they still believed in that other central plank of left idealism, the top-down government-planned (again, for simplicity's sake) engineering of the social system. This they tried to nail onto a more workable freer economic system than the left-inspired one that had failed before and which led to the break-up of the post-war consensus under Thatcher.

Now this 'social-justice' notion has failed just as spectacularly as the economic one. Despite all the promises, despite all the money, despite all the promised Brave New Worlds, everyone (except the New Laborg collective and their fellow-travellers) realises that it has all gone horribly wrong.

It is this total failure of the other (and only other remaining) main plank of left ideology that is the reason for the collapse of Labour support and - if you like - goodwill amongst the general population. They will not easily be forgiven for this, just as they were not forgiven at the end of the 70s.

The Iraq war too can also be seen – in one sense - as a failure of the scrag-end of the 'ethical foreign policy' (remember that?) that didn't even survive its first contact with the reality of realpolitik. The mess that has come after the great PR show of the ‘end of the war’ victory has – though – become a kind of metaphor for, a symbol of, Labour’s collapse. A collapse into a total inability to not only sort out the mess they have made in this country, but even to really comprehend the scale of what has gone, and what continues to go, wrong with all their policies.

So, whoever is Brown’s successor will have to find some social-policy equivalent of the economic ‘Clause 4’ moment in order to begin to lead Labour out of yet another period in the wilderness. That is if the party really will want to survive with its total economic and social philosophies gone, after all it did come very close to dying in the heyday of the SDP when its economic ideas turned out to be bankrupt.