|
Like the IRA decommissioning their weapons, New Labour has spent ten years dismantling Labour’s Big Bertha Gun, the state, more properly called the community acting for collective purposes.
Worse. We’ve attracted it, undermined it, and rejected it as outdated dangerous and likely to endanger the health of the body politic, such as our preference for the private rather than the public, the individual rather than the collective, and choice and competition rather than quality provision. All shown by our obsession with Private Finance (get now, pay later) handing chunks of the public service to the private sector, calling in expensive outside consultants, giving away council housing, continuing Tory privatizations, deregulating obsessively, and remaining intensely relaxed about the explosion of wealth and its migration to tax havens, which is doing so much to build envy and heighten every cost in London. Labour came in in l945 and used the state and collective provision as the basic tools for advancing the people. We’ve denigrated, dismantled and undermined both.
Now that we need the weapons of socialism we’re going to have to eat so many of our own words and re-learn skills which should be instinctive to Labour. What a waste of time when we should have been persuading the people that public spending works, collective regulation and fair taxation are their friends, and that the market has to be controlled else it will trample them to death.
* * * * *
In abandoning his holiday in Dorset to deal with foot and mouth, Gordon is establishing a marvelous contrast with Tony’s long freeloading absences, though its too late for Tony himself to learn the lesson, indeed he’s already spent more time freeloading than envoying in the Middle East since he took on that job.
He’s also making a good point in having holidays at home (though camping in Scotland is an extreme way of showing devotion) rather than Tuscany where New Labour went to die. Certainly it outplays Ming who’s having to follow his few days on Tiree by going to the South of France to get warm. Yet don’t overdo it Gordon. The strain of the job is so great that PMs need breaks -preferably short and regular - and while your response to the floods and the ram raiding medics was excellent, you can’t keep dashing back to London every time a cow gets sick over the next few years.
You’re in for the long term You’ve established your concern. Now pace yourself. It tells me there’ll be an election next year because no one can conceivably go paddling in Weymouth two years running. So next year he can go back to America which he really loves, though after a quick paddle at Cleethorpes where the tide pays its annual visit in August. Going to the US shows you love the country if not the government and trumps Psycho Sarko who’s amazed everyone by abandoning France and going to the US for his hols. Perhaps he likes the cuisine. |
