British Home Secretary John Reid has announced that he will step down with Tony Blair. All I can say is good riddance to him too. Under Blair, the job of the Home Secretary has been to come up with new ways to erode fundamental human rights - and its a job Reid has only been too willing to perform. His departure - and Blair's - is an opportunity for someone to take a different tack.
Um, yes... but I do hope someone is eventually going to get around to asking Gordon Brown and his clique what the flaming fuck have they been doing for the last decade?
ReplyDeleteIt seems the UK Labour Party decided to hold a coronation rather than a leadership election, which they're entitled to do. But I do hope the media - and more importantly the British people - don't let a Brown Administration do their best Pontius Pilate impersonation.
I see very little change under Brown - assuming he does actually take the job.
ReplyDeleteWhat might be interesting is what happens after a Labour defeat at the next election. Who will succeed Gordon - maybe then we might actually get a leftwinger, though I doubt it.
Craig: collaborating with Blair. As Timothy Garton-Ash has pointed out, "Blairism" (in the sense of the economic project of continuing Thatcherism) was a joint project between the two. OTOH, he is also supposed to be the more social democratic of the pair, and there is some small hope for a shift back in that direction with balir's departure.
ReplyDeleteWhat people really want is a shift in foreign policy, and I think there'll certainly be some distance there. TB may be happy to go down with Bush, but I don't think anyone else is.
But yes, this also needs to be pointed out to the British public. Brown shares responsibility for much of what is objectionable about the New Labour project, and his ascension therefore probably won't change much.
I wouldn't class the economic policies of GB as "continuing with Thatcherism".
ReplyDeleteThey are certainly based on a monetarist, free market model, but I think that one key difference is that Labour believes that government is always going to take a large slice of national income and that process needs to be effectively managed - as opposed to Tories who have a fantasy of "small government" which they utterly fail to deliver on. The Tories also (contrary to the intellectual basis of their ideology) managed monetary policy as a political tool - it took Brown to move to the international norm of an independent central bank.
Mind you, I'm more right-wing on economics than on social/foreign policy.
Blairism" (in the sense of the economic project of continuing Thatcherism) was a joint project between the two.
ReplyDeleteWhat rot. I understand that Blair's disaster in Iraq is enough to put anyone off him but to compare the economic and social policies of Labour since 1997 to Thatcher is utter tripe. I lived under Thatcher and she was about as wicked and divisive as you can get, matched in that only by Arthur Sarcgill.
The social, redistributive and investments in services made by Brown might not be the most publicised aspects of UK Labour but that does not mean that they haven't happened.
I also have not seen any other OECD country push so hard to resolve poverty and global warming issues world wide with anything like the vigour of Brown and Blair.