« Home | The lying lies and dirty secrets of Ms Nadine Dorr... » | How to defraud millions and get away with it part 2. » | Each society has - and creates - its own monsters. » | How to defraud millions and get away with it. » | You better hope you don't smoke the reefer. » | Labour's "relaunch" and what it ought to do. » | He just doesn't get it. » | Scum-watch: Women! Know your limits! » | Why Ken lost to Boris. » | "We're all fucked. You're fucked. We're all comple... » 

Saturday, May 10, 2008 

Forgetting your roots.

You can always rely on Martin Kettle to do the talking of the Blairites who are otherwise too cowardly to stick their heads above the parapet. Having defended Blair for years after he should have gone, he's now openly stating he thinks Brown should go when he hasn't even been in the job for a year; or rather, as he's more subtle than that, those who he's "talked to" think that Gordon isn't up to it. The best part though has to be his concluding paragraph:

The best thing I read in this spirit this week was at the start of a Progress magazine article by Charles Clarke. In his house, he said, he used to have a poster quoting the American trade unionist Samuel Gompers, headed, "What does Labor Want?". The answer, set out by Gompers, was: "We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact more opportunities to cultivate our better natures." Not bad as a first draft of what Labour needs to be to face the future and move on.

Which sets out exactly where the party led by Blair which Kettle apparently mourns for went wrong: it tried to do both what Gompers said there should be more of and more of what he thought there should be less of. While extra funding has gone on education and health, equally more jails have been built and more wars have been fought and supported; crime has fallen and leisure encouraged while greed has been celebrated; and while the human rights act was introduced, liberty itself has been reduced and revenge rather than true justice appeased. That Clarke was part of the government that tried to do both, and indeed, as Home Secretary tried to introduce 90 days detention without charge for terrorist suspects, the summation of all that has been wrong with Labour's triangulation policies, makes his sudden remembering of his old Labour past all the more fatuous.

Better reading and advice is provided on the very same page of the Grauniad, with Jon Cruddas increasingly looking like around the only remaining member of the Labour party that actually gets it.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

Post a Comment

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

    blogspot stats
    Subscribe

     Subscribe in a reader

Archives

Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates