Yesterday, I wondered the following:
[...] I really wouldn’t be surprised if the often worthy and positive cuckoo that was the New Labour tendency mightn’t end up destroying the heart and soul of the Tory Party over the next two governments in much the same way as it has already manifestly managed to do to what used to be Labour, its class movement and its society-loving instincts.
The truth of the matter is that our “top-flight” politicians – the ones who lead parties and get to the top of greasy poles in a multitude of hierarchies (organisations, institutions and committees various) - are generally, almost without exception in fact, intellectual hypocrites. The meme that currently dominates our Western societies is that of choice: we are no longer patients, parents, students or victims of crime but end-user consumers of services the state provides. And so it is that our “top-flight” politicians – those who run our lives, those who plan how to win us over despite ourselves – structure our needs in terms of socioeconomic McMenus.
Except, of course, in terms of the political parties they lead. There, it would seem, curiously enough, we have blessed little choice at all.
Another example of do what I say and not what I do:
The Labour party’s chief union backer has accused Ed Miliband of undermining his own leadership, disenfranchising the party’s core support and leaving the country with all three main parties bent on using austerity to save capitalism.In an article in the Guardian, the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, launches a strident attack on Miliband and Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, prompted by the party leadership’s weekend decision to endorse a continuation of the government’s public-sector pay freeze.
He suggests that their stance “challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself”. He also claims Blairites will seek to capitalise on their policy coup and come for Miliband himself, a path he says “will lead to the destruction of the Labour party as constituted and certain election defeat”. [...]
I hate being manipulated by clever political bods such as these. I really do. And I do seriously wonder if McCluskey isn’t right in what he says when he suggests that Blairites might seek to remake Labour in their very own image once again.
In fact, I have to say it wouldn’t surprise me if over the next two governments we didn’t see a new centrist political party in Britain: based around the most Blairite of triangulations; cementing together the UK out of an artificial fear of the unknown; centralising even more the power bases around strong-arm tactics in Westminster, with a trivial agenda of petty localism as a sop to the decentralisers amongst us … all this and more would simply confirm that for Blairites Labour was merely a conditional stepping-stone to “better” things.
Never a certain bet nor fundamentally organic relationship of the altruistic.
A shaky foundation, in fact, to be defec(a)ted on when necessary.
What say you?
