[R-G] New Labour is Dead

[Anthony Fenton]

Weekend Edition
May 3 / 4, 2008
Power Can't Shape Truth Forever
New Labour is Dead
http://counterpunch.org/tariq05032008.html

By TARIQ ALI

New Labour has suffered a crushing defeat. The Blair project of  
promoting and implementing right-wing policies in the knowledge that  
traditional working class voters would remain solid died on 1 May  
2008. Labour’s vote in the local elections in dropped to 24 percent, a  
point below the Liberal Democrats and twenty points less than the  
Conservatives (44 percent). Gioven the scale of the catstrophe, It  
seems unlikely that Gordon Brown can win the next general election.

Awestruck by Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Brown aped her achievements  
within their own party, squeezing old social-democratic ideas out of  
themselves, drop by drop. They were all market fundamentalists now.  
Deregulation and privatisation became a mantra and over the last ten  
years the social divide in the country between rich and poor increased  
more than even under Thatcher. Redistribution of wealth was no longer  
on Labour’s agenda.

As the market suffered a series of shocks---the collapse of a debt- 
ridden British bank, Northern Rock, led to state intervention in the  
form of nationalisation. No lessons were learnt. Helping the rich by  
further tax-cuts, abandoning (under pressure from the Financial Times)  
plans to tax non-domiciled billionaires symbolised the regime. The neo- 
liberal model atomised social and political life, weakened democratic  
accountability and drastically reduced the margins of reformist  
possibilities within the system. After 9/11 civil liberties were  
seriously eroded. A fdew weeks ago Brown and his ministers were  
arguing for increasing the detention of suspects to 42-days without  
trial. The Conservatives and police chiefs opposed this as draconian.

The British electoral system helped to conceal the relentless ebbing  
of popular support for the Blairite agenda. No longer. The New Labour  
Emperor is now revealed without any clothes. Power can shape ‘truth’,  
but not forever. That is the lesson of the New Labour defeat.

In London the choice was clear. . A Conservative celebrity who  
carefully cultivates an ultra-reactionary image, Boris Johnson, is a  
star of TV comedy shows. Given the way that politics has gone to the  
dogs in so many parts of the democratic world, its hardly surprising  
that celebrity status and wealth have taken centre stage. A somewhat  
pathetic and ineffectual ex-policeman stood for the Liberal Democrats  
or Ken Livingstone, the Labour candidate. Even though Livingstone  
first won as an independent against New Labour, he subsequently made  
his peace with Blair and rejoined the party, while preserving an  
independent stance on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and developing  
his own foreign policy by inviting Hugo Chavez to visit London.

The elections for the Mayor of London reflected the national mood.  
That Livingstone made mistakes is obvious. The biggest error was not  
in receiving an eccentric Muslim cleric and annjoying the right-wing  
press, but re-entering the Labour fold. The basis of his popularity  
had rested on the fact that he was not a confected New Labour  
politician. The fact that margin of his defeat appears to be less than  
the national average reflected this fact, but was not enough to save  
him. The official result has yet to be declared, but New Labour  
commentators on TV have accepted defeat. He suffered because he was  
associated with an unpopular New Labour government. Had he remained an  
independent and lacerated the Blair and Brown regimes, instead of  
being photographed with them he would have been home and dry.

A city in which 70% of the citizens oppose the British presence in  
Iraq will now be represented by a pro-war mayor. Who cares if a  
million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three  
million have become refugees and millions in that suffering country  
face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. Anything  
associated with New Labour was punished.

Tariq Ali’s memoir Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the  
Sixties is published by Verso.