prise to tina that many of the proposals in the 'New Labour' manifesto have had an airing already.
Behind Tony and his political gophers are a growing number of liberal academics and journos keen to be part of the New Labour project. Professor David Marquand, Oxford don John Gray, economist John Kay and Observer editor Will Hutton are the best known names. Many of the Labour leader's favourite buzz words originate in their writings.
They share a deep hostility to the Thatcherite market philosophy of the 1980s. They want politicians to use the state to intervene for the national interest. Business cannot be left on its own to deliver the good life for all the state's citizens. After the social disintegration of the last decade "the task instead is to construct a new form of capitalism".
Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle's nonk ine kiair Revolition . Can New Labour Deliver? tries to popularise their approach.
They characterise Blairism as democratic socialist, "giving renewed expression to the party's founding beliefs".
Marxism is the heresy here, not social democratic politics. The attempts of Edward Bernstein to reform the agenda of the German SPD in 1899 are described as "astonishingly relevant today".
We are told that Blair's nation of "strong communities" in which all have individual rights alongside individual responsibilities has its origins in an ethical socialism which draws on the ideas of Ruskin and Tawney.
The family is portrayed as the given absolute, the institution which needs to exist in order to create the strong society and the strong community. It is the place where individuals learn their sense new Labour new Britain new Vision The Union Jack flies over Parliament: New Labour's choice of publicity pictures speaks a thousand words of right and wrong. Christian morality underpins the whole arrangement.
Mandelson and Liddle talk about how the present "social-security system unintentionally encourages casual, not committed sex" by giving benefits to young women. Furthermore, "the left of centre's commitment to racial and sexual equality" has given the appearance of a Labour party indifferent "to the family and individual responsibility":
The universal welfare state_that great totem of Labourism- comes in for serious criticism. It needs to be substantially overhauled and a new emonasic placed on family responsibility rather than the safety net of state provision. Sons and daughters should receive financial inducements to save for their parents' old age.
Jack Straw's curfews on young people are a taster of this right wing social agenda.
There will be no wholesale increase in public spending. no ioh creation schemes and no new taxation of the rich and better off. The only new taxes to be introduced will be on inheritance and a once-only tax imposition on privatised utilities. Work schemes will provide a Labour cure-all for youth unemployment and eventually eradicate long-term unemployment.
This hardly seems enough to fund the grandiose training and education schemes which are to create new prosperity.
It is whimsy of the highest order.
For all the aspirational talk of the boys in the backroom, the reality of the New Labour project is a continuation of the reactionary social policies we have had rammed down our throats for the last twenty years. Even the targets are the same-miscreant teenagers, young women who get pregnant without getting married, the poor in general.
So too are the politics. The demands of big business outweigh all other interests. There is nothing all that new here.
Even the constitutional reform that the liberal political classes have favoured for the last decade or two is now being quietly dropped.
For all the huff and puff of the ideologues Blair is finding it very difficult to distinguish New Labour from mainstream brush conservatism.
Aidan Day
IRELAND IS back at the centre of British politics after the events of the last couple of weeks. Major sanctioned the brutal assault on the nationalist community partly as a result of pressure from the unionists. His majority is in hock to sectarian loyalism. But the Tory right were keen to reassert their identity as the Conservative and Unionist Party. In their view, too many concessions had been made to the nationalists in the 'peace process'. The strategy of the 'peace process', for a settlement in the north, with Dublin's agreement, was an attempt to stabilise the situation and modernise both parts of a partitioned ireland. large blame Britain. in all its horror.
Socialist Outlook 106 • August 1996. Europe and America are not happy with the unravelling of the peace process-and by and The facade of a neutral state has once again been dramatically destroyed. The sectarian statelet in the six counties has been unveiled