Anger as Blair's team get cosy in millionaire mansions while nurses quit low-pay NHS
The ugly face of New Labour!
PETER MANDELSON and his grubby millionaire chum Geoffrey Robinson may have left Tony Blair’s cabinet, but a foul smell still lingers over the government.
Whether or not there are further cash scandals yet to come, the whole affair has lifted the lid on the reactionary politics of New Labour, with its relentless quest for the favours of the rich, right wing and powerful, at the expense of the working people who voted for them hoping for something different.
While ministers cavort around with union-busting press barons and tycoons, spend holidays in luxurious villas and jet around the world arguing for an extension of Britain’s low-wage, anti-union "flexible labour" policy, millions of workers are struggling to make ends meet on rock-bottom rates of pay, or facing the sack in the latest lurch towards recession.
While Mandelson could go to his wealthy friend and borrow almost ten times his salary for a £400,000 house, ordinary families face growing queues for a dwindling pool of council housing, sky-high prices for private rentals, and the impossibility of paying a mortgage on the government’s pitiful proposed minimum wage.
They call it New Labour: of course it is neither new, nor anything to do with the labour movement. Blair’s team is just the latest bunch of shiftless individuals to have climbed on the back of the labour movement, only to be intoxicated by the illusions of power while being manipulated by the capitalist class into doing their bidding.
The appalling level of attachment of the current government to so many aspects of Thatcherite policy is a direct result of the deliberate moves, led by Mandelson and other "modernisers" to junk any hint of traditional labour movement politics and principles.
Already the question is how far – if at all – Mandelson has really been removed from Blair’s inner circle, and how soon he will be openly welcomed back. But his departure should reopen discussion on what the Labour Party has become, and encourage health workers and others in the public sector and fighting for union rights to get stuck in to a government that will otherwise pay no heed to them, their unions or their demands.