Editorial
You tell them by their friends
So it's true: after less than four years in office, more voters regard New Labour as sleazy than the Tories. And the spectacle of senior Labour figures denouncing each other and fighting like rats in a sack will reinforce the cynicism and apathy of growing sections of Labour's core vote, convincing them that the Party has completely lost sight of their interests.
Of course Tony Blair's supple-spined team of ministers are not the first Labour politicians to be caught in dubious company or to seek out the support of wealthy individuals. Who can forget the presence at Labour conferences of the notorious Robert Maxwell, or Harold Wilson's promotion of the Gannex raincoat?
But the sheer scale of New Labour's dependence upon big business sponsorship and immersion in the shady netherworld of millionaires, billionaires and unsavoury business types is unprecedented.
We simply need to ask the question: what could a leading member of a party committed to the interests of working people have in common with a billionaire business person? We can understand William Hague and his team happily following decades of tradition in courting the super-rich, but wasn't Labour supposed to be different?
Why would Tony Blair and senior Labour ministers, including the already wealthy Lord Sainsbury, all want to join Tory MPs in signing a presentation painting to celebrate the 20th anniversary of a œ1.7 billion company owned by an Iraqi-born tycoon?
Has this eagerness to please the ultra-wealthy anything to do with Gordon Brown's refusal to tax the rich, and his preference for holding down pensions, imposing tuition fees on students and holding down public sector pay?
Trying to minimise the scale of this moral and political collapse in the Labour Party, one of the Sunday papers ran a page arguing that the level of corruption in British politics is not as great as in a whole number of other - mainly third world - countries.
Pardon us if we're not impressed. It's not just the sickening hypocrisy of a government flexing every muscle to exclude asylum seekers and deport desperate "illegal immigrants" finding ways to open doors for wealthy people that sickens us.
It's the fact that New Labour is more politically influenced by - and keen to keep the company of - a small handful of mega-rich individuals than the large majority of ordinary working class people whose efforts and votes got them elected.
While the trade unions and campaigners on refugee and asylum rights are kept on the outside looking in at a government ignoring their problems and demands, they see a privileged ‚lite able to summon ministers to grotesque social gatherings with a mere snap of their fingers.
While asylum seekers face starvation amid the wreckage of New Labour's brutal voucher scheme, billionaires can get top Labour bigwigs to exert influence to speed up their passport applications.
We don't really care what Mandelson said on the phone to another Blairite minister, or who leaked what information to whom. The curtain has been lifted high enough on the shenanigans to see that none of New Labour's priorities are those of the people who voted for them against the Tories in 1997.
David Blunkett may bleat that this type of revelation, fuelled by seemingly endless in-fighting by ministers who hate each other far more than they hate the power and arrogance of the rich, will increase cynicism and apathy. But whose fault is it?
If Blunkett spent even a few moments a day remembering where he came from as an FE teacher, or contemplating the grim reality of a day as a school teacher in Blair's Britain, perhaps he could realise why the government is so far removed from the concerns of working people.
His gruesome colleagues - Milburn, Straw, Darling and Prescott - are all as bad: on almost every front the New Labour government has delighted its former adversaries and antagonised its supporters since 1997.
Popular pledges have been ditched, Tory policies embraced, and reactionary bandwagons set rolling, generally at the expense of people too isolated to defend themselves. Pensioners and students have been fleeced, unions short-changed, and asylum seekers victimised, while millionaires and shareholders laugh all the way to the bank.
After almost four years of this, Labour's comparatively high poll rating relies far more on the unelectability of Hague's far-right - and still sleazy - Tories and the irrelevance of the Lib Dems than it does on genuine popular support.
As the election countdown continues, the development of a serious challenge from a united left, under the Socialist Alliance banner, can start to test out the possibilities of focusing popular anger on the electoral stage.