SO MANY outrageous things have been done by the Labour government this summer that some of the earlier issues have almost faded from memory.
Clare Short may protest to the media that someone's "out to get her" - but her comments on Montserrat were outrageous even as thoughts.
Robin Cook's attempt to regain credibility as an "ethical" foreign secretary after his refusal to cancel the Tory contract to sell Hawk jets to the Indonesian regime in occupation of East Timor is about as unconvincing as could be imagined.
And then there have been the scandals - with the suicide of Gordon McMasters at the centre, making public some pretty unsavoury stuff in Renfrewshire - and what has been published in England at least is only the tip of the iceberg.
It may well be true that the scandal, combined with the shortly to be published report on shady goings on on Glasgow city council will allow Blair to bring in local government reform that will further strengthen his centralising grip on Cook: sell the arms first, talk ethics later... the party in the name of "fighting corruption".
Never the less the antics of Tommy Graham and Lord Dixon have done his image no good, and neither has the scandal around Sawar in Glasgow. Bob Waring's nasty dealings with Serbia have attracted less sustained attention - for the time being at least. The press may have given the policy their more or less undiluted support, but the decision to charge fees to students has already caused significant outrage - and the anger will build as the impact is felt in practice. How does this - together with vicious attacks on over worked teachers and so-called "failing schools" -square with the election pledge of 'education, education, education'? What other charges does New Labour have in store for us next?
Then there was the fiasco of Lord Simon's shares. Again the mainstream right wing press predictably ducked the main issue: what is a man like this doing in the labour government in the first place?
British Petroleum stands accused of collaboration with the army in Colombia - and therefore of complicity in mass murder. But even if Simon did not have blood on his hands he is a representative par excellence of the ruling class, not of the workers the Labour Party is supposed to represent.
Blair's most crucial piece of class collaboration is obviously his pact with the Liberals. Coalition type politics have long be part of New Labour's trajectory, but the landslide victory seemed to put such deals on the back burner.
Not for long, it seems, with the announcement at the end of July of Liberals being given seats on a Cabinet Committee supposedly to aid co-oneration over constitu. tional issues.
Its true of course that Liberallabour pacts are as old as the Labour Party itself. Since its formation the Labour Party, after all, while it gave the trade union leadership a voice in Parliament, has never acted consistently in the in the interests of working people. The political break with Liberalism was never more than partial.
But Blair's project is a bolder one than that of his predecessors. No wonder the papers suggest that this might be the "harbinger of a broader realignment'.
Combined with the Labour leadership's project of neutering the internal life of the Labour Party through 'Partnership into Power', this is a vision to create a party that the bosses and the city can rely on more consistently, that ditches any notion that working people deserve their own voice The battle lines have been drawn and it is crucial that a major fight to defeat this whole approach is waged.
At the same time discussions need to take place on the left and throughout the rank and file of the labour movement - more openly than they are doing so far - on what sort of party we need that can really represent the dispossessed and exploited, and what sort of vision of a tuture is really in the interests of working people.
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