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Don't let New Labour screw up new modernity again



“A warning from the recent past.”

It would be trite to say New Modernity was tarnished by political personalities in the labour party, but here is a warning: Brown and Blair both surfed political waves of designer post socialism called ‘Cool Britannia’, but they ignored ‘champagne socialism’ deftly. They ran text and sub-text of politics because they side-stepped their enemies by patronage, conspired against orthodoxy and threw the occasional bone to the traditional hack-dogs of socialism. Hague was sent into electoral battle with no weaponry, and fell on his sword honourably. All the self-appointed ‘traditional socialist’ ‘enemies of the ‘establishment’ (The City, judiciary, MI5/MI6, the media, the CBI, the armed forces, the police blah de blah....) were protected by Brown and King Blair, who decided to woe them by laissez-faire and by extending their influence. This was a huge political risk, ‘more Tory than Toryism’ and more NHS than Labour. All this was run on an impressive economic record, a comfortable ‘loads of money’, and the occasional upper-middle class bashing and baiting: “Tally ho” Blair mocked as he drove legislation to ban fox hunting.

Yet this was a conspiracy of taboo breaking politics, and ended the ethical stand-off between 2 deeply held ideologies by rewriting political practice, whilst grudges were learnt, studied and used to undermine rather than confront. Labour had evolved as a Machiavellian animal prepared to bide its time before enjoying political revenge. Red Labour shedded its skin to become the Tories worst nightmare, it had infiltrated and would not stop until it had broken the political back of the Tories, and this is ‘white collar punk’. It was respectable ‘domocratic’ political conspiracy dominated by politically ‘ middle-aged’ cynics and ex public school boys wanting to’ boast of them knowing the price of milk’ like ‘working families’. In one respect their social climbing agenda for ‘everyone’ completely ambushed traditional social mobility by political image and spin, and the novelty of this social ‘stakeholding’ tried to modernise and move away from the moribund nationalisation. More importantly it inspired the first New Modern people’s party of the Conservatives, run by Cameron leaving Liberal Democrats to juggle and drop their own policy balls, whilst pretending to be in government. New Modernity excited the common touch of the ‘Red Tory’ think tank, and must never be maligned as a repro of Blair. Instead this political radicalisation led Cameron’s vision to engage and invest in all of New Modernities possibilitities, but without the conspiratorial poison of New Labour and the tired Old Labour navel-gazing of those and others still engaged in class-warfare.


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