Blairism has destroyed the Labour party

Marc O'Polo

Spot on. The Tories will annihilate NuLab (good riddance)- and we'll get more of the same.

Richard

They have damaged Democracy just a little bit too.

RobHK

Surely the Lenin quote is; "A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with"?

Rob

Uh, what? This is the most authoritarian government we've had in peacetime for centuries. Cult of liberties? Fear of the police state?

They /are/ the police state. Listen to Andy Burnham. He's a fascist.

Christopher Chantrill

David Selbourne misses the point. "Labour’s old beliefs in the virtues of community, the dignities of productive work and the ethics of public service" were always a delusion.

"Community" always dissolves when government takes over the work of the little platoons.

"Productive work" is always traduced when politicians use political power to back losers as Labour always does.

"Public service" is an Orwellian term, for it obscures the truth about politicians: they are always bossy people who want power.

The truth about left-wing politics is that it is not about "emancipation," but liberation, liberation precisely from community, from work, and from service.

Given the delusion at the heart of the Old Labour project it is hardly surprising that New Labour was unable to rescue it.

We are left with the reality of the welfare state and social democracy. It is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and deluded.

MikeF

"a politics which, in justice’s name, has supported claims to rights even where the possession and exercise of such rights harms civil society and its institutions."

Very well put, but those politics are not those of the Blairites who never really believed in anything. They are instead those of the socialists who still make up the mass of the party and who want to justify their existence and sense of personal superiority by treating society at large as a series of pogroms waiting to happen against various ethnic and social minorities. The failure of Blairism was not, in the end, its destruction of 'Old Labour' socialism, but its failure to destroy it and replace it with anything of relevance to the modern world.

Minnie Ovens

I get the impression from this article that Blair not only emasculated Labour but the Conservatives as well.
How can one explain how the Conservatives are not far, far in the lead over the Socialists?
You are quite correct to warn the Tories but I do not think real Tories are at home anymore.
There isn't another Thatcher around to pull us out of this mess.

Ganpat Ram

When David Selbourne starts quoting Marx and even Lenin admiringly, we are in deep, deep, deep trouble.

Does Selbourne hope that we have all forgotten that he is a one-time fiery Marxist who became a Tory sage?

So history has found you out, David.

You who sneered persistently at Eric Hobsbawm has had to swallow your own anti-Marxist bile and sing like the despised Eric.

You have had to sing again the folly song of your youth because the wisdom of age turned out to be the bray of the ass.

How comic.

Ben

"No democracy can rest upon rights alone, as Old Labour, with its sense of duty to community and neighbour, once knew."

Sorry but I thought the seeds of bolshy selfishness originated with the Old Socialists. Befan, Benn, Crosland, Foot, Healey, Heffer, Hattersley....

How many days were lost to strikes between 1965-1979 for example? Millions. Millions. What was the top rate of tax on unearned income? A paltry 98%

The country was as scuppered under the previous Labour government due to the militancy of its trade union movement and its penal tax regime, just as it has been today by the bankers. The economic pendulum has swung from the far-left thirty years ago to far-right today: the common denominator has been financial ruin and a Labour government!!

M.Hristov

This is a very confused article. It is written as if there is a tidal wave of human rights based legal cases which threaten to demolish the state. This just isn't the case. The British state is as strong as it ever was. It has been strengthened by Acts such as The Civil Contingencies Act. It now has effective control over the banks. The author sets up an anarchy which does not exist and proposes a remedy which is stronger control by organs of the state.

What a success that was in old Eastern Europe and The Soviet Union. It just about worked for 40 years before those who were in control of the states had become so ossified in their privilege that they didn't even recognise a direct threat to
themselves, in the shape of Mikhail Gorbachev. Long before that ordinary people had become marooned in a state where the officials were in control and so the state was run for the benefit of officials not ordinary people.

Be careful what you wish for Mr Selborne. You might not end up part of the new elite.

Ganpat Ram

Poor Selbourne.

He doesn't knows whether he should return to his old Marxism or not......!!!!

But I like his unusually humble, sincere tone.

terence patrick hewett

Mr Selbournes article simply underlines yet once again how little the political village understands the world in which we live. Societies are dragged along in the wake of technology; the invention of the humble transistor wrought societal changes in the last fifty years of which Marx could only dream. And yet, and yet they still bang on about Marxism and Socialism and Thatcherism and Blairism, as if any of them matter a fig. They are like First World War generals fighting the previous war with technology whose capacity for mass death and destruction they can hardly appreciate. Bankers and politicians were handed systems whose capabilities they never understood and still do not understand. There is no crisis of capitalism only an appalling ignorance amongst politicians of how to drive it. The education and abilities of the political elites in this country are more suited to the 18th century rather than the 21st. Technologies engaged at a molecular level are going to change society so profoundly in the future that we can no longer afford the low order of competance of those in government.

the pro from dover

I remember thinking about Tony Blair, when I saw him on GMTV for the 5th or 6th time -as a young thrusting politician on the make- that he was actually a dictator in disguise. Sure enough he built a monstrous secret organisation to control his people, get his MPs 'on-message' ?!? and feed the lazy media what it wanted. He built a huge public sector and encouraged the expansion of a banking machine to suck funds out of the people (isn't that what the City was for, let a few hundred thousand make millions for themselves in commission and hoover up the rest in taxation?).
He talked up 'debate' and never had any, only listening to what suited him.
Brown is basically the same. They air-brush out their enemies, a pair of Stalinists really.
I don't have an agenda at all, just an ashamed citizen...
Biggest cuplrits are a compliant mass-media; they let it happen.

Stephen

The reference to the difference between right and wrong is most apposite.
The fact that a former Minister of State in the so called "Justice" Department had to refer to a junior clerk in the Fees Office to explain that difference to him tells us all we need to know as to why NuLabour is on the brink of obliteration.
Whether they will be succeded by genuine democrats or facists (be they from the left or the right) is anyones guess.