The choice enforcers

Blair, his Sicilian connections, his Christian Fundamentalist enthusiasms, his search for a New Order, his NGO government, his mind-cloned ministers, his hireling parliamentary party, what’s that got to do with education? Well, it seems that when a British Government reaches its final bunker stage of eye-rolling decadence, it has to, as a parting gesture and rite of passage, Destroy Something Big. John Major’s victim, the railways, looks a bit modest now, a measure of the man. Blair is going for the throat. As he’s always said, Education, education, education.

Those who are still members of the Labour Party might make excuses. They might say, “He’s really trying to do something good. He has mistaken the condition of London for the condition of the country, as British politicians are inclined to do, and to find a quick fix for the shortage of school places in the capital he has imposed on the whole nation what might be a viciously wrongheaded and over-reactive and short-term remedy, we’ll go along with you on that, but give the guy his due, he’s doing it in the, okay mistaken, belief that one size, anarchy and chaos and religious superstition and bigotry sure, but we are enforcing choice (or whatever the advantage of the Blair plan is supposed to be), fits all. Agreed, we have a Leader who is prepared to destroy in order to create, who has always been unabashed by a Year Zero sense of history, but you have to allow Him his Greatness and His Legacy. He has done so much for us. We must take the rough with the smooth.” They may say, these yet supporters of the Labour Party who will soon be holding street parties to welcome the New New Labour Nuclear Age.
But their excuses no longer convince.
They still revel in the “Portillo moment”, these Labour Party Members, the instant when poor Michael’s face dropped on the announcement of his defeat. I voted Labour then, I had been a member of the Labour Party in the days before it became an agency of post-Thatcherite `modernisation` and police and intelligence service-driven repression. But poor old Michael Portillo now - sure he was a bit of a dickhead with his SAS guff and all, but like the Duck of Edinburgh, compared with the Labour Party, you look back on him as an all-round decent guy.

Think what we could have voted in then, if Labour had not been what they are, what Blair, to give him his due, always asserted that they would be. In the eight years that Labour has been in power, we might have:
Built the schools that they promised, rather than failing to, then privatising education;
Developed a public transport policy, and an energy policy, with all the innovation and economic development that that might engender;
Rationalised defence policy, bringing to an end the post 1945 era, removing from taxpayers’ shoulders the burden of the defence industry, which I guess history will show as being the largest single criminal, in the literal sense, organisation in post-war Britain, and removing us from our obsequious subjugation to America;
Reformed our abysmal criminal justice system in a way that actually addresses the problems of criminality;
and, closely related to this, addressed our largest, in fact overpowering domestic problem, the American-style gap between the rich and the poor, which the Labour Party affects to care about, even though it’s the lifeblood of their ideology.

They have destroyed, and they have created the metastases of a corrupt neo-liberal post-democratic state. With the destruction of the education system, the process will be irreversible. That is the Labour legacy. That, and the only country in the world where the purchase of SUVs, and popcorn in cinemas, is on the increase. Oh smell that Labour fart in your face.