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  Wednesday, December 23, 2009The Big Red One: Santa Clause IVIt's been an interesting year. I've said before that New Labour is a failed brand: nobody asked for New Labour, nobody wanted New Labour, nobody needed New Labour. Re-branding doesn't work when your head honchos love it, but your target market hate it. In 1997, people were so sick to their stomachs of the Conservatives that, heck, they'd have even voted en masse for my beloved Doncaster Rovers team as the next cabinet, if that was the alternative (and back then, they even sucked at soccer - now they're doing well in the Championship and beating teams like Bristol City, which of course I'm not shouting about as I sit here at Bristol International Airport awaiting a flight...to socialist Spain). Speaking of socialism, I've also said that New Labour are now doomed unless they drop the "New" and return to some of the values they had back when they formed at the turn of the century - a group of trade unionists sitting in the Good Woman pub in St Sepulchre Gate in Doncaster drafting up a proposal to the trade union congress to create a party for the people, a party for the workers: a Labour Party. The Big Red One! Here we are, a century later, and they're almost unrecognizable, and considered virtually unelectable. Yep, after all the damage Thatcher's Tories did to Britain, 1997 finally saw the working classes mobilize and make sure Labour got into power. What they didn't realize, however, was that New Labour meant Tory LiteTM. Tory Tony Blair scrapped his party's Clause IV (devotion to nationalization of industry), which may not have seemed like a big deal, had it not been for the fact that what it actually symbolized was Blair's devotion to the very opposite: privatization - of areas even Thatcher was hesitant to touch. Blair was able to do this, of course, as a wolf in sheep's clothing; a very dangerous man indeed. And now? Well, today we have his successor, Gordon Brown, trying his best at damage control while leading a party his predecessor put towards privatization, leaving Britain ripe for the pickings of a Tory Party salivating at the thought of finally selling off every last little piece of the country to anyone with the money to buy (their pals). Yeah: thanks - ironically - to New Labour, Tories are more excited than John Major in Edwina Curry's bedroom; their wildest dreams now almost a reality. Almost. The thing is, New Labour have faced a backlash because of these policies, and today's Independent published results of a poll showing that a massive amount of British citizens still feel the Tory toffs favour the privileged few. And 2009 has seen the demise of New Labour's best-laid right-wing plans. In 2009, Blair admitted he committed war crimes, compulsory identity cards were essentially abandoned, the plans to privatize the postal service were scrapped, certain banks were taken back into government ownership, and, with an overwhelming 70% of the British public wanting Thatcher's privatized railways back under government control, it actually started to happen. As if the message was not clear enough over the last decade of diminishing votes for the New Labour brand: Britain wanted its working class party back. From the call centre operators to the retail checkout clerks, it wanted a Labour Party again. So, with the coal of my hometown barely a memory, Santa Claus gets to safely land at the bottom of my chimney with a chance of granting my wish of what I - like most of the working class mass majority - want for Christmas: the return of the Labour Party. The New Year will bring us a renewed push from the Tory toffs to re-brand themselves, too, as less posh, more relatable, and a far cry from Thatcher's Milton Friedman economics that led to a devastating economic crisis - but it's more of the same. Incredibly, their solution to the crisis has been to repeat what was the problem in the first place: selling off public services, privatization, and deregulation for their banker buddies. What Gordon Brown and Labour have to do, then, is show us what - if anything - is left of the Labour Party that represented the workers; the working class. They have to show us the Big Red One at its biggest and best! A defining moment in the history of British politics is almost here. Interestingly enough, for Labour to show a shred of integrity means they can still stay in power, while to fail to kick their habit - this new addiction to capitalism - means certain defeat, and a nation wallowing in the mock of avarice. - Jay Baker; Bristol, England Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here. Labels: Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, New Labour, Tony Blair
posted by Jay Baker at
8:43 AM
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