One And The Same
Kim du Toit
May 13, 2008
9:00 AM CDT
· News Wire
Here’s an interesting take on Britain’s Labour Party (and the effects of NuLabour on the ancien regime):
Now, like a character in a cartoon who fails to realise for the longest time that the ledge he had been standing on has disappeared, it has suddenly looked down in horror at the emptiness and plummeted to the ground.
But in all this talk of the death of the New Labour dream, something is being overlooked. In order to reinvent itself, Labour definitively killed off its old self. If the new incarnation is done for, is there anything left of Labour? Martin Kettle, writing in the Guardian at the weekend, seemed to be suggesting apocalypse: “The entire post-1918 Labour project of government by a single nationwide class-based party of the Left may now be in terminal jeopardy.”
But hey, I thought that New Labour was all about getting rid of the idea of a “class-based” party. What happened to “governing for the whole country”, and leaving behind the old sectarianism of Arthur Scargill and Michael Foot?
In their confusion and disarray, people on the Left seem to be losing a grip on the famous “narrative” of the last decade, and they are especially at sea about where the “c” word fits into the picture. Suddenly everybody is talking about class, or rather talking about the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter any more, as if this were a revelation.
Why would this be interesting, at least to Americans?
Because we’ve never had a “workers’ paradise"-style government (aided, in no small part, by the non-existence of “class” in the British sense). In addition, labor unions have gone from their heyday of strength in the Hoffa Senior years to a pale shadow today.
In fact, where the parallels occur between the Labour Party and the Democrats is that Tony Blair pulled his party to the center, co-opting many Conservative Party planks as his own—and if that sounds familiar, it’s because Bill Clinton did the same in the early 1990s.
Now, of course, NuLabour has left Labour in ruins, as the ill-effects of statist government are being felt by Brits everywhere, and statism is exposed for the inefficient (and ultimately brutal) political system that it is.
What’s even more interesting is that both Democrat candidates are statists in the Old Labour mold—Hillary Clinton is not Bill, in that she is more of a doctrinaire socialist than he ever was, and Barack Obama is even more of a socialist than Hillary Clinton. Both talk of class (in the American sense of “the rich” vs. “ordinary people"), and both foresee a much-expanded government as the cure for all our society’s supposed ills.
And that, right there, is the difference between America and Britain—because America is not broken, and the “ills” which the Democrats would seek to address are either miniscule, or have already been dealt with in previous political generations. Consider, for example, the “race” issue in the 1950s compared with the “race” issue today, or the “working class” of the 1930s vs. the same class today, and the gaping differences are immediately apparent.
Immediately apparent, that is, except to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and all the rest of the liberal Democrats, who are still fighting their race- and labor battles as though the issues are still those of the 1950s and 1930s respectively.
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