In his opening few pages Tony Wright’s denounces the privatisation of rail, water and the London Underground, of income tax cuts in the last budget, and the internal market in the NHS. He believes that these measures are all part of the same story: “A country that is becoming a different place from what it once thought it was, its values and institutions converted not from without but from within, and its people gloomily uncertain about their own future and the future of their country.”
Then we are off into a grandiose account of what he calls “New Labour, old values.” We should have “massive investment in education.” We need “a modern integrated transport system.” The NHS has suffered from “budget constraints.” Why offer income tax cuts, he asks, when the voters prefer to safeguard public services? Wright, with whom I have been debating happily over the past few weeks, is an impeccable New Labour Blairite. He is not some obscure trade union official who has emerged through Buggin’s turn to represent a Labour fastness in the north of England. Nor is he a leftover from the Benn/Livingstone years who has been lost in the political jungle unaware that the war is over-and lost. He goes out of his way to praise the changes which Tony Blair has brought to the Labour party. He describes it as a “party reborn.” But no one reading this authentic account of New Labour could possibly believe Gordon Brown’s absurd claims that he will hold down public expenditure or even bring down income tax rates. The book is quite open about its assumption that there is more for the state to do-and that means more for the state to spend.
The Blair-led Labour party has got about as far as Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats but it certainly does not get anywhere close to what, for example, Roger Douglas did by way of transforming the Labour party in New Zealand.
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