A load of bollocks

Tony Blair is one of those people (men usually) who seem to have an obsession with certain male appendages. Tony admires people with balls. In Tony’s world there are people you admire, people like Bill Clinton and Alastair Campbell and boy, do these guys have great big cojones or what! Great clanking balls of steel is what they have. To be fair, Tony does admire women as well. Cheri and Anji feature pretty highly on his admiration list but, being women, they don’t appear to possess great big cojones themselves - not like the boys do anyway, but still, they do pretty well without them.

But I digress. The purpose of this post is to seek to shine a light into the dark heart of New Labour. It’s not too difficult as Tony starts to reveal all round about page 94 of his compelling autobiography – A Journey. The secret of New Labour is aspiration. You see Tony found the magic key to electability. Sometime in the 1990s, after years of thinking, he, and polling guru Phillip Gould, realised that what people in Britain wanted most was to ‘get on’. They wanted things like bigger TVs, a second holiday or a new house. It turned out that if you appealed to this desire to ‘get on’, you could get elected. There was one other really important factor – never be anti-business, never do things that business doesn’t like - increasing corporation tax for example. So Tony set out with a ruthless mission to get elected and made sure he trampled over the Labour Party and its democratic structures to get his way. He had to, it was the Labour Party or him, and it had to be him.

There are a couple of curious things about this heady New Labour brew that Tony doesn’t fully explain. Firstly, he doesn’t explain why it is OK to be anti-union but you have to be pro-business. He talks about creating a level playing field between business and employees – “(employees might have additional rights but not collective ones)”. So under New Labour you can have your extra few days maternity leave but you can’t go on strike to protect your job. That seems profoundly anti-union to me and not a level playing field at all. Collective action is what unions are all about. Secondly, Tony has a rather narrow view of aspiration. If you aspire to improve your lot or ‘get on’ by taking industrial action, in order to get a fair reward for your labour, this doesn’t seem to count as aspiration or ‘getting on’. The nearest we get to an explanation is that; according to Tony it’s just not ‘modern’ like the other form of aspiration, and therefore not allowed.

The plain fact is that Labour would have been elected in 1997 if John Smith had still been leader. The Tories were exhausted and in disarray, the country was sick and tired of Thatcherism and desperate for an alternative. No doubt the gloss of poster boy Tony helped the majority, but it was not crucial to Labour’s success. Nor was New Labour’s continued Thatcherism. Labour could have taken a different path. What’s curious about Blair’s undoubted success is that it was really down to chance rather than his penetrating insights into electability. He was in the right place at the right time. No self respecting Party would have put up with someone like Blair had they not spent eighteen years in the political wilderness.

I don't spend much time commenting on my male friends' testicles but there are some people I admire. I admire people like union representatives who voluntarily help their colleagues with such issues as bullying and harassment, discrimination at work, and the petty vagaries of management stupidity. These people often put their own careers on the line to help others. Now that takes real balls.