jdc wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 3:46 pm
So their good policies were reversible and Labour also had some policies we didn't like therefore they were Tories?
Nah.
No but if you fail to win (or even make) the argument that the good policies are good ideas why should people fight for them and why should the public care? If you fail to shift the dial when you hold the radio you can't act surprised when it doesn't play the tunes you would like.
The post-war consensus was built on the intellectual foundation that the War had proven the benefit of a more equitable society and a planned economy; the Thatcherite consensus was built on the premise that the entrepreneurial dynamism of the private sector and consumers pursuing their own selfish desires produces a better and freer country than the dead hand of sclerotic state monopolies and obsolete notions of communal solidarity. As such even once Atlee and Thatcher were gone their legacies continued.
What was the equivalent underpinning of Blairism? Where's his legacy, beyond the graveyards of Iraq?
Take Sure Start, it's continuing success was predicated on convincing the public that the State investing in Early Years interventions for the poorest children would pay wider dividends in terms of educational attainment, health outcomes and societal improvements sufficient to justify the expenditure. To turn the Reaganite punchline on its head "Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to help".
How do you square that with the simultaneous introduction of Foundation Hospitals, School Academies, PFI, the "Choice Agenda" even privatisation of the bl..dy Air Traffic Control ?
Each of those was justified using the same arguments lifted straight from the Tory Privatisation playbook "
The State has no business delivering this vital public service; the public sector is inefficient and hidebound, all public servants care about is feather-bedding themselves at the expense of quality of service, the only thing that can save it is the shoe-horning of for-profit organisations into the running of these organisations and the Cargo Cult creation of artificial and vastly bureaucratic internal markets to ape the workings of the Free Market.
Blair relished his run-ins with the teachers, nurses, scientists etc. when they dared point out the flaws in this approach.
It didn't matter that millions of pounds of tax-payers money were being handed over to a dodgy
Creationist businessman to indoctrinate kids that the Earth was 6000 years old and the dinosaurs all died in the Great Flood, who needs a scientifically literate population anyway? Just look at this favourable headline in the Mail about Tony standing up to the child-hating Marxist blob of the Teaching Unions, I tell you what a good round of austerity would clear out the deadwood mark my words!
Blair never challenged the assumptions of Thatcherism, in fact he actively embraced them; her State Funeral being an exemplar of his ridiculous unforced errors in prioritising being seen to needlessly piss-off the Left over any rational policy decision. As such there was nothing to stop the Tories turbo-charging it once they got back in power.
With an unchallenged mind-set that "Public is bad" what chance did something like Sure Start ever stand under a future Tory administration? If even the Labour Party are saying the State has no business delivering education and those on benefits should be starved into work, why should hard-working tax-payers be forking out cash just so scrounging single-mums can smoke tabs with their mates while their brood run riot?
How do you make the argument that immigration is an economic and social positive and that any attempts to blame them for all a country's ills is the worst-form of racist scapegoating ... while standing under a "
British Jobs for British Workers" banner?
How do you make a positive case for continuing membership for the EU if you've spent the last four decades blaming Brussels for all your cock-ups and boasting about how plucky little Britain is standing up to over-reaching, unelected Eurocrats and their mad attempts to create a bloated European Superstate?
How do you make the case for any sort of economic redistribution when you think it a cunning wheeze to abolish the 10p tax-band in order to fund a penny off middle-class income tax?
How do you make the case that capitalism is flawed and its worst excesses need managing when you've let the deregulated banks burn the global economy to the ground and then force the poorest among us to pick up the bill?