Asboring

The last sentence of this article says all you need to know about the New Labour project in the UK.

It's hard to believe the air of optimism and excitement that greeted the election of Bliar and his party in 1997. How they squandered our goodwill. Their chief problem, in social politics, in my view, was that they responded to the sections of society who it is easy to pander to (although they are impossible to please). The lower-middle-class readers of the Daily Mail want governments who seem to be "cracking down" on someone or something all the time. They want governments to act, and act now. And what they mostly want is action against niggers, gyppos and the underclass, all of whom have their hand in the Mail reader's back pocket.

I say problem, because it's a problem from the point of view of anyone who wants social justice in the UK. For New Labour, there's no problem so long as they retain power. They can fiddle cosmetically at the margins and appear to be doing something, getting re-elected by people who were scarred by the Tories. Now New Labour are struggling for two reasons: first, people have forgotten what shitheads the Tories really are, because they are pretending to give a shit about society; second, New Labour are worse. They've out-Toried the Tories. They hate the people. They drip with contempt for us. Their initiatives, their policies, their endless chattering all have one message: you are stupid children who need nannying by us because we know better.

Well, you can get away with that when you have the illusion of competence that faking a strong economy by pumping up a housing bubble gives you. But when the air starts to leak out of housing, and the oil crisis bites (and your refusal for so many years to look forward and pump money into alternative energy until it's too late starts to hurt), and you make blunder after blunder, losing the support of the press, all we can see then is a sternfaced bureaucrat, telling us we don't know how to run our own lives, giving us nothing, and hating on Muslims just isn't enough smokescreen for your inadequacies.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:07 am