Vale Blair

27th June it all ends.

Lets briefly look back. Despite whopping majorities, Blair always realised his grip on power was slender, and was based on distortions of the electoral system. Michael Foot planned the '83 election on the premise that a radical left could win with a fraction of the vote if teh SPD syphoned enouh votes off the Tories. Blair took the opposite view, he pursued a hegemonic strategy - Labour was always going to be a weak government, but persistance would leader to greater changes, eventually.

In the North, Labour has massive percentile margins of victory, with handfuls of votes (the Tories are derisory). In the south, Labour loses seats after taking over twentyb thousands votes - the Tory heartlands held.

Trimming a centrist line, even with overwhelming parliamentary majorities was thus his strategy. Despite that, public spending has increased, the welfare state protected, and the use-value provided by the state extended through the (thoroughly dubious) means of PFI.

As far as the hegemonic strategy goes, it is clear from the persistance of the existence of the awkward squad that they epresent a real phenomena, a measurement of the labour left in the electorate and parliament, a left vote is too weak to sustain a long-term left-wing government.

The question is, has Labour simply accomodated to the centre right electorate or has it shaped the electorate to the left. What's for certain is that the map of the great and the good has be re-written.

The true effects will be seen after Brown - my predictions on that score another time.

Comrade Blair speaks

Having cunningly arranged my annual leave so I can unilaterally declare a four day week, I caught Tony Blair's interview on the Today programme last Friday.

Blair is a stunning interview performer, easy enough to sound nice, pushy enough to control the discussion, fast enough to avoid a punch being landed.

Usually, that is. Humphries landed a punch. It doesn't really appear in the review I linked to above, but Humphries asked Blair about the lack of social mobility, and quoted Alan Milburn (the ultra Blairista) and Alan Johnson (current cabinet minister) both saying that mobility has declined since their days on the council estates.

Blair was flummuxed, he clearly had no get out, cornered by his own acolytes. He waffled, Humpries pressed. The pressing was a mistake - it gave Blair time and an opening to say "I don't believe in punishing the wealth creators" casting this as about some sort of politics of envy.

It is, though, what he said before that that struck me like an intercontinental ballistic missile. He said that the difference between now and when the two Alan's were bairns is that there was an organised labour movement to help move people like them up.

[Beat]

[Pause]

The Labour Prime Minister says there was an organised workers' movement. Think about it. The head of the Labour Party says there is declining social mobility and a hard to reach group of the socially excluded solely because there isn't an organised political force doing something about it - the implication being such an organised political force could do something about it.

A slip on an interview, unreported, unmentioned in the sound and light over cash for honours and "When will he go?" - that will be Blair's political epitaph: "There was an organised workers' movement..."