It’s up to you, shiraz quaffer

A great post (or rather repost) on the new blog The Sharpener about shiraz quaffer voting New Labour becasue it's fashionable to hate the Tories while forgetting what New Labour actually stands for which in the words of a quote from the post:

"Nick Cohen has recently gone mad, poor fellow, but remember this?

Power is New Labour’s first concern: how to hold to hold on to power, how to expand power and how to crush rival centres of power… In his attitude to the judiciary, as much as in his attitude to the BBC and his backbenchers, Blair shows an impatience with fetters on power. Listen carefully enough and you can almost hear the PM cry: ‘Do you know who I am?’"

I always try to use New Labour as the name of our ruling party rather than Labour, because they are not the same, a point that I think that this post has brought up better than I could ever say:

Labour’s origins aren’t in programmatic socialism. The party grew out of the unions – in other words it grew out of a tradition of free assembly and collective bargaining. In other words, it grew out of a tradition of political liberty to which the current government is hostile and seeks to curtail by whatever means possible.

When the government says that political liberties don’t matter to working class people, it’s using the old Cuba apologist trick. Hey man, the poor don’t need freedom of expression. They just want something to eat. Well, a lot of New Labour types are former trots and tankies so that isn’t such a surprise. Remember your Orwell on people who pass through the Communist Party “emerging with nothing but contempt for democracy and democratic methods.” Civil liberties were important to Old Labour because its members believed that working class people should succeed into the full range of their economic and political rights. Civil liberties are unimportant to New Labour because it believes that people are cattle, and that cattle need hay and a barn.

But we know that New Labour has got back in, so 4 more years (and going by their record 2 more wars) of the systematic destruction of Civil Liberties, and the transfer of the power to deside how best to run our lives from me and you, the judicary, parliment, and the rule of law to Number 10 Downing Street.