What is it about betrayal?

The other week I was talking to someone about Margaret Thatcher – they were describing how many of the things that add up to Cameron’s “broken Britain” can be laid at her door. As they warmed to the theme, they declared “what the fuck is that Tory going on about broken Britain for? I was them that broke it!”

Now I’m a child of Thatcher’s Britain – I started work in 1979, voted and campaigned against her, stood in her dole queues, and raised a glass to her political demise. I even have a bottle of vintage champagne squirraled away for the day that she shuffles of this mortal coil and goes to wherever people like her go.

Yes, I hate Thatcher and everything she represents, but as I tried to explain to my friend, she doesn’t really make me angry – for that I need Blair….

For all Thatcher’s faults, I can’t say that I’ve ever been cheated by her – what you saw was what you got. We knew that she was going to be an unpleasant blend of Cruella DeVille and the wicked witch of the west, and she didn’t let us down. Thatcher, like her political bedfellows Pinochet and Botha were proper old-fashioned pantomime villains – people to inspire resistance movements.

Blair on the other hand arrived on a wave of hope. He promised a fairer society, an end to the money-grubbing sleaze, a new way of doing things. He was meant to be one of us – we overlooked his background in the belief that nobody joined the Labour party to help the rich, line their own pockets, destroy our civil liberties and take us into war after war. We were wrong.

When now I look at New Labour, I’m reminded of the book “The Midwitch Cuckoos”, where a society is slowly taken over by a bunch of bright, fresh-faced, good looking children. While the Labour party were fighting off the attentions of the entryist Militant Tendency, they were being infected with a far more insideous form of entryism – that of “New” Labour.

While Thatcher may have invented broken Britain, it was Blair who did something much worse – by taking over the resistance to unfettered greed, and slowly strangling the life out of it, it was he who made the process irreversable. He stole our means of opposing the primacy of the market, and finished what Thatcher started.

The signs were there from the start. The decision to stick to the Tory’s spending plans. The Ecclestone affair. Mandelson’s loan from Geoffrey Robertson. Blair’s support for ‘liberal interventionism’. By the 2001 election I could no longer support the Labour party, and that was before 9/11 created the pretext he needed to launch the biggest assault on civil liberties seen in a century.

New Labour was bewitched by wealth. They wanted to be rich, both personally and politically. A party founded by working men cosied up to money in a way even old-school Tories would find distasteful – rather than being influenced by their natural constituency, they calculated that the lack of an alternative, and clever media management, could keep them in power. They were interested in what Murdoch, Hinduja, Ecclestone and Mittal thought – not in the people that elected them.

After 13 years of New Labour Britain is broken – not so much economically as socially. The gap between rich and poor continues to rise. Our civil liberties have been ripped away from us. Britain’s standing in the world has been reduced to a point that we’re little more than a US rubber stamp.

And what of those who made it happen? Some, like Blair and Mandelson, have become very rich, but what about the over-promoted nonentities that have made up the bulk of New Labour cabinets? Can any Government in living memory match the sheer incompetence, sleaze and lack of stature of New Labour?

David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon, Ruth Kelly, Patricia Hewitt, Peter Hain, Hazel Blears, Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman, James Purnell, David Milliband, Ed Milliband, Margaret Hodge, Tessa Jowell, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls, John Reid, Margaret Beckett, Jack Straw, Charles Falconer, Alistair Darling, Jacqui Smith, Peter Goldsmith, Ian McCartney, Derry Irvine, Hilary Benn, Douglas Alexander….

I don’t blame Gordon Brown – alongside the above, he seems a giant amongst pygmies – but how is it possible that, with the honourable exceptions of Robin Cook and Mo Mowlem, we can be governed for so long by such dross?

Blair has achieved the impossible – he has helped me to get over Thatcher.

I’m hoping that May 6th will bring a near wipe-out for New Labour – enough to persuade the self-serving entryists that there’s nothing for them to gain in the party. The rats have already started to leave the sinking ship – some like James Purnell will probably re-emerge, though given his lack of principles, it could be as anything – but only the electorate can give them the final push. Then the job can start of rebuilding a left of centre party that represents something other than the ambitions of its leaders.