For the last decade my Conservative acquaintances have been waiting for the Blair government to reintroduce socialist economics, confident that any month now they would. And for that same decade, I and friends of mine like Tim Evans have been saying: You don’t get it, do you? They aren’t going to do that. For as long as you fight these people on this terrain, you’re doomed, doomed. Start dealing with the fact that mothers on TV comedy shows don’t want their daughters going out with Conservatives, because Conservatives are too peculiar and too nasty. That’s your problem.
The Conservatives are still as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now, suddenly, the “Blair government” is the Blair government no longer. We now we have a Brown government. New Labour is back to being Labour. And now that public spending really is about to do a huge leap into the wild red yonder, all that the Conservatives can find to say is that they will do public sector extravagance better. Patrick Crozier‘s other blog linked, earlier this week, to an article by Matthew Parris in the Times of London(*) which spells all this out.
But give the Conservatives a few months. They’ll eventually get what’s happening. After all, they’ve been waiting for this for a decade.
Why has Tony Blair let this happen? He has built his whole position in British politics on not allowing Labour to ruin the British economy, and thereby making it unnecessary for Britain to vote for those peculiar and nasty Conservatives.
Could it be that he blames the recent relative success of the British economy for the fact that younger British people don’t seem to believe with anything like sufficient fervour in Britain getting itself stitched into the European Union? Could it be that he wants to wreck the British economy, again, so that we will then be willing to run to Europe for cover, again?
I don’t think it’s anything so cunning. After all, we had an economic semi-miracle by voting economically-conservative six times in a row, four times for the Conservatives and twice for Blair. So if we carry on voting economically-conservative, i.e. voting for the Conservatives again (as peculiar and nasty as ever, but now necessary again), we could semi-rescue the British economy, again.
No. I just I think that Blair has become bored with being the Prime Minister of, as a Bond villain once put it, these “pitiful little islands”. He wants to be the King of the World.
(*)=we have a Samizdata.net policy against linking to The Times of London as they charge for access to their archives and restrict access by people not in the UK.
