The resignations of the Blairite current and previous Ministers – Patricia Hewitt, Bev Hughes, and Hazel Blears – and possibly also the premature leaking of Jacqui Smith’s resignation, all immediately before key elections known to be critical for Labour, appear part of a coordinated de-stabilisation of Gordon Brown. They also illustrate how deep is the animus between the two feuding factions, and bring to the surface the rancour which has been latent ever since Tony Blair was forced out two years ago. And, deeply depressingly, they reveal just how far the Labour Party, in its bowdlerised nemesis as New Labour, has now become the cockpit for the struggle between ambitious factions, devoid of ideology or wider inspiration. The lesson is that this is the fate of any political party that merely apes its rival and loses all touch with the wider social and economic interests it is meant to represent.

Blairism never had any ideological roots. It was simply and solely a power project, as Blair himself candidly noted when he admitted he had extracted from the Labour Party all its beliefs and power was all that was left. Now there is no power either. The case against New Labour is not that it tried and failed – that is perhaps forgiveable. The case is that it never tried at all. It never had an agenda, it never had a vision. What is unforgiveable is that in 1997 Blair had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the face of Britain and to recreate a more just, mor equal, more accountable society, but he completely blew it. He moved seamlessly into the culture, values and power system that Thatcher had wrought before him, as the Telegraph noted in its early photograph of Blair in front of No.10: ‘to Thatcher, a son’.
Gordon Brown was even more the architect of New Labour than Tony Blair, which is why the struggle between the two over the same bone was always so venomous. It is also why, when Labour now needs a fundamental re-directioning if it is to survive, Brown is the one person who cannot deliver it. Moreover the systematic cloning of the PLP in the Blairite mould by the ruthlessness of the Blairite machine in fixing Parliamentary selections has rendered the Centre-Left, the one section of the party genuinely able to bring about such a re-direction, so weakened that it is unlikely to occur. All the likely candidates for the succession, if Brown were to be toppled, basically share similar New Labour values, which is precisely what the electorate is now repudiating.
The tragedy for the country is that half or more of the electorate is now disenfranchised, with no political party likely to gain power which represents them. New Labour and Toryism are effectively two sides of a single coin. The only hope is that if Labour does, as the polls suggest, crash to unprecedented defeat this weekend, it may finally compel a realignment of forces within the Labour Party, allowing at last a modern progressive voice of Labour to re-emerge which is neither Old Labour nor New Labour, but an advocate for a new economic order replacing the neo-liberal finance capitalism that has imploded while at the same time championing the social justice and environmental aspirations which have been so damagingly suppressed.

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