‘Progressive’ New Labour?

I’D hate to be impolite, but it’s hard not to conclude that for Mr/Mrs Joe Average, P Moody’s response to my letter reporting the recent grassroots electoral failings of Blairites will have tragic-comic resonances.

And while this correspondent maybe an ‘avid fan’ of Blair the use of the word ‘progressive’ for past New Labour governments is clearly a head-scratcher.

Blair and Brown championed what they called employment ‘flexibility.’ The reality was that we got a massive wave of workplace casualisations. Zero hour contracts flourished. Employers were even permitted to split the working-day into multiples of 4.5 hour shifts.

The latter both side-stepped the provision of traditional lunch breaks and a guaranteed weekly living wage. Nor could young workers pull themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve social mobility.

This is because one of the first acts of the Blairites was to abolish the previous long-established norm of free higher education supported by a mandatory student grant. As a result we now have a generation of graduates joining other impoverished workers, ghettoised into jobs on supermarket tills and in fast-food restaurants, while being overburdened by huge levels of student debt. Nor is there any relief or hiding place from the economic trap the Blairites constructed, as they also cut access to basic subsistence welfare. Throw in the privatisation and marketisation of public services and you have a generation that is not only worse off than their parents but less well supported than their grandparents.

Significantly by the end of neoliberal era, New Labour was actually trying to secure greater state support for political parties to pay for the campaign canvassing their own traditional Labour supporters would no longer provide. It seems neither the public nor supporters found this record ‘progress’ nor practices that were in their interests to defend. Gavin Lewis, Manchester