Guardian UK: Labour Party Has Presided Over a Social Recession

[marmar]

New Labour has presided over a social recession


Harsh meritocracy has corroded solidarity, empathy and humanity. We must put people ahead of the market

Neal Lawson
Thursday February 22, 2007
The Guardian

History, said Karl Marx, repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The tragedy today is the violent death of three boys in south London. They repeat the death of one boy 14 years ago. Tony Blair first came to the nation's attention after the tragic murder of three-year-old James Bulger at the hands of children just a few years older than him. Feral kids, beyond the law and beyond control, symbolised the social decline of Thatcher's Britain. Tony Blair seized that moment and spoke to the nation about being "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime".

Wind forward those 14 years. Today David Cameron leads the reaction to more tragic deaths. Tony Blair, facing his own imminent political mortality resorts to a mix of denial on the social scale of the problem and a promise to clamp down even harder.

At the beginning of the Blair era a strategist close to the new leader told me that it was a policy decision to give up on the Bulger generation, the boys we now see again on the news. For them it was too late.

For a moment, let's accept this strategy - that nothing could have been done. The question that New Labour must answer is whether we are better prepared now to avoid yet another wasted generation. Aspects of education are better, there are more jobs, and 700,000 children have been lifted out of poverty. And yet Britain is still in social decay. The economy is struggling and public spending will almost certainly decline. The gap between rich and poor is stretching. Social mobility is in retreat. Unicef condemns Britain as the sick nation of Europe for the way that it cares for children. The buoyant public mood that swept New Labour to power has long gone. Some things did get better - but not enough. Now they stand to get worse.

Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives - but all they find is shopping. The threat of global warming creates a psychosis of despair because, it seems, nothing can be done. The meltdown is social as well as glacial. We are a society losing control. Why? .......(more)

The complete editorial is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2018274,00.html

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Because Tony Blair didn't so much reverse Thatcherism as modify it

New Labour should have undone Thatcher's "reforms." Instead, they acted like slow-motion Republicans.