New Labour is not so much a party of shopkeepers as a guild of slick and sleazy wide boys and girls.
They never seem to stop thinking about making a fast buck, sorry, a quick quid. This need to capitalise follows them around everywhere they go, like a stray dog, always sizing up the financial potential of everything and everyone. This “commercialise it, mark it up and sell it on” behaviour becomes second nature to them, the totality of the whole of the known universe is there for them to leverage, and frankly, and for most of the time, there is bugger all we can do about it.
Everywhere a New Labourite looks they see a commercial possibility, watch it in action, observe it in their faces, it is a sudden intuitive leap of understanding, a classic moment from Tom and Jerry; the stupid grin, the glazed eyes, the dollar signs – and the ring of an old-fashioned cash register.
This is why a New Labourite can look at an old public library, a place of efficient slow-paced calm and a repository of the written word, at the service of everyone – a centre of culture and knowledge, and see, a Blockbusters style outlet for books, an internet shop, and a mp3/mp4/mobile phone, My Little Pussy, merchandising tat corner. Oh, and a library cafeteria, serving the less than discerning punter with overpriced crap; an oversized blueberry muffin with your mocca-choca-spresso-lite-up-the-wazzoo with itsy-bitsy crack flavoured chocolate flakes?
But of course, if New Labour got their way, they would replace all the librarians with telephone booths, so if you had a query you could just pay to ring up the call-centre, in good knows which place, to ask if the library has a book on the life of Seneca. That is, if you manage to get past the mind numbing music they screw down your ear hole. Of course, with all the closed circuit supervision, and the armed security staff on the door, to stop you nicking stuff, it will actually cost you, the taxpayer, more not less.
Which is bad enough as it is, but leads to all sorts of professional deformations, such as, an instinctive desire to reward generosity with even more generous peerages; private fee-based faith based schooling; and, daft and unrealistic expectations of others – e.g. the Olympics, to day nothing of the Ecclestone type scandals – oh gag me with a silver spoon. It also leads to censure of people for shagging their secretaries rather than having them resign for justifying going to war, based on miserable half-truths and downright mendacity.
Not many people know this, but at the height of the battle to invade and occupy Iraq, the New Labour styled MoD briefings were little more than thinly veiled Sales and Marketing shows for serious heat, designed to flog British arms, with the value proposition “as successfully used in Iraq on real people”. All the main channels (owned by friends of NL) aired these sales events as “breaking news”. It was nauseating guff.
I also remember hearing a story about a brief encounter between Tony Blair and the more than wonderful Ms Kate Bush. It was one of those Cool Britannia bashes if I remember correctly. Blair, according to the gossip, had a little chat with each of the star guests at the bash. When he came to Ms Bush he effused grandiloquently about her great export figures, and the importance of exports for Britain, yet never once mentioned an appreciation of her work as a contemporary British artist. At the time, I thought well, he either has no interest in popular culture or is just an insensitive bastard lacking in empathy. Was he solely interested in the cash flow, and just could not give a sod about the person? Overall, it was quite a gob-smacking revelation.
Print | posted on Thursday, February 19, 2009 12:00 AM