I have often said that knowing anything about politics is a grave disadvantage if you want to set up as a pundit, especially (but not exclusively) when the Labour Party is under discussion. Most political reporters think and thought that Michael Howard, an incorrigible liberal, and the man who did more than anyone else to turn the Tories into a Blairite faction, was a hardline right-winger.

They think Blairism was Toryism. They thought Neil Kinnock’s attack on Militant was a right-wing purge of the party. Etc etc.

Alas, as a result, many of their readers, listeners and viewers also end up thinking these daft and untrue things, and are, as a result, quite unable to understand what is going on. It was to put this right that I wrote my book ‘The Broken Compass’, later re-engineered as ‘The Cameron Delusion’. The effect has been minimal.

Now the conventionally wise all think that Jeremy Corbyn is a wild leftist, steering a moderate and conservative Blairite Labour Party away from the safe centre. The way in which he is pilloried for his dealings with Irish Republicans is especially funny, given the Blair creature’s direct role in arranging a humiliating and wholly unnecessary national surrender to the IRA, who, having won almost all their demands, were allowed to keep all their guns and bombs, and exonerated for any atrocities which might happen after the surrender was signed, to make sure that they would be able to squeeze the rest out of us in due time. By their deeds shall ye know them.

I have to point out that I’m not a supporter of Mr Corbyn. He and I don’t agree about much, except the serial stupidity of our military interventions. This is not because we have a meeting of minds. We don’t. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned 1930s leftist attitude to war (learned from his old-fashioned leftist parents) accidentally coincides with my wholly different Christian view of it.

Modern leftists (which Mr Corbyn isn’t, but my late brother was, and which the Blairites are) love interventionist war as a means of imposing utopia. For them, the might of the liberal democratist USA, bringing ‘democracy’ to the world by bomb and missile, has replaced the vanished might of the USSR, and they worship it in the same way.

Mr Corbyn is old enough to recall the days when the left mistrusted the USA, and a kind of inertia keeps him thinking this way. At his age, he doesn’t want to reconstruct his entire philosophy.

There’s a lot of this sort of inertia about, on the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ . For example, as I make my way in and out of Paddington station, I often have jolly encounters with railway trade unionists, who are friendly towards me largely because of my attitude to Russia, though they also like my support for renationalisation of the railways, and my pluralist belief in union freedoms.

I feel it would be unkind and ungenerous of me to pick a quarrel with these pleasant people over the Russia issue, but I suspect they (just like the ‘New Cold War’ merchants) still cannot really separate Russia and the USSR in their minds (as I can, having seen the USSR collapse, close to) , nor do they distinguish between the USA of the Cold War and the very different post-Clinton USA of liberal intervention. They think my defence of Russia’s behaviour is a continuation of the Cold War. They don’t grasp that I defend Russia precisely because it is *not* the USSR any more, and criticise the modern USA precisely because it is no longer the arsenal of conservative liberty, and has turned instead into a globalist, ultra-liberal ideological state.

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to pointing out that my view of New Labour(and its Cameroon clones in the Tory Party) has been spectacularly vindicated by a Deep Throat from the heart if Blairism.

To the mockery of the conventionally wise, I wrote in the MoS on 9th August

‘Today's Tory Party is indistinguishable from Blairite New Labour, and is probably more Marxist in practice than Jeremy Corbyn is in theory.’

And I then wrote on 4th October, to yet more derision from the massed bands of received opinion: ‘Our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction's ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?’

Ha! Sunday’s ‘Observer’ published the following article by Peter Hyman, a close associate of the Blair creature at the height of his popularity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/20/labour-party-directionless-political-future?CMP=share_btn_tw

This is the key passage:

'The [New Labour]“project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters'

The context is below.

I think it entirely vindicates what I have now been saying for nearly 20 years, and makes nonsense of the idea that Blairism was a form of Toryism.

‘New Labour was not intended merely as a short-term electoral fix after 18 years out of power and four crushing election defeats (though that would not have been a terrible thing), but as a radical new force in British politics. The “project” was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters. The idea of New Labour was not to be a good opposition party, to protest loudly or have an “influence” over events, but, rather, to take and hold on to the levers of power. New Labour sought political hegemony: winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a Labour century with Labour values in contrast to a Tory-dominated 20th century.

‘The scale of that ambition, in a country dominated by a stridently rightwing press and the quiet conservatism of large swaths of the British people, was breathtaking. If Labour could be in power for a serious amount of time, then the country would, we believed, change for good; not a burst of socialism for one time (if that), but changed institutions and values that could shape the country for all time.

‘The project worked at a number of levels. We told a story about Britain that was optimistic, tapped into people’s aspirations, stressed our tradition as a pioneering nation and showed how once again, through knowledge, know-how, new technology and networking, our creativity could help shape the prosperity and success of Britain in the future. We championed a society in which community and solidarity played a more important role – “giving” as well as “taking”.

‘We put forward a practical programme for government and new delivery mechanisms to ensure that policies were actually working on the ground. A plan to get the young unemployed back to work. A plan to end rough sleeping on our streets (now sadly back in big numbers). A radical plan to end child poverty in a generation. A plan to cut huge waiting times in the NHS both for routine operations and in A&E departments. A plan to get the trains to run on time. Through massive new investment and judicious reform, the infrastructure of Britain and the life chances of the poorest families improved dramatically. The case for an active, empowering state was being made. There was a moral imperative too: to rebuild the public realm, to shape a more tolerant, kinder society and to devolve power to the nations of Britain.

‘There were many mistakes, many messy compromises. To those who want to compare this imperfect Labour government with some Aaron Sorkin-scripted, West Wing-style fantasy, it was doomed to come up short. But the real comparison should always have been between an imperfect Labour government and a Tory government. For if Labour holds out for something pure and untainted by reality, if we pretend that there are black-and-white answers to complicated situations, then, as we are finding out now, the left is ruined.

It’s too easy to forget what life was like under the pre-New Labour Tory government or what it would have been like if they had continued in power. It was illegal to talk about gay relationships in schools; pupils still used outside lavatories in crumbling buildings; free-market Tories were urging the end of the NHS; while the government defended apartheid, foxhunting and the massive, unregulated profits of privatised utilities.

It’s also easy to forget just how much the centre of gravity of British politics has moved to the left as a result of New Labour.’