Remora

Tony Blair is finally getting a bit of resistance in his party for trying to complete the Thatcher revolution. Usually a good Marxist would have some French Revolutionary analogy at hand - you know, Blair is playing the Demoulins to John Major's Lafayette, or some obscure thing like that - but there is nothing I can think of at the moment. Roy Hattersley has a nice denunciation of Blair in today's Observer. Key grafs

"...during the general election campaign Tony Blair was asked on television why he was not prepared to increase taxes on the rich in order to help the poor.

He replied that increasing the top rates of income tax would drive entrepreneurs from the country - without explaining that they would be unlikely to go to those other European Union members where both direct taxes and gross domestic product are higher than in Britain.

The second part of his answer must have chilled thousands of Labour Party members to the bone. The object of his policy was, he said, a general expansion in wealth. If that happened the higher earners would drag the poor along behind them. The Labour Party now believes in the trickle-down effect."

Warning about this article: Hattersley makes some batty remarks about inherited traits. His opposition to Blair avails itself of a pseudo-science that makes me uncomfortable. But at least there is some striking out at today's appalling Labour party. Meanwhile, the Tories are floundering about, with Clarke and Smith going at it like mudwrestlers on a sinking lifeboat. Which is a shame, because there are serious problems with the Europe Idea, and nobody is going to represent them. Duncan Smith is of course a joke, and his problem with Europe is basically, well, Europeans live there. The typical xenophobia of the retarded right wing. And that will be a great cover for advocates of Europe to get across an un-democratic program that, in a thousand ways, de-politicizes the economy - in other words, invests its control even more firmly in the hands of speculators, CEOs, and central bankers.