New Labour’s Betrayal of Founding Principles

Hardly a day goes by without New Labour Ministers in London trying to out Tory the Tories. Today’s policy proposal by Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister is so extreme it makes Margaret Thatcher look like Karl Marx!! Shelter summed up the policy simply by saying if implemented it would return the UK to the Victorian age. Anyone remember the Workhouse?

Downing Street has moved quickly to slap down their Minister tonight, however the comments underline a strategic dynamic that has dominated New Labour thinking since its inception.

In an attempt to triangulate the Tories, New Labour placed itself on the centre right in order to steal the Tories thunder – a strategic move which has led to the building of the New Labour coalition. The problem New Labour has faced is that they have had to continue to betray their founding principles in order to feed the beast of their own making. Today we witness a mass cull of public sector jobs; the squeezing of the wages of frontline public sector workers below inflation, whilst city wages and bonuses are allowed to spiral out of control; the increasing privatisation of public services; the reckless use of the private finance initiative that has already accumulated over £160bn of repayment debt, whilst allowing private firms to refinance incurring extraordinary cost on the public purse – all from a Labour Government.

We witness how a Labour London Government according to the TUC has failed to act on an estimated £25bn per annum tax evasion swindle by the super rich whilst fuel poverty levels go through the roof and little progress is made in addressing child poverty. It’s a Labour Government that has introduced a tax regime which means that average working people pay tax at 33% (income tax and national insurance payments) whilst millionaires are able to declare income on the much more favourable 18% Capital Gains Tax rate.

It is little wonder in such a climate of the betrayal of the founding principles of their movement that someone like Peter Hain finds himself in the mess he is in. So ingrained is New Labour’s ‘sell out’ culture that a politician who made his name as an anti apartheid campaigner willingly accepts money from a financial supporter of the South African National Party! The real damage for Hain is that his own vanity has become more important than principle – a sorry reflection of the type of politics New Labour has fostered.

The Labour party was created to campaign for social justice for working class people. Caroline Flint’s comments are testament to a New Labour Government that has turned its back on these principles. Social justice will never be achieved in Wales as long as we have little protection from a London right wing consensus which has little interest in building a fair society. The sooner we have the tools at our disposal in Wales to get on with the job of creating a prosperous just society the better.