Parish Notices
Thanks to Robin Whittaker (in particular), Terry Hanstock, Simon Matthews, Grattan Healey, David Turner, Jane Affleck, Harlan Girard, Anthony Frewin and Tom Easton for cuttings and other material since the last issue.
Two years into New Labour and the loudest sound is the sound of surprise being expressed by people who ought to know better.
There were the animal welfare and right-to-roam lobbies surprised to discover that New Labour would not deliver the legislation they thought had been promised. There was Maurice Frankel, the director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, apparently surprised to discover that New Labour did not produce a meaningful Freedom of Information Bill. I was at a meeting in May and heard Diane Abbot MP expressing surprise at how Atlanticist New Labour had turned out to be after the very pro-European tone of the manifesto.
While the animal welfare and ramblers’ lobby groups may be excused their naivety on the grounds that they are not political professionals, there really is no excuse for people like Frankel and Abbott, who are. There was never the remotest possibility that New Labour under any Home Secretary, let alone an instinctive authoritarian like Jack Straw, would bring in a Freedom of Information Bill that meant anything; or that the enthusiastic fans of America round Blair would do anything but genuflect across the Atlantic. It is, alas, all going precisely as Lobster 33 said it would.
Young Mr Blair really is the prissy public schoolboy he appears to be. He is too ill-informed to know that ‘beyond ideology’ – and I have heard him use the expression – which is the core of the laughable Third Way, was the concept at the heart of the CIA’s great psy-war project of the 1950s. (And, presumably, unaware of the idea that professing ‘no ideology’ is an ideology in itself.) He retains a naive American-oriented belief in Progress, the Future, Technology and Science, when the evidence is now overwhelming that these are destroying the planet. Heathrow will be extended to take more planes even though planes are destroying the ozone layer. The problem is not that Blair is a moderniser but that he is a rather innocent Modernist surrounded by sycophants even less impressive than he is.
As usual the pieces without an author have been written by me.
Robin Ramsay
Lobster is edited and published by:
Robin Ramsay at 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull, HU5 3JB. UK
Tel: 01482 447558. e-mail:
Web site at http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/lobster/
ISSN: 0964-0436
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