Pieces without an author’s name are by the editor
Parish Notices
For information thanks to Jane Affleck and Robert Henderson, in particular.
I wasn’t going to add my 5p’s worth to the ‘Good-bye Tony’ feature in this issue. But since Our Great Leader announced he was slipping his moorings and was pushing off into a dollar-laden future as a World Statesman, writing something has proved to be irresistible.
In Lobster 33 and subsequent issues, Lobster’s writers gave a view of the New Labour thing as it began. We got much of it right; but what we didn’t foresee, and what now strikes me most powerfully, is what a complete bunch of schmucks they were, capable of believing any idiocy if it was pitched to them by ‘business consultants’ in the vacuous jargon of contemporary management-speak. Thus the public sector being picked clean by PFI deals; thus the complete corruption of all government statistics as public sector employees responded to the target-driven management culture by faking ‘achievement’; thus the tens of billions being ripped-off by ‘consultants’ within the public sector in the name of efficiency and competition.
The sad truth is that the New Labour people were a very typical product of the age: people who were not nearly as bright as they thought they were, who were conned by the first bunch of sharp cookies they encountered. The seminal event in this story is clearly the seminars given to the New Labour government-in-waiting by Andersen Consulting, the people who signed-off on the accounts of Enron, the shysters’ shysters. And Gordon Brown has been at the centre of this; this has been his project at least as much as happy-clappy Tony’s.
For all that New Labour people think they have changed so much, this country’s problems remain exactly as they were in 1977, just before North Sea oil came on stream: too much London/City-dominance; vast income and wealth inequalities; deindustrialization; the determination of the British state (and secret state) to remain America’s flunkey. The Labour left had all this down pat thirty years ago (read Tony Benn’s diaries for the period). Now we are about to enter the post-North Sea oil, eco-catastrophe period about as ill-equipped for it as could be managed, with the additional bonuses of 10 million more people than there were on this island in 1977 and the transfer of huge chunks of British social capital and infrastructure to foreign control.
It would be some small consolation if Prime Minister Brown had a full term to wrestle with the problems he has helped create in the past decade; but his period in office will be brief and, no doubt he will find ways to blame other people in the memoirs he writes after Labour loses the next general election.
Sometimes I wonder what the point of Lobster is. But it will always have this point: it owes nothing to anybody other than the people who write for it; and this means we can continue pointing out the emperor has no clothes on. It’s a small thing but it is something.
Pieces without a stated author are by me.
Robin Ramsay
Robin Ramsay
Lobster is edited and published by:
Robin Ramsay at 214 Westbourne Avenune, Hull, HU5 3JB. UK
Tel: 01482 447558. e-mail:
Web site at www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
ISSN: 0964-0436
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