Spectacles Of Our Time

Rod Liddle is on masterful form:

“It is the hallmark of the Myersons’ incalculably selfish and feckless generation, perhaps the worst generation we have ever witnessed in this country. Both Julie and Jonathan were born in 1960 (as was I, incidentally).

This is the generation which has managed to spend the hard-earned cash built up over years by its parents and also has busied itself spending any possible inheritance to its children. A generation which takes but will not give. The money spent uselessly on divorces, or serial monogamy, or holidays, or consumer durables.

A generation deprived of genuine hardship and poverty and cosseted by a liberal theology which insisted, at every turn — no, go on, do your own thing, whatever that is, and let there be no recriminations.

A generation for whom notions such as discipline, obedience and conformity were not merely antithetical but actually risible.

A generation which inherited the highest standard of living this country has ever enjoyed and thus saw no great problem in simply spending until all the money was gone.

A generation which believes in self-expression and emotional incontinence, which believes it owes nothing to anyone. And nor is it to blame for anything, even when its kids turn out to be real trouble. ”

But this week’s star article in The Spectator is by David Selbourne:

“Labour as a popular movement, as a party, and as the embodiment of an ethic, was destroyed by Blairism.

Labour was not so much modernised as Mandelsonised. With electoral rehabilitation as the prize — today’s Tories beware! — Labour’s old purposes were transformed. This process was driven by the perceived need to shake off its ‘old-fashioned statism’, to ‘go with the flow’ of market forces, and to change Labour’s ‘brand’.

New Labour’s handlers, some of them ex-Marxists, declared that we were living in ‘post-ideological’ times. Producer interests — code for what used to be called the working class — had become a political albatross. Donkey-jackets and proletarian vowel-sounds were out, sleek haircuts and rimless specs were in. The citizen had been replaced by the consumer, and the political realm was to be treated as a marketplace like any other.

More important, ‘rebranding’ sidelined many of Labour’s old beliefs in the virtues of community, the dignities of productive work and the ethics of public service. A seedy construct, Blairism nevertheless brought New Labour and its hangers-on office and personal benefit. But it left much of the public domain ransacked and inefficient.”