A New Dawn Has Broken, Has It Not?

It was clever to show the National Economic Council, which is a Cabinet committee, complete with its Conservative and Reform UK members, who are neither Kemi Badenoch nor Nigel Farage. If Buy British is a reassertion of the Labour Party’s roots in industrial trade unionism, then it is also a challenge to the Conservative Party to revisit its only irreducible core, the farmers. Reform has already welcomed it as classic populism and a Brexit benefit. Even so close to Christmas, there ought to be a national day of mourning on 15 December, the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the neoliberal age in Britain, the Budget of 15 December 1976. That was delivered by Denis Healey on behalf of Jim Callaghan to the delight of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, who considered that the fox of their backbench and indeed frontbench critics had been shot. The only notable thing about the 1979 General Election was the sex of the new Prime Minister. Everything else had changed two and half years earlier, and has carried on under all three parties ever since. Andy Burnham is right about that, even if it is remarkable for a man with his record to say it

As Defence Secretary, Healey had expelled the Chagossian people from the Chagos Islands, a wrong that was later compounded by David Miliband before apparently being completed by David Lammy and Richard Hermer. But Burnham has dismissed both Lammy and Hermer. He should cancel the Labour Right’s three generations of betrayal and recognise that the Chagossians had the same right to self-determination as the Falkland Islanders, beginning with the right of return to exercise it. If Donald Trump did not like that, then too bad. There is only one British member of Trump’s so-called Board of Peace. The expulsion of Tony Blair from the Labour Party, and his removal from the Privy Council as an agent of a foreign and increasingly hostile power, would be quite the Clause IV moment. As would the righting of the wrong against the Chagossians. And as would the removal of the 1995 commitment to neoliberalism that Blair wrote into the Labour Party Constitution in place of Clause IV, leading Thatcher to describe New Labour as her own greatest achievement.