Blairism has destroyed the Labour party

David Selbourne says that New Labour won elections but eradicated all that was good in the party’s traditions. The Cameroons should learn from this terrible lesson

The Thirties taught us that conditions of slump are a mixed blessing for the Left. But in today’s Weimar-like social and economic conditions, and with Toryism a shadow of its former self, it remains surprising that New Labour is in poor political shape.

Other European left and social democratic parties are in a similar pickle. Why? In Britain, it is not the fault of any single individual, not even Gordon Brown. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a systemic failure which old leftists would say vindicates Marx — a crisis of world capitalism itself.

Well over a century before the word ‘globalisation’ had been invented, the Soho Sage was writing of the ‘entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market’. He not only predicted the ‘universal inter-dependence of nations’, but saw on the horizon the ‘ruin of national industries’ and even the ‘break-up of nationalities’ themselves.