Blame Tony Blair for Labour’s new stupidity about wealth

Peter Mandelson’s famous quote about New Labour being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich has a suffix that is often mischievously omitted: he added ‘so long as they pay their taxes’.

But there are a few more things which many Labour members would have put on the end: so long as you don’t earn it by advising Central Asian dictatorships, so long as you don’t hang around with Russian oligarchs, so long as you don’t make it from the Saudis.

Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson got filthy rich all right. But the whiff they gave off while doing so has only served to regenerate a very Old Labour disgust of wealth. This week, Peter Mandelson became the latest Labour figure to criticise Ed Balls’s mansion tax, calling it ‘crude’ and ‘short-termist’. The issue threatens to spark a Labour civil war over envy politics and wealth. The painstaking efforts of Tony Blair to turn his party from a socialist one to a socially democratic one, to convince the faithful that profit is not a dirty word but the source of the tax revenues which pay for social programmes, are in danger of ultimately showing for nothing.