Letters | 28 May 2011

Clarity? New Labour?

Sir: I read with growing disbelief your leader ‘Lost Labour’ (14 May), but I now realise that it must have been intended as joke. ‘The tragedy of the Labour years was that so many good ideas were mooted…’; ‘The New Labour years can now be regarded as… a moment of clarity…’ You can’t be serious.

Blair did indeed talk fervently about welfare reform. He talked fervently about many things, such as fictitious WMDs capable of striking within 45 minutes or the elimination of poverty not only in this country but in Africa and indeed everywhere. One of his favourite fervent words was ‘reform’, which for him meant to wreck what is in place and working. Thus he ‘reformed’ our constitutional arrangements by creating a House of Lords that is partisan and now has about 150 more members than the elected House of Commons; and we now have different voting systems for Westminster, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the European Parliament.