The joys of inequality

It is time we gave the party some electric-shock treatment. The words are worthy of Stalin or Mao, but were spoken by nice, considerate Tony Blair soon after becoming Labour leader in 1994, when he was plotting with his creepy sidekick Philip Gould to ditch Clause 4. In recent months Mr Blair has used the university funding crisis to put several million more volts through his comrades. Like some sadistic psychiatrist, he has fastened his electrodes once again to the emaciated body of the Labour party, which is horribly contorted and enfeebled after eight and a half years of his treatment, but is still capable of feeling pain. Labour MPs emit blood-curdling shrieks of anguish as the Prime Minister tries to force his plan for university top-up fees on them, but that is their function. For if the Labour party regards what Mr Blair is doing as yet another betrayal of socialism, middle England will yet again conclude that the Prime Minister must be getting something right.

Roy Hattersley, in the Guardian of 5 January, accurately and felicitously summarised the Prime Minister’s unchanging recipe for political success: ‘To win the next general election, the Labour party must prove it is no longer Labour.’ Mr Hattersley added rather feebly that to prove this requires ‘the repudiation of social democracy’. But it requires something more elemental, namely the repudiation of equality. Tocqueville long ago observed how in democracies the passion for equality could vanquish the passion for liberty, and certainly in the Labour movement equality has often been treated as a much higher good than freedom.