New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.
New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected. All the other institutions of society — above all, Parliament — are ‘superstructure’, so much flim-flam to be insulted, ignored and, if the chance presents itself, kicked into ‘the dustbin of history’. Everything about the arrest of Damian Green shows the effects of this process. Thus the police, corrupted by years of political pressure, chose the brief moment when the House of Commons was prorogued to raid the offices of a Member of Parliament. Unless they are intensely stupid (a proposition not to be discounted), they cannot have imagined that their behaviour could ever have led to a successful prosecution, but they went ahead anyway, influenced perhaps by the fact that the official urging them on was Sir David Normington, who happens to be chairing the body trying to select the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner.
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