Denis MacShane has chutzpah. Politicians should believe what they write but, after the latest con-Budget, it takes effrontery to claim that New Labour is now neo-liberal. Yes, Cameron and his donkeys may suck up to the public sector, but they learn from those who shifted (shafted?) Britain to the Left, in terms of charming the electorate:
No, this pledge of support for the gentlemen of Whitehall and their self-reproducing army of state employees paid for by our taxes came from none other than George Osborne, the close associate of David Cameron whose love affair with statism grows daily.
However, Denis betrays himself with that Europhile rush that he tried to omit but his hand typed in whilst his brain or research assistant wasn't looking:
The only bureaucracy Messrs Osborne and Cameron appear to dislike is that in Brussels, where fewer Eurocrats than the staff of the BBC try to keep open markets working in 27 cantankerous nations.
Most Tories will not accept MacShane's arguments that Tory statism is bad, but Labour's record is worse. Nor will they accept that the Budget was a success, as the polls indicate anything such. Brown is the most disliked politician in the UK today and MacShane's success is a collective denial:
That is why Gordon Brown's Budget caused such delight on Labour benches. The mound of shot foxes in front of Cameron and Osborne grew higher and higher.
The Chancellor played with the Tory Trotskys and Bullingdon Bukharins of Notting Hill and watched them fall one by one into the traps he had set.
To
set income and corporation tax below levels that Margaret Thatcher
dared to introduce was not so much catching the Tories bathing and
walking off with their clothes as a vital caesura in the reinvention of
Labour as a party serious about power.
If MacShane had not clouded this move in a partisan paean of praise to the Chancellor, one might view this as a serious effort to set the agenda. New Labour is grappling with the polling disaster of the pissed off middle classes but pretending to be Tory transvestites is an unlikely solution. Like certain musings on the abolition of inheritance tax, we will hear more about low-tax Ireland in the future as a possible path for New Labour. Except that I doubt Gord, too tainted with his own 'success', is listening to Denis.