New Labour

A happy New Year to you all.

Looking forward to watching - even helping, in our own little way - Gordon Brown drag New Labour's sorry carcass to oblivion and beyond. New Labour has a lot to answer for and we will be working hard - here and over at liberalconspiracy.org - to get some answers.

They have inflicted poverty and real hardship on too many people, which means that something will happen. People get very tired of poverty and hardship. The Tories will also inflict poverty and hardship on too many people - we spent much of 2007 recording examples of that - but that's what Tories are supposed to do. You expect that from Tories. You don't expect that from Labour. Well, you do now, but you shouldn't have to.

BRING IT ON, GORDON.

And so we continue our tale a far-off (kind of) land, where a hopeless People's (some might say New Labour) Party Council is cutting services, getting rid of Council housing, spending millions of pounds on private consultants and paying senior management huge salaries for achieving bugger-all at great cost.

You can read the Prologue to this article here.
You can read Chapter One here .

Chapter Two: The Councillors try to sell reform and the idea of a call-centre to the staff

For the local branch secretary, it all began one Monday morning when she looked up from her newspaper in the staff cafe, and saw the Mayor standing in front of her. He had one hand in his pocket, and a big smile on his face.

The branch secretary sighed. She could barely stand it. For most of his career, the Mayor had been an old-style People's Party politician - a balding, often unshaven, large, committed working man who believed in community (even if he quietly preferred white ones), and was rarely seen in anything other than jeans, a Chelsea scarf, and an elderly vinyl jacket. Unfortunately, he had caught the modernisation bug, somehow, and had recently refashioned himself into a new-style People's Party politician, complete with banker's suit, manbag, earpiece, and a wispy little Hoxton fin on top of his head, where a mighty comb-over had once reigned.