Some people try and make out that New Labour was not socialist, mainly because they didn’t nationalise everything in sight. But the reality is that this is just about the only stupid socialist trait that they didn’t show much of. (Except for Railtrack and some banks). This is because state ownership of productive assets is such a well proven route to failure that even the British public would not have voted it in.
So, ask yourself, did Blair and Brown show any of the following socialist traits?:
- Massively increase the power of the state whilst taking rights and freedoms away from individuals.
- Spend vastly more money than their ability to pay for it through taxation.
- Try to micromanage vast areas of the economy.
- Try to redistribute wealth by throwing money at a feckless workshy underclass.
- Stubbornly refuse to bring reform to where it was most needed, the public sector.
- Starve the military of resources whilst committing them to many useless foreign ventures.
- Continuously increase taxation to pay for their profligate spending.
- Punish people for being successful. Politics of envy.
- Allow political correctness to get so far out of control that it has damaged the essence of our society.
- Allow a far higher level of corruption throughout government.
- Follow a diversity policy that has made Britain a land of ghettoes.
- Continually shrink the relative size of our private sector (which generates all the wealth).
- Allow rampant inflation, this time a house price bubble.
- Give plumb diplomatic jobs to untrained and unsuitable Labour cronies.
- Increase public sector pay above private sector pay whilst also reducing public sector productivity.
- Taking on huge numbers of unnecessary extra public sector workers.
- Committing our children into financing billions of pounds of profligate PFI spending.
- End up with the state paying more on loan interest than on education.
- Oversee a continuing degradation of educational standards, especially in the key areas of English and maths.
I could go on, but you must be getting the message by now. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.