Tony Blair's Poltical Revolution in Britain: What Can We Yanks Learn From It?

Officially, the Brits sneer at Tony Blair, the guy that rescued Britain's Labour Party from left-wing lunacy. For a while. But Mick Hume reminds us, on the 25th anniversary of Blair's win in 1997, that Blair reordered Britain's approach to government.

New Labour firmly believed in changing how people lived their lives, and regulating human behaviour. It would be the central new role of government to discourage bad habits, interfering in everything from what we should eat and drink to what we were allowed to say and think.

Back in 1997 Hume was editor of LM Magazine (LM = Living Marxism) and his reaction to Blair's win was:

The Tony Blair Commandments: Thou Shalt Not smoke, drink or eat what you like; have a gun, a knife or a wild sex life; watch, read or download what you want; bring up your children as you see best; use what words, gestures or jokes you choose; or in any other way think for yourself.

In other words, Blair "accelerated a shift in power from elected to unelected and unaccountable institutions", administrative, regulatory, supervisory institutions that continually butt into our daily lives. And the Brit elite is just as eager to police the internet as our noble rulers here in the US.

Mick Hume, a lefty, finishes up with  a plea to "put personal freedom and popular democracy back at the heart of British politics." Doesn't sound all that different from Trumpism, that our President Biden just anathematized:

This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history. Recent American history.

Only, I'd say, as the president implies indirectly, the "MAGA crowd" isn't really an organization at all. It is the cultural-political aura around former President Trump. It is inchoate, organic, supported by ordinary middle class people and nobody in the ruling class really knows what to do about it.

It's interesting to note how Britain and the US tend to echo each other. In the Eighties we had Reagan and the Brits had Thatcher. Both were saying that the old economic regime wasn't working. In the Nineties we had Clinton and the Brits had Blair. Both were saying that the old working-class politics of the mid 20th century didn't play any more. And both proposed the rule of the educated class as wise counselors -- combining, I would say, political power and religious belief. In the 2010s we had Trump and they had Brexit, in which the ordinary middle class rebelled peacefully against its betters.

The simple thing to say is that both the US and UK are experiencing the Woke Meltdown. I think I saw a cartoon recently that showed Elon Musk as Dorothy throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West who is crying "I'm Melting."

But then what?

One thing that's important. I don't think that the "MAGA crowd," as extreme as it doubtless is, wants to burn the place down. And that might make the Great Rebellion relatively peaceful.