Blair the fascist?

All this is noxious
stuff, but can Labour really complain? Over the years of Blair’s
leadership, he and his cabal have themselves regularly echoed the
rhetoric of fascism, from "New Labour" (as in Neue Ordnung) to "the
third way", a phrase much used by fascists in the interwar years. At
one time, the Blairites liked to tell us that we lived in a Young
Country. Quite apart from the fact that this is simply wrong in terms
of history or demography, it recalled Giovinezza, or Youth, the
marching song of Mussolini’s Blackshirts. We were endlessly told about
the People’s Government, People’s Wimbledon, and even the People’s
Princess. It is terrifying that anyone should have been quite so tone
deaf to memories of a Third Reich with its People’s Courts and People’s
Car (Volkswagen).

Maybe
that could be excused as obtuse inadvertence but some things Blair has
said cannot be so easily overlooked. One of his most memorable speeches
was given to the Labour conference in 1999, when he attacked "the
forces of conservatism", a phrase that sent some of his more
simple-minded followers into raptures until they realised that those
forces included everyone who stood in his way, from honourable Tories
to decent radicals and principled socialists.

He
used even more frightening words that day. When he said that New Labour
was "the political wing of the British people", the implication was
that other parties weren’t needed at all. Had he really never thought
of those leaders of the 1920s and 1930s who claimed that theirs was the
one true voice of the people, above the corruption of party politics?
In a recent essay in Prospect on politics and language, Richard
Jenkyns, the Oxford classicist and literary critic, looked harder at
that scary oration, which was, "in its demonising of opponents and its
aspiration to make the Labour party the political arm of the British
people, perhaps the most fascistic speech ever made by a mainstream
British politician".

The Enabling Act (Civil Contingencies Act), abolition of Habeus Corpus, ID Cards…..he does have a point.