Blearily Blaring, Blair's Blears Blurs

Through no particular fault of my own, I am in receipt of an email from Hazel Blears, the Labour Party chair. Like everything else about the Labour Party, the email has received the attentions of marketing specialists. Hence, it has a logo. The logo reads "Labour Supporters Network" and the three letters O are thinned out and joined together to resemble a diagram of a rather uninteresting molecule or a particularly unhelpful section of a Tube map. Beneath the logo is a title: Labour Supporters Network newsletter, and beneath the title is a very small picture which I take to be Hazel Blears, although she seems to have very prominent upper canines and nothing much between them. Somewhere near the picture is a further title, "Opportunity and security for all"; which is, as it turns out, "a programme in tune with our values, and in touch with the aspirations of the decent majority of hard-working people in Britain today".

Now, being labelled a Labour Supporter is bad enough, especially as I have always considered myself one of the decent, hard-working majority; but those words opportunity and security caused me frank apprehension. They look reasonable enough; but context is all, and in the context of a big, fat slice of New Labour spam the first means slashing welfare rights and calling poor people frauds and shirkers, while the second translates as slashing civil rights and calling Muslims terrorists. Accordingly, Hazel Blears next announces that "today we announced the priorities for government" as culled from the past few weeks' headlines in the Daily Mail, "and have shown we are taking the right long-term decisions for the future of our country".

Naturally, the right long-term decisions, while not particularly new, concrete, considered, equitable, efficient, just or imaginative, are at least tough. The Queen's Speech is "ambitious and bold", or at least as ambitious and bold as any announcement of New Labour policy by an octogenarian fiscal tapeworm with a Goon Show voice and a Ruritanian conscience possibly could be; but in one eighty-word paragraph (the only paragraph which goes on for more than two lines, in recognition of the likely attention span of a genuine Labour Supporter), Hazel Blears uses word tough twice. Tough are the decisions which the New Labour programme is taking (sic) "in the interests of our country's long-term future", and tough is the action which New Labour is taking "to tackle anti-social behaviour and crime". The measures to tackle climate change, by contrast, are not tough, or at least not tough enough to merit the privilege of an adjective. Together with proposals to link pensions to earnings and "ensure that millions more women will receive a full state pension", which have taken a nominally Labour government a mere nine years to come up with, these measures, tough and otherwise, constitute "a programme for government which will build on our successes, create opportunities, enhance our security" and blah blah blah. This, particularly the blah blah blah, is "a programme in tune with our values", not to mention the aspirations of that decent, hard-working majority to which, it appears, I have heretofore all too undeservedly consigned myself.

Hazel Blears then goes on to mention New Labour's "Let's Talk" programme, which is about "making sure that we are constantly listening to the public" before peremptorily informing the public that it is constantly wrong. This, like the tough, bold and ambitious measures detailed above, constitutes "building on the success of the last ten years"; or, in Standard English, continuing to flog the horse even after its flesh has macerated, its eyeballs been eaten by crows and its destination reached by automated vehicles. It also means "refocusing today's challenges", which might sound jolly exciting if only it had a meaning. (Despite the lack of meaning, the method is the usual one: "extending opportunity and security in a changing world". But we all knew that.) Anyway, Hazel Blears and her colleagues are looking forward to hearing from us, so that they can clarify those parts of the Queen's Speech which were too ambitious, bold or tough for us to comprehend.

Oh, one more thing: after her autograph, Hazel Blears has attached a postscript, even longer than the eighty-word policy statement, which starts "Being a member of a political party means a lot" and goes on "Never before has the membership of any political party had such power" and continues "future of British politics" and "responsibility to the people of Britain" and "the history of our movement" and "a responsibility and a privilege" and "this historic election" and "your time, your opportunity". The postscript ends "So, if you are not already a member of the Labour Party you can join by clicking here". The words "your security" appear by some oversight to have been missed out.