From: "John Hurst", [EMAIL PROTECTED] About Scotland on Sunday By GERALD WARNER HI FELLOW home-makers and child-nurturers of the New Britain! I know exactly what you're thinking: 'Isn't he marvellous - just a couple of weeks after having a baby, here he is, back at work on a public platform!' But - hey - I mean - I don't have to tell you that's what it's all about. About responsibility. Values. Valuing responsibility. Tradition. Change. Changing tradition. The inclusive ideal that brought me to your conference today - Opportunism for all! "Don't expect a political speech from me - you had to put up with enough of that sort of thing during a thousand years of social exclusion, fox-hunting and homophobia under the Forces of Conservatism. No, I want to tell you about my hopes for young Leo - there should be a pack of photographs on your seats - and for the kind of Britain I want him to grow up in. New Britain. Full of hope. Full of university places - for the many, not the few. Full of asylum-seekers, bringing their wonderful cultural diversity. "And kids. Your kids. Kids at ease with the fact that they are gay, although most of them may never have realised it before. A health service where illness is a thing of the past, where you no longer have to cope with elderly parents, thanks to 'Do not resuscitate' notices. Values. Old values. Good values. Good old British values. "My call to you today is to respond to the challenge of community by embracing the kaleidoscope of renewal and the spectre of modernisation, by changing the world - changing for the better, not the worse - changing attitudes - changing nappies - Hey! Steady on - if you want to send jars of chutney as presents to Cherie, leave them at the stage door - don't throw them! And - by the way - is that the fastest you can clap? ' Blessed are the jam-makers. Historians will record that, at around 11 o'clock last Wednesday morning, the Fourth Reich collapsed. Britain has awakened from the hypnotist's spell, roused from mesmerised impotence by the slow handclap of the Women's Institute. Labour might, in some guise, stagger through the next election; but Blairism is dead. The Great Charlatan has been emasculated by hands skilled in dead-heading roses with secateurs. Those of us who were never for an instant taken in by this mountebank have marvelled for years at the purblind naivety of our countrymen. Now, however belatedly, the blinkers have fallen from their eyes and they see that the emperor has no clothes. Nor, as became evident at last week's G�tterd�mmerung, has he the personal resources to recover any credibility. As he stood there, barracked and scorned by 10,000 women who could take no more of his insufferable imposture, the grinning jackanapes wilted like a rag doll. His game-show comp�re's grin froze into a ghastly rictus of dismay and incomprehension: no more the water-treading saviour of the New Britain, he resembled nothing so much as Frank Spencer, the gormless character in Some Mothers Do Have 'Em. The real, mortal damage was caused less by the audience's reaction than by his inability to cope with it. His face glistened with sweat, like greasepaint dissolving on the cheeks of an old hag, and suddenly there was nothing there - no personality, no substance, no guts. Here, nakedly exposed, was the dead zombie heart of New Labour. This was Blair: the portrait in the attic must have improved dramatically at that moment. When the Great Charlatan shambled off the Wembley stage with the demeanour of a whipped cur, the curtain came down on the Project. Even the most ardent supporters of the Project now know that the game is up. It may be possible to get a Labour government elected again, but the crusade is over. It is all just ordinary, sublunary politics now. Put as much sticking plaster as possible on the Health Service, tart-up some schools and hope for the best; but the first whiff of Islington-speak will act like mustard gas on Labour supporters. The wonderful, hopeful thing is that all the signs are that the habit of disdain for public opinion is now so ingrained that Labour cannot save itself. Three hours after more than a million Scots had served notice on the Scottish Executive regarding Section 28, it arrogantly rejected an innocuous amendment to the legislation which tentatively recognised the existence of marriage. Similarly, just 48 hours after the Women's Institute, with a strong rural base, had reminded Blair of his mortality, he resumed his vendetta against hunting. Whom the gods wish to destroy - Blair's place in history is assured and reprehensible. He is a hollow, empty creature, with no beliefs and no passions, save the holding of office and the patronage it confers. His sole accomplishment has been to vandalise our stable constitution and reduce our country to fissiparous incoherence, eroding our national identity and setting region against region. He has also gerrymandered one house of parliament into a coven of cronies, an affront to democracy. For the rest, he is the champion of family values who has ruthlessly promoted sodomy; the semi-Catholic who has voted 28 times to extend abortion; the man who abolished the Assisted Places scheme, whose son attends the Oratory School; the jailer of Pinochet who gave grovelling hospitality to the Chinese dictator; the ethical statesman who sold jet fighters to Indonesia; and the bomber of Kosovo who is now bombing in Britain. It would be wrong to dignify as rhetoric the flow of meaningless, vacuous waffle that issues from the mountebank who pollutes the office once held by Pitt, Disraeli and Churchill. The country is now satiated with Blairspeak: as last week demonstrated, it will tolerate no more. Did he think it could last for ever? Did the supplanting of Diana by Camilla in the affections of the fickle mob, within three years, carry no intimation of mortality? Yet mortal he is and therein lies Britain's hope. Farewell, soon, Great Charlatan. "In England today we can do what we like, as long as we do as we're told." -- Marriott Edgar -------[Cybershooters contacts]-------- Editor: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website & subscription info: www.cybershooters.org
