Mentalist Tendency
Lenin's Tomb is on marvellous form at the moment, skewering ex-leftists like David Blunkett and Nick Cohen's allegedly liberal baiting meme of the 'dinner party' here, writing a piece on Orwell I'd always planned to write here, and on the evident psychosis of the aformentioned former home secretary here. The sheer self-delusion and brutality of Blunkett, revealed more obviously than ever in his memoirs, have been a thing to behold- it's staggering to think the man was once thought of as a 'loony left', at the helm of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. Adocating machine-gunning prisoners, bombing independent news services- a rightward swing that Mussolini would have envied. But most staggering of all is that he seems to think he deserves sympathy for all this. Mussolini may have written some awful novels, but at least he never tried to make people feel his pain.
posted by owen hatherley at 3:37 pm
2 Comments:
machine-gunning prisoners is *entirely in keeping* with eighties blunkett, a lifelong authoritarian.
well, he's always been illiberal, as i think I implied already (nasty homophobic streak too), but what's interesting is that he, and new labour as a whole, has held onto this illiberalism while junking everything else that they might have stood for, and this is always done in aid of 'ordinary people'
John Reid's prolier than thou stance is a great example of this, the new lab resorting to the usually disavowed class to justify their authoritarianism.
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