Kitchen Sink

'...my own personal journey has mirrored the political journey of the party.'

Towards a theory of Austerity Nostalgia, part three - the case of Hazel Blears. If Blears didn't exist, it would have been necessary for me to invent her. Dragged up in Salford, to the point where she features as one of the child extras in a ground zero of Northern mythography, the film of that bleakest of kitchen sink dramas, A Taste of Honey, her seemingly meteoric rise to a New Labour Thatcher was only halted by the unexpected inconvenience of huge, and possibly criminal, mortgage fiddling. So, this interview from a few months ago documents a car-crash of austerity nostalgia combined with utterly ruthless Blairite modernisation, and as such is grimly intriguing as an exemplar of this curious phenomenon, the only deficiency in her case being a lack of the requisite irony. Much of the interview reads as a document from a country where the second world war never ended. Not only is Blears' office decorated with - of course! - the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster, her rhetoric is pervaded by a strange combination of Victorianism and Blitz spirit platitudes. You can see a frankly impressive performance of Blairite dialectic in her clear desire to play to every constituency at once, mocking bankers on the one hand but earlier talking about (progressivist metaphor alert) how the 'train' which they presumably commandeered bafflingly didn't transport every member of society; defending the strict working class Salford that created her but sticking up for the ending of 'deference' and backing off from the possibility that she'd ever stand in the way of anyone's fun; an obvious contempt for the Welfare State combined with a belief that the 'underclasses' need to be surveilled at all times...but the most interesting phrase used in the interview is that, in the recession, 'we've all got to do our bit'. We've all got to pull together. By the end of it, you feel a song coming on. Roll out the barrel...

Partly because of a history that would surely once have assured her of a place on a Smiths single sleeve, Blears, like Blunkett, Prescott, Caroline Flint, fascinates me in a way other New Labour politicians do not. James Purnell, Jacqui Smith, Blair himself, these are apparatchiks who would fit into any party at any time, but who historical happenstance, youthful leftism and ruthless careerism elevated to positions in what was apparently the workers' party. Blears and her ilk are different, and more symptomatically interesting - the New Labour proleface contingent, constantly 'flexing their roots' (copyright Julie Burchill). I know people in the Labour Party like Blears, old friends of my Mum's who junked every serious element of their politics, from the egalitarianism to the opposition to imperialism to the respect for something as basic and elementary as habeas corpus, but who retain their implacable hatred of the bourgeoisie, or at least the liberal segment of it; those who supported tuition fees and the abolition of student grants, because they didn't see why people like their parents should have to pay taxes for the children of the middle classes to go to college (conveniently forgetting their own entirely free education and its place in their self-advancement). Perfectly prepared to defend alleged working class racism, if not working class socialism as anything other than a sentimental memory, she is a Burchill column made flesh, minus the wit or the excuse of coke-induced brain damage (presumably, although we can speculate about what made her Blair's 'ray of sunshine'). If we take literally her comments that her advance has been in tandem with the cause of Labour, it's interesting that it was her who specifically provoked George Monbiot to his most ferocious attack on the government - the finest moment in his journalistic career - followed by this confrontation where Monbiot, frankly, fucks it up, allowing Blears to present herself as an unlikely defender of the Salford proletariat.

In the Times interview she decries, with austere rectitude, the 1980s as a time when yuppies caroused and others suffered, seemingly unaware that this is by now the public perception of the boom of the last decade (the irony that it described her behaviour too, as we now know, is another matter); and as it's domestic politics she feels most comfortable talking about, it's this that you would think Monbiot would go for. But while he reprimands her for supporting (or having no opinion on) various British-backed torturers, she's allowed to say, unchallenged, that it doesn't matter to her, as these are all mere bourgeois shibboleths, matters for those who care what happens in Central Asia - not bread and butter issues, not like what she's done for Salford. This is odd, as the counter-argument is simple. She represents one of the most unequal places in the country, but one which has been very keen on remaking itself under her watch, via some very prominent sitebites. When in the Times interview she talks of her love of modern buildings, you're struck first by how much this fits the nostalgia template - take out the politics and you could imagine her in grainy footage next to an architect's model in a GPO film; and second, by what this means in the Salford context. Places like this, if we're being generous, or this, and blocks even worse than that, if we're not. Or perhaps she referred to the 'media city' being built on the former Salford Docks. She certainly doesn't mean any new housing for her 'people', something she explicitly distances herself from, in favour of the spectacularly Dickensian solution of 'mother and baby homes'. She's absolutely right - she represents absolutely perfectly the trajectory of the Labour Party, and as such is truly beyond satire. Make do and mend rhetoric combined with petty graft, without ever seemingly being aware of the contradiction. And as such, she's provided her biggest, if accidental, service to capital, if not to the Labour Party - for her minor corruption in the face of the truly awesome graft of the bank bail-outs.