Word: labouring
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...elected, you can't do a damn thing for anybody." Those who seek office, he knows, aren't shy about accommodating reality, and the realities have changed rapidly in Britain. Large chunks of the old working class have advanced into the middle class. Union membership, the bedrock Labour constituency, has dropped from 53% in 1980 to 32% in 1994. Many voters who once cast their ballots for Labour on the basis of a tribal instinct to support their similarly situated comrades floated to the Conservatives in the 1980s. But like Clinton, who wooed back the Reagan Democrats, Blair is leading...
...Labour now embraces capitalism, free markets and privatization. Most extraordinarily, in its effort to appear fiscally responsible, it has agreed to follow the Major government's spending commitments for two years and to refrain from raising income taxes. Once in power, Labour would thus be defined mostly by what it will not do: it will not increase taxes; it will not increase public spending; it will not renationalize companies privatized under Thatcher and Major; and it will not, Blair intones endlessly, restore union power. Thatcherism has been confirmed as the new Natural...
Major, like the Republicans who moan that Clinton has stolen their ideas, denounces the imitation as insincere. "Tony Blair will say whatever he has to," says the Prime Minister. "For him, nothing is sacred." Not only have Major's gibes failed to reduce significantly Labour's big lead in the polls, but Blair has shrewdly turned his party's conversions to rhetorical advantage. When the Conservatives "go on about U-turns," Blair said recently, "they simply underline the fact that new Labour...
Blair's comfortable upbringing means his politics aren't grounded in the old class resentments that animated Labour leaders before him. Yet he has known heartbreak and hardship. When Tony was only 11, his father, a law professor, suffered a serious stroke just as he was about to run for Parliament as a Conservative. With his father disabled, Blair received scholarship help to attend a tony prep school in Scotland. He did well enough there to pass the tough exams for Oxford in 1972, where he showed little interest in politics. He studied law, but is remembered most...
Blair saw it differently. He said at the time that "it was absurd that the one guiding value the Labour Party has in its constitution is wholesale nationalization, when, in fact, the party no longer believes in it." He traveled the country selling his view and was again vigorously opposed by the unions. "We didn't like the idea that Blair was hijacking the party by changing Clause IV," says John Cogger, president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. "It's our party, created by my union in 1899." It took two tries, but Blair finally...