Will Worlds Collide?

The absence of any acknowledgement of external reality within the New Labour Project is one of its foundation pillars, others being permanence in power, post democratic administration by appointees, identification of government with the state. Consequently New Labour cannot err, it merely shifts policy emphasis to maintain its balance and achieve its objectives.

This does not mean that external reality does not impinge upon New Labour, but when it does in the form of criticism, warning or advice there is a standard policy response of attacking the source as unhelpful, destructive, renegade or terrorist (depending on the level of threat posed by the criticism), and when it is from events these are invariably generated from outside New Labour's areas of control and implementation.

There has been extraordinary forbearance towards this unpleasant and unEnglish ideology and practice because those who have suffered from its overbearing ministrations have been state dependents of the waged and unwaged varieties. The self-sufficient have remarked on it but ignored it while it has not touched them. Outsiders have been content to use the unregulated casino of London's financial markets and pay taxes that are no more than a token gesture.

The victims of New Labour's external aggressions have been the civilian populations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia - even more distant than Czechoslovakia.

Europe, Russia, America, Asia, have taken what they can use, particularly Brown's 'British' tax havens and his entrenched resistance to their control, and laugh a bit at the rest.

But if New Labour seriously tries to slash taxes, continue to lower interest rates, and mind the gap by raising funds borrowed on the strength and stability of the United Kingdom state and its economy, then default will finally bring down the New Labour temple.

Let us, on this Sunday morning, pray that the propaganda of the last weeks is just that, and tomorrow the usual mouse-sized actions, instantly reversed in the small print, will leave us to get on.