Another morning begins with Peter Mandleson lecturing the left on where we have gone wrong
This is it. This is the news story in which Mandleson is going to tell us that in fact it turns out that for two decades he had absolutely nothing to say about the state of society and the economy or at least in so far as he did have anything to say it was totally and utterly wrong. Oh, no, that’s not it at all. The story says that it is the left who is about to have absolutely nothing to… Actually, I can’t be bothered typing the sentence.
At the time of the G8 Summit in Gleneagles Tony Blair blithely told the world that those campaigning against unrestrained financial capitalism had nothing worth hearing and anything they said was totally and utterly wrong. Then within four years everything they said was going to happen did happen. Mandleson’s philosophy was about the scope for globalisation to make some people ‘filthy rich’. Even David Cameron claims there is something wrong with that philosophy now, given that it has created social division and social and economic breakdown.
But Peter is back and today he tells us that we (the left) are still wrong if we don’t embrace globalisation. In fact, the role of the left should be to prepare starving and disenfranchised workers across the world to cope with the hell of a disintegrating global system as best as we can without getting in the way of mega-profits. And in this paraphrasing I do not think I am actually shifting from his real meaning very far.
There can be no major British politician in the last 50 years who has been so utterly and consistently wrong as Peter Mandleson. Perhaps when we get a proper apology for the extent to which his personal misjudgement has resulted in the social and economic catastrophe the world currently faces then he can start to rebuild some semblance of credibility. But even then, he is still more than a decade behind the people he deems to lecture when it comes to an analysis of the world around us.
And so a simple plea: dear Lord of Catastrophe, you’ve done enough harm. Unbelievable harm to the world, the nation and the Labour movement. Please just stop.
Robin McAlpine