Just my opinion of course…

With the major exception of ‘top up fees’ for universities. There, the UK make a significant step in the direction of the U.S. rather than the other way around.

I didn’t mention issues like women’s liberation and gay liberation where no-one suggests that Thatcher had a lasting impact, except I suppose that her Victorian values stuff, when compared to actual behavior, helped to cement the image of the Tories as the party of sleaze.

I’m curious. Why don’t you really blame Blair for that?

What’s the point of wanting root and branch reform if you don’t know what the reform would look like or how to do it? I think someone setting about a root and branch reform should have both those things already worked out. Otherwise there’s no point in moving away from the status quo.

If Blair did want root and branch reform but did not know what that would look like or how to do it, then blaming him strikes me as the only rational response.

Brown was suitably obscure with his talk of “the work of change” – god only knows that he has in mind (literally, cause the rest of the country is completely in the dark). To his credit, tho’, he’s got off to a cracking start by ditching the foreign secretary.

Two things missing from John’s analysis (which gets things about right, I think). One is that Blair consolidated Thatcher’s defeat of the unions, by undermining their power in the Labour Party (no bad thing for them, this, in the long term at least after they can figure out an alternative strategy). The other, much less tangible, is the erosion of a public service ethic informing the choices both of public sector professionals and of consumers/clients of the services provided by the sector. This can’t be quanitified, and I can’t even give much evidence for it, but Thatcher’s reforms and Blair’s ethos both encouraged people to act much more like the rent-seekers of public choice theory, and that’s what has happened. Blair, even more than Thatcher, has undermined the autonomy of the civil service, encouraged movement between private and public sector, and, through PFIs public/private partnerships, and the constant processes of bidding for contracts within the public sector, encouraged actors to prioritise their own interest over any public good. Some of this was inevitable, sure, but policy has made it much worse. I think that’s a terrible loss. Perhaps it is very personal for me, having grown up in an environment particularly infused with the public service ethic.

People keep saying this but I’ve yet to see any solid evidence of things he’s done or said (in public) to base this belief on. There is the small matter of being half of the powerhouse that devised and forced through the change from Old Labour.

Is it simply because he’s less telegenic? I suppose that counts come to think of it – New Labour does involve a certain focus on the presentational.

Specifically, the tilt to capital is intact, but none of the libertarian noises. What has come through is Major’s government: continuity Thatcherism, like the Continuity IRA. PFI/PPP, targeting, quasi-private sector managerialism, and a big, big focus on surveillance, prison, and greater police powers. Unlike Thatch, Major was more willing to buy social peace; no change.

Then you have the influence of the London Labour Party in the 80s and trying to change the world from Islington council, which feeds into the niggly targety wanking.