Sounds like a Tory, Looks Like a Tony

In a New Year's message Charles Kennedy reminded us that whatever David Cameron sounds like he is "still a Tory at heart" (let noone ever say Mr Kennedy is slow on the up-take or that he lacks a dry-as-a-bone sense of situationist humour)...

Anyway, Cameron - Tory at heart, right - must be why he leads the Tory party...

Then again Andrew Neil had him fooling Ulrika Jonsson a few weeks back - which makes a change from people fooling with Ulrika. Jonsson was falling for Cameron's 'new politics' hook, line and faux zebra cushion on an even more Daily Mail-man than usual edition of The Week in Politics (or whatever that oddly entertaining late night lubricant-fest Neil hosts with Abbot and Port-a-loo is called...)

So at heart David Cameron IS still a Tory...
and perhaps more importantly at wallet,
at his old (and new?) boys clubs (on second thoughts take a glance at that front bench team - before we even start on the advisers - and lets stick with 'old' boys club),
at private schools (or sorry opted out state schools with 'independent' selection policies - a notable area of agreement with our Prime Minister),
at work...

...You know the list.

You get my drift.

Which is why as Johann Hari points out it is a great relief that our interests are defended in such a robust way by the lovely Mr Tony - who has just ensured that years of
efforts to properly regulate the chemical industry, and the businesses which feed us its products both intentionally and carelessly, have gone up in smoke - or as Johann puts it how Blair has failed to protect us from the 'corporate killers in pin-striped suits'
- he does have such a sense of populist vim lurking under all that sententiousness our Johann that really he is quite wasted on the Indy, but his point is nonetheless sound - and the article is in fact rather better than its title.

I however am even more exercised by a similar example of Mr Tony's great wisdom. This is his well-flagged innovation for the new year of forgetting why he once opposed nuclear power - "Well, err actually, you see I never, err really, as such, opposed nuclear power, more in any case a matter of warheads and that whole labour anti-war thing - all forgotten now, you know, haha, New World Order, threats to liberty, NEW THINKING, global warming, science, advice, industry, realism, solutions not slogans..."- OH SHUT THE F**K UP Tony!

We know Blair gets a masturbatory thrill out of rolling back that delicate pink outer skin of social democracy to reveal the blue blood which apparently throbs in his political head - but surely this is a step too far - this is, after all, not a political issue - is it?

Well the fact is that it has spent much of recent history in the UK as a distinctly left-right political issue. That, if nothing else, should serve to remind us of something about where the loyalties of different political traditions primarily lie (lay? - lets stick with 'lie' - its kind of appropriate).

And this of course is why it has earned the right to be one of the left of centre statues which Tony Blair wants to kick over - but speaking as someone who knows (and has known) a statistically improbable number of people with extremely rare cancers who live(d) near to nuclear power stations and other sources of 'low level' nuclear pollution I would rather prefer if this particular statue could remain a monument to a tradition that puts people before profit and retains a healthy suspicion of what happens when science, finance and industry get together with a big heap of public subsidy, a dressing of official secrets and national interest, and the opportunity to write things down over a ten thousand year half-life instead of a five year amoritisation period.

Billy Bragg has a concert at the RFH in February called Which Side Are You On? - someone should buy Blair a ticket.

Christ - I knew all that populism would get to me eventually!