Labour will 'give people control over more
of their lives'
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- Sir,
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- Tom Baldwin says new Labour will create "a legacy for Britain’s
public services in the same way that Margaret Thatcher embedded the free
market during the 1980s." [report on Alan Milburn's speech January
26]. He also says that Tony Blair's desire for an "unremittingly
new Labour manifesto" will cause unease within the party.
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- Well, as an ordinary new Labour member, I hope this will not be the
case. I hope we will once again fight this election as a one-nation,
classless party of the "centre and centre-left"; and at the
same time preserving Attlee's embedded welfare state *alongside*
Thatcher's embedded free market.
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- For this was the bargain the Labour party made with Blair, prior to
the party agreeing our new constitution, and endorsed overwhelmingly in
the OMOV prior to the 1997 manifesto. And, of course, this was also the
bargain struck with the electorate. The party, in effect, traded-in all
ideas of traditional socialism, in return for political power.
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- Surely on most reasonable measures of social justice, that bargain
has paid off handsomely. It is therefore right that new Labour should
continue to be totally unremitting.
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- Yours faithfully
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- Mike Allott
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