From his interview with Socialist Unity:
Here in Britain, the local government experience has been squeezed right out. Everyone leaves university, works in some PR firm or as a researcher for a MP, and the first experience they have of managing anything is when they find they are a Cabinet Minister or a Prime Minister. So I watched Blair and Brown and everybody, except for Blunkett and Dobson and Chris Smith, who’d had strong local government experience – all these people learning and making the sort of mistakes that I made when I was a councillor in Lambeth my 20s, but on the national stage. Blair would honestly say to you that he spent his first term as Prime Minister learning how to do the job. That’s a luxury. Boris is now spending his first term as Mayor learning how to do the job. This is a luxury that you really can’t indulge. It is really only in Britain with this obsessive centralised state, that you’ve got to be Prime Minister, or virtually nothing else is worth doing. It has got worse under New Labour; in Mrs Thatcher’s time, being a Cabinet Minister you had a real air of responsibility, and were left to get on with it.
The simple fact that few if any people in Nu Labour have had any experience in the real world outside of public school -> Uni -> think tank -> cabinet minister has been a persistent theme on this blog, especially pursued by my co-blogger Palau.
It’s good to see Ken Livingstone agreeing with us. A whole generation of Labour politicians, as well as their competitors in the Lib Dems and Tories have never worked a proper job, but always been in the kind of political bubble where even if you fail you can expect a cushy job somewhere out of the sight of the public to be wheeled back in when needed.
Their entire lives they’ve been able to talk themselves out of any bad situation, either through glib manipulation or blunt rejection (not for nought is “I do not accept that” the standard phrase of a Labour minister confronted with unpleasant facts) to the point where many seem to genuinely believe their words have the power to not just hide, but reshape reality. Hence the idea that to solve a problem, you only need to make a law about it and the torrent of legislation unleashed by Labour since 1997. Everytime their laws turn out not to solve a problem, they make more. It’s a systemic, but deliberate failing in Labour, one now unfortunately emulated by the other parties.