Tony Blair is now at the stage where he is looking back over his decade in office and realising that not everything went well; that history will probably not look kindly on a few of his exploits. So he’s been busy over the last few months redefining the terms of the game.
In Blair-world, his grandiose ideas didn’t fail because they were bad ideas, but because they were spectacular ideas poorly implemented. Or because he had damn good ideas but didn’t make them big enough.
Such as his wondrous plans to eradicate anti-social behaviour1. He’s now saying that they didn’t work because he didn’t shit on people enough
“Instead of years with social services trying and failing to persuade them to change, those families… need to be made to change,” he wrote.
“It is very tough. It is intrusive…but, for some of these families and their children, a nanny state is what they need – for their sake as much as for ours.”
Those families need to be made to change.
Because that concept doesn’t sound sinister at all, does it?
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1 – You know, when I was growing up, ‘anti-social’ meant ‘didn’t want to go out tonight’. Then came NuLabour, and all of a sudden the same word meant ‘likes pushing grannies off cliffs and pissing through letterboxes’. Why the sudden change?