Blair questioned in cash for peerages probe

Blair tried to conceal his embarrassment by scheduling his meeting to coincide with the release of the long-awaited report by Lord Stevens of the inquiry into the death of Princess Diana. Blair’s advisors have stressed that he acted as a witness and not a suspect. And his apologists in the media have stressed that he was not under caution and that this proves that no prosecution is likely. But whatever damage limitation is attempted, nothing can conceal the stench of corruption and sleaze that surrounds the Labour government.

It is a smell just as rank as that which helped bring about the downfall of the Conservative government of John Major in 1997. And Blair, the man who boasted that his election—that of “a pretty straight kind of guy”—heralded a new era of clean government is tainted by more serious accusations of impropriety than Major ever was.

There is no time in modern British history, including the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, when so wide a section of the electorate has been so alienated from official politics to the point where the very legitimacy of a government has been called into question.

Thatcher was hated by millions of working people, but for a time was able to secure a base of support through such measures as the veritable fire sale of state assets that enriched not only big business, but a layer of the middle class and skilled workers. Indeed the “sleaze” scandals that beset her successor Major emerged in large part because the myth of “popular capitalism” that was cultivated in the 1980s had already begun to unravel against a background of ever-worsening social inequality that hit ever broader layers of the population.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/blai-d16.shtml