1996, the vanished golden age

I like Aris Roussinos enormously. In Unherd he quotes from Mandelson's 1996 tract The Blair Revolution “the respect in which politicians are held has been… damaged by the widespread impression that ‘they’re only in it for themselves'”.

Mr Roussinos says very truly: "The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism".

In fact the Thatcher years (I disliked her in her time) look like a blissful Edwardian age, in so many ways. The hereditary peers sat in the House of Lords, vicars were men, the armed forces, the Churches, the universities, the monarchy, every British institution was in good shape then and is not now. The Cold War kept the peace. 

The Major years were better because unemployment came down but the disastrous decision to expand the universities was taken, which prefigured Blairism. The worst things were also proto-Blairite: Maastricht and the negotiations with the IRA.

50,000 dependents from the Indian Subcontinent entering the country each year now seems terribly bad but looks very good compared to the deluge that came after (or started in the last months of John Major's time in office).

The Blair-Mandelson years started in the UK in 1997 and have continued till now - the Tory years under 4 Prime Ministers were a continuation of Blairism.  

Liz Truss might have ben the exception but we hardly knew her.

Boris Johnson was more Blairite than Blair and his monument is the Boris wave of legal, non-EU migration to the UK reaching 906,000 in the year ending June 2023—contradicting pledges to lower immigration levels after leaving the European Union. 

His other monuments are dissuading Zelensky from continuing negotiations with Russia in the spring of 2022 and improving Theresa May's terrible Brexit.

The Mandelson-Epstein scandal seems to encapsulate a lot about Blair and Blairism: Britain viewed from a plane by deracinated internationalists from humble backgrounds dizzied by big money; the indifference to the past; the greed (not least Blair's, about which Epstein and Barak gossip), the corruption, sexual permissiveness and the Zionism. 

How it makes me miss the hereditary peers sitting in Parliament.