There has never been any such thing as Blairism

"Blairism does not exist and never has", claims the journalist Simon Jenkins. "It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a particular direction. ... That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism. This reality has been obscured by the congenital bipolarity of British politics and the bifocalism of the Westminster media, in which protocol requires that everything is expressed in terms of government and opposition. Hence Blairism cannot be Thatcherism because Blair is Labour and Margaret Thatcher Tory. For a decade British politics has, quite simply, been wrongly described."

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