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Blair Revelation
Deliverance for whom?

By Michael Barratt Brown & Ken Coates
December 1996
Spokesman
ISBN: 0-85124-604-4
224 pages, 6" x 8 ½"
$87.50 hardcover

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Michael Barratt Brown and Ken Coates seek to tell the truth as they understand it of the changes which the Labour Party has recently undergone. They have looked closely at Mr. Blair's much hyped commitment to ethical socialism. They examine the meaning of his idea of 'community', and test his claims that he stands in the tradition of Christian Socialism. Tony Blair has said that 'Old' Labour 'abandoned values of community and social justice' and turned its back on the tradition of ethical socialism'. Barratt Brown and Coates reject this reinvention of history, as it has been offered by Mandelson and Liddle in their apologia 'The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver?', from which they derive their own title. They examine what New Labour has to offer to meet the deep moral and economic crisis of our times, and find its responses full of ambiguities.

Politics
Socialist Renewal, No. 11