Britain over the past year or so, ever since Labor was returned to power in May 1997, has presented a strange spectacle: we have had a government encouraging a people to declare war on its own culture. The campaign has taken many forms, but it is best (or most brutally) summed up in the frequent calls from high places for the “rebranding” of Britain: supermarket language applied to a whole society. Not that this transformation is meant to be part of a broader social revolution—not at least as old-fashioned socialists would have understood such a thing. It has largely been invoked as an end in itself.

When Tony Blair won the election, he was committed (not in so many words, of course) to the fundamental economic doctrines of Margaret Thatcher. There was to be no return to nationalization or the ways of Old Labor, no resurgence of trade-union power, no major redistribution of wealth. Many people doubted Blair’s sincerity, others wo ...

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