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 wondered whether he wouldn’t have to start making concessions
to the Left once the election was over. But assuming his
economic policies proved to be what he said they were, it seemed a
fair bet that the radical impulses of a Blair regime would burn all
the more brightly elsewhere. Left-wing social and cultural policies
would compensate for right-wing economics.

In the event, Blair has proved as good as his word: the market
economy reigns unchallenged. At the same time, the air is thick with
official talk