TONY BLAIR, THE CONSERVATIVE VERSION OF MUSSOLINI?

A chip off the old block?: What do Fascism's belligerent founding father and our own democratically elected Prime Minister have in common? A great deal more than you might imagine. (Nicholas Farrell, 25 June 2003, Independent uk)

Indeed, despite all the uncanny similarities between the two leaders, there are, of course many differences, not the least of which is that Blair is in many ways more right-wing. Mussolini, for example, founded Italy's welfare state. Presumably, most people would agree that such a move was fairly left-wing. Blair, on the other hand, is doing his best not just to hack away at the welfare state but also at workplace rights traditionally regarded by the left as sacred. Clause Four - the Labour Party's commitment to common ownership of the means of production - went years ago and Blair has forged an axis with the European Union's two Thatcherite leaders, Jose Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi, to make the labour market in Europe more flexible - making it, for example, easier to sack people.

While Blair has doggedly pursued Daily Mail-reading Sierra Man, Mussolini despised the middle classes above all (like all left-wingers, he called them the bourgeoisie) even more than communists, whom he called "state capitalists", because his view was that the middle classes were riddled with parasites. They lived, Mussolini sneered, "la vita comoda", the comfortable life.

This is all presumably meant to be pejorative, but seems pretty accurate (other than underestimating the leftist nature of fascism), and reasonably complimentary. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2003 8:06 PM