NOR DID BLAIR CALL IT THATCHERISM:

A sick France means a sick Europe - and that must be bad for Britain:
Just as Blair is leaving the stage, a kind of Blairism could prevail across the channel. Under another name, of course (Timothy Garton Ash, April 19, 2007, The Guardian)

What an irony. Just as Blair leaves the stage in Britain, Blairism arrives in France. Le Blair est parti, vive le blairisme! Not explicitly, of course, and not as a particular set of post-Thatcherite, neoliberal economic policies, habitually denounced in Paris as "Anglo-Saxon". I mean Blairism as a post-ideological, pragmatic way of doing politics which borrows eclectically from left and right, and worries about results rather than ideological consistency. Responding to the challenge of globalisation, it aims to combine entrepreneurial economic dynamism with high employment and social justice, mediated by a redistributive welfare state. Its true motto is "whatever works".

French Blairism will be very different from British Blairism, because France is not Britain. For a start, whoever is the next French president, their policy will not be called Blairism.

Of course, it's rightfully Pinochetism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 19, 2007 6:03 AM