WITH YET another senior New Labour minister embroiled -this time via the unsavoury connections and activities of her husband - in a sleaze scandal, the extent to which Blair's team has broken any real links they may have once had with the working class or labour movement is once again revealed.
While Tessa Jowell may possibly succeed in convincing the media and sections of the electorate that she really knew nothing of the huge sums of money flowing through accounts she shared with her husband, she can only do so by revealing what a strange and rarefied life Blairite ministers have become accustomed to since they became the new political establishment in 1997.
As many working class families struggle to obtain and then to pay off even one mortgage, the spectacle of "Labour" ministers with multiple homes and living as high on the hog as Thatcher and Major's cronies did in the 1980s and 1990s will simply confirm the cynics in the view that all politicians are simply "in it for themselves".
And any illusion that the impending succession of Gordon Brown might herald a move back to more traditional 'old Labour' values when Blair eventually moves on has also been dispelled by a series of speeches and statements by the Chancellor, which have specifically embraced all of the most reactionary and controversial aspects of Blair's socalled "modernisation" agenda.
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