As a 70s guy, one of life's minor annoyances has been putting up with condescending lectures from up their own arse 60s lefties on the political brilliance of their decade compared to what came afterwards.

Now, it seems we have to put up with condescending lectures from up their own arse present day "lefties," too:

Politically the sixties generation came to maturity in the eighties. They were worse than useless. They threw away the precious gains of the forties and the sixties. Their irresponsibility in political attitudes ceded power to the right.

I don’t blame the sixties for crime today. I blame the eighties culture of greed, excess and selfishness. Trouble is, it was the Greers, the Kuireshis, the Tariq Ali’s- and their political equivalents at every level of the Labour party and the Democrats – at their prime in the Eighties, who were supposed to hold the line. We needed them to be making the compromises, getting their hands dirty for the sake of others against a rising tide of the right. They walked away from the fight to preserve their purity. Whether it was militant, or identity politics, or the Bennite revolt. It was the pose that mattered not the achievement.

Those of us who come after the deluge might have expected a society based on community, on compassion, on a society geared for the needs of the many, not the few. Instead, we got the triumph of the individual. The sink estate. The failing school. The low tax economy.  Of course, The right is truly  to blame, but I refuse to forgive those who spent that timed indulging themselves and their consciences, disappearing up their own arses (or noses) for a decade while the hard won achievements of half a century were thrown away.

So how, I wonder, did New Labour go about turning the tide and making the world a better place? By boldly challenging the flawed and failing ideology that brought us to this sorry state or by accepting and adopting its rhetoric and most of its policies while frantically playing down the importance of anything that smacked of Old Labour and those hard won achievements of the previous half century?

You decide.