"90 days", 12 days on revisited: aye, there's the rub

To quote Shakespeare!

In my previous post, I noted that Blair is playing a long game, but the media have a much shorter time horizon. The problem, of course, is, though, that we have what in science would be termed a "participant observation" problem; to put it another way, media predictions of Blair's demise could become self-fulfilling. Strictly, Blair just needs to keep the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) sufficiently onside to remain capable of running a government, able to win any vote of confidence by a sufficient majority, etc. But in the real world MPs are influenced by all manner of other interests, in particular by the media. They could be egged on to ditch Blair before his time is otherwise up. The danger to our democracy is that the short-termism of the media becomes the only show in town.

New Labour's strategy has been to accept the power of the media and try to control it. I suspect this won't be possible a second time. If we're ever to have a government that addresses the ever-growing inequalities in our society (and globally), at some point that government will need to tackle the in-built biases of our political system towards vested interests. The media, of course, are a key part of our political system.

Looking back over the last 25 years or so, it's interesting to see how little fundamental change Clinton and Blair - both political geniuses - have been able to achieve. What might be even more instructive would be to also look at the areas Thatcher and Reagan wanted to, but were unable to influence. For example, even they didn't reduce the size of the state as much as their rhetoric would have you believe they wanted to.