ABSTRACT
When I was a little boy I used to make faces, and my mother used to say ‘Be careful, the wind will change and you’ll get stuck like that.’ In a way, that is what has happened to the current Labour Government: it has got caught making faces and striking attitudes, for very good reasons, and its face has got stuck. There are two aspects to this: the first is the idea that somehow the world in which the Labour Government operates is the same as the one in which it – and indeed the Conservatives – used to operate and, therefore, that it can use the resources that were then used to build a new morality; the second is the question of what this new morality could consist of, given the shift in the relationship over the years between the private and the public, the personal and the public.
