In these exchanges terms like ‘socialist’ erode to become generalised slogans of political abuse which lose all meaning. A socialist is one who believes in the state ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. By this definition Blair was not a socialist. Before he won the 1997 election, he fought to remove all commitment to state ownership from his party’s constitution on order to make it electable. On accession to power, not only did he fail to reverse the Thatcher and Major governments’ massive programme of privatization of public services, as previous Labour Prime Ministers, true socialists, would have done: he actually continued and extended it with enthusiasm, most notably in education, health and capital infrastructure projects. These are not the actions of a socialist, and because of them he was always loathed by the true socialists in the Labour Party (of which there are still many, although for the most part they keep their heads down). To believe Blair a socialist is completely to misunderstand the temper of British politics in the last decade.