The English lesson.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Labor Party wins British election - Column

It's not quite a victory for socialism, is it?" mused Tony Benn, the radical conscience of British politics, as he and I watched election returns in Chesterfield as Labour tallied up a landslide win.

After eighteen years of rightwing domination -- first in the dramatic form of Margaret Thatcher and later in the grey visage of John Major -- the United Kingdom's traditional party of the left returned to power on May 1.

But the Labour Party that won control of the British government bore scant resemblance to the party that marched into parliament in 1945 singing "The Red Flag." Once a beacon of democratic socialism, the Labour Party won this year's election with little mention of the traditional party values of trade-union solidarity, economic democracy, and individual rights.

Newly minted Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Oxford-educated lawyer who took the helm of Labour in 1994, has dragged the party of R.H. Tawney and H.G. Wells through the sort of transformation not seen since Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde.

Blair dispenses the feel-good rhetoric of Bill Clinton. "In a sense, I am modern man," says Blair. "I am somebody of my own generation, a generation that's grown up without the tags of easy political simplicities of left and right."

Translation: Blair is part of an international strike force that is grabbing hold of traditional parties of the left and draining them of their historic passion and principles.

During the past three years, Blair and a circle of politically savvy aides -- many of whom proudly proclaim that they have borrowed pages from Clinton's playbook -- have "modernized" the Labour Party by undermining its ties to the trade unions that created it.

They have jettisoned "Clause Four" of the party constitution, which had always committed Labour to the goal of wresting control of the means of production from the private sector.

They have imposed corporate lawyers and public-relations specialists as candidates in constituencies that once sent miners, nurses, and radical intellectuals to parliament.

They have done everything in their power to muffle unions, damp down the enthusiasm of grassroots activists in communities like this historic mining town, and marginalize committed socialists such as Chesterfield's Benn, the longest serving Labour Party member in parliament.

In Chesterfield, as in a number of other Labour strongholds, the Blair reformation ran up against a proud history. At the Chesterfield Labour Club, where members...