Nine times out of ten I get the bus home like everybody else. But on those rare occasions when I pile out of Ronnie Scott’s or the 100 Club and it’s a bit too late or a bit too cold to be hanging around for the N73, I jump in a taxi to Stoke Newington. There’s change from twenty five quid, even after the tip.

So when Stephen Byers – who would have regulated the taxi trade during his stint as transport secretary – compares himself to ‘a cab for hire’ at £5,000 a day, the obvious question is just how far that fare would take a punter.

That kind of cash might even be enough to overcome any lingering traditional reluctance to go south of the river after midnight, guv’nor. Despite the extortionate rates charged by London cabbies, five grand must be sufficient to drop you off in Rome or Vienna, just in time for a bollocking from the missus for staying out late.

The irony here is that Byers’ words precisely echo the remark made by disgraced Tory lobbyist Ian Greer during the cash for questions scandal of the 1990s. It was Greer who famously told Harrod’s owner Mohamed al Fayed that people can rent an MP like they can a London taxi.

For socialists of the period, that formulation seemed to encapsulate everything execrable about the discredited administration of John Major. It summed up precisely why the Tories had to go. Those of us who then yearned for a Labour government would never have imagined that a prominent Labour politician could sink to the same depths.

How wrong we were. Perhaps it is a good job that the public is no longer all that engaged with politics anymore. Because if it was, it would surely be disgusted.

Yet Byers’ outburst somehow serves as a final shameful metaphor for New Labourism, which ultimately created a taxi party from which the super-rich could rent a law or a peerage or a passport or a lucrative PFI deal or pretty much anything else they wanted, at prices starting from a bargain basement £1,000,000 upwards.

Byers started out in politics as a member of the Militant Tendency, an organisation still regularly reviled as exemplifying all things problematic about Labour in the past. He ended up as a Blairite, representing a school of thought that exemplifies everything problematic about Labour today.

The contrast between the two is that Militant supporters were famously puritanical. Where they did bend the rules, it was to advance what they regarded as the wider interests of the working class, rather than to line their own pockets. Blairism doesn’t even have that excuse.

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

   Stephen Byers: just how far a £5,000 cab fare gets you http://bit.ly/cYEbmQ

2. Justin McKeating

   RT @libcon: Stephen Byers: just how far a £5,000 cab fare gets you http://bit.ly/cYEbmQ

3. Dave Harris

   Agree with most of this RT @libcon Stephen Byers: just how far a £5,000 cab fare gets you http://bit.ly/cYEbmQ

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