“Everything was perfectly in place: the red velveteen backdrop, the multi-ethnic cast of Labour supporters positioned on the platform, and a speech balanced delicately between rousing celebration and the floating of new, explosive ideas. But who, in the long hours leading up to Tony Blair’s conference oration, picked the music?

One crashing chord, and it became clear: after D:Ream, The Lighthouse Family and U2, the soundtrack to the much-discussed renewal of New Labour – replete with its insistence that there is to be no going back to the past – is being provided by Sham 69, the once-successful punk band whose last hit came in around 1979. The song in question, used to accompany Blair’s introductory video and to blare out as he took his bows, is If The Kids Are United, which fuses its brutal music with a clumsily rendered message of generational solidarity…”

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Shortcuts: Tony Blair’s Sham scam

Update…

Christ it gets worse: “Pursey said the message behind the song was critical for the country at the moment. ‘We have got to unite Brown and Blair together. He could be one of the best prime ministers this country has ever produced,’ said the singer who once appeared on Top of the Pops holding a plastic water pistol to his head.”

Independent Online Edition > UK Politics : app6

So are Blair and Brown “kids” now, or what? Surely they of all people are on the “They can lie to my face, but not to my heart” side of the fence?

I think I’m going to have to have a sit down and a cup of tea…

John Effay is characteristically on the money, though…