Taxonomy of the left

John Rentoul once more - in his Independent column today, discussing the travails of Gordon Brown, offers a political classification that all sides of this debate will find useful:

(Blairite ultra, by the way, will no doubt appear in dictionaries next year, defined as "originally, a term denoting any British citizen of voting age who does not regard Tony Blair as a war criminal; now, vulg, term of abuse used by Brownites, qv, to denounce people saying 'I told you so' to Sunday newspaper journalists".)

It happens in doing interviews and debates that I get accused of being a neoconservative. I always answer that, while I don't regard that label as the insult the utterer intended, it isn't strictly applicable to me. I share the position of some neoconservatives (such as Paul Wolfowitz) and some who are not conservative at all (such as Christopher Hitchens) that the promotion of democracy ought to be the mainstay of western foreign policy; and I take a very different stance from what is commonly taken to be neoconservatism in economics and welfare, social issues, matters of personal liberty and the place of religion in public life.

I am not therefore a neoconservative. I am an immoderate liberal. "Blairite ultra" is a synonym. I shall use it with particular relish as it comes to have the second meaning that John identifies.