Justice & Law Quote by Rory Bremner

Bremner’s joke lands because it treats political rhetoric like contraband: Blair and Straw’s 1994 speeches, full of “liberty” and “human rights,” are framed as so incendiary they’d need to be sold on the black market. That inversion is the point. The “terribly revolutionary” line isn’t praising their eloquence; it’s mocking the distance between what New Labour promised in opposition and what it normalized in power.

The subtext is a particularly British strain of cynicism about managed sincerity. Blair’s brand was moral language with a lawyerly sheen, the kind that could make power sound like principle. Bremner imagines replaying those words after the later record (Iraq, expanded surveillance, a more punitive security state) and finding them newly radical - not because politics moved left, but because the center moved right while keeping the same uplifting vocabulary. “That sort of thing” is doing heavy comedic work: it shrugs at the sanctimony of set-piece ideals, implying they’re often decorative, interchangeable, and easily deployed.

Context matters: 1994 is pre-landslide, pre-Downing Street, when Blair and Straw could posture as reformers against a Conservative establishment. In hindsight, those speeches read like artifacts from a political moment when rights-talk still sounded oppositional, not managerial. Bremner’s intent is to puncture the piety without sounding preachy: by proposing to “sell” the speeches, he turns accountability into a consumer gag. The laugh arrives with a sting - nostalgia weaponized into indictment.