In my book The Courageous State I described Cameron's government as a perfect example of cowardly politics. As I put it in the introduction:
Cameron and Osborne, with their allies Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander ....have become the apotheosis of something that has been thirty years in the making: they are the personification of what I call the cowardly state. The cowardly state in the UK is the creation of Margaret Thatcher, although its US version is of course the creation of Ronald Reagan. It was these two politicians who swept neoliberalism into the political arena in 1979 and 1980 respectively following the first neoliberal revolution in Chile in 1973 that saw the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government by General Pinochet. Since then its progress has been continual: now it forms the consensus of thinking across the political divide within the UK, Europe and the US.
The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform the market, which will always, it says, allocate resources better and so increase human well-being more than government can.
That thinking is the reason why we have ended up with cowardly government. That is why in August 2011, when we had riots on streets of London we also had Conservative politicians on holiday, reluctant to return because they were quite sure that nothing they could do and no action they could take would make any difference to the outcome of the situation. What began as an economic idea has now swept across government as a whole: we have got a class of politicians who think that the only useful function for the power that they hold is to dismantle the state they have been elected to govern while transferring as many of its functions as possible to unelected businesses that have bankrolled their path to power.
This morning we have NHS rules being re-written in what I fear will be a vain attempt to stop privatisation.
The road sell off is in disarray.
And Universal Credit is collapsing.
All three are evidence of the of the forlorn policies of the cowardly state.
We need the Courageous alternative.
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Sadly there’s no sign we’ll be getting it from Labour. Quite the reverse, in fact.
Too true Richard, except that – ironically? hypocritically? barefacedly? – this corrupt kleptocratic shower is ACTUALLY creating what George Monbiot accurately terms “a novelty: a capitalist command economy.”
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/04/education-capitalist-command-economy
I have to say that Labour, or WHOEVER aims to take power after the next election, must run on a promise of taking these phoney “academies” back under REAL local democratic control, WITHOUT compensation – which should be easy, since I’m sure ANY moneys flowing between academy and sponsor will have been FROM the State TO the sponsor, so we should also CHARGE them for their disruption of education.
For the demolition of our education system is the relatively hidden “smash and grab” raid by corporate raiders. Gove really is the pits – to call him a Vandal is to insult a people who, as Waldemar Janusczak showed in his programme on the Dark Ages, were actually a highly artistic people. Schmuck seems a better term!
Agreed
And the details you presented yesterday of Labour’s policy review meetings on taxation and personal debt graphically illustrate that despite everything that’s happened since 2008, despite all the opportunities that the current economic situation create for new, fresh thinking, and so on, Labour politicians are as cowardly as the rest.
One Nation Labour: Captured and cowardly.
What a combination!
It seems pretty obvious that all our political parties have been captured by neo-liberalism. It also seems obvious, at least from the conversations I have with old-school tories, that what previously divided left and right has been superceded in large measure by anti and pro/neo-liberalism.
If we are to preserve, perhaps recreate, representative democracy, where government seeks to establish and act on common ground that can be supported by a substantial majority of the electorate, and promotes what one might call civilised attitudes towards all those that need support, I suspect that the old left/right divide needs to be redefined as anti or pro/neoliberalism and political parties realigned accordingly.
As a leftie, I’d certainly be happier to vote for a positively anti-neo-liberalist party that included left wing labourites and one nation tories, who could and would work together, than for any of the three current parties, as, I believe, would many of my tory friends and acquaintances.
Well said
I’ve been saying both Labour and the Tory party would split and reform as neoliberals and anti-neoliberals. I think Parliament will change greatly too, if it survives at all. This is why I’ve been pushing (albeit occasionally!) for council run banks since 2010, so while everything is remaking itself people can have local currencies to trade with. It may well be that we’ve seen the end of central government itself. I’d like to think when the full horrors of what the American insurance company Unum have been up to in this country and people grasp what appears to be the involvement of top politicians from all three major parties, people will understand that central government gives far too much power to too few people, and isn’t sustainable anymore..