In the US employees are being sent home because politicians so dislike the idea of the state providing people with healthcare that they'd rather close down government.
Here in the UK Kwasi Kwarteng, Conservative MP for Spelthorne in Surrey said yesterday:
"People do not expect us to be terribly friendly or terribly in touch with our emotional side. What they expect, what they look to from a conservative government is competence and have a plan. We've got to be the party of business and free enterprise."
And George Osborne promised to balance the government budget by 2020 by squeezing social security.
In all these comments and actions there is a theme. It is of politicians who hate government, who serve self-interest and appear to have contempt for those not as fortunate as themselves.
I am aware some think what I do is political. So be it: that's their view. I disagree. My motive is social justice. I believe that all have a chance and all who succeed have a duty to those who cannot or do not share their fortune.
The problem is - and I'll talk about this in York next week - is that the prevailing culture is antagonistic to caring. And that's why I do overlap with politics, because when caring hurts people suffer. If politics is the cause of that failure, and it often is, there is no choice but to engage with the political culture. That's what social justice demands.
In the US and the UK political culture is deliberately failing far too many people. To say so is the least we can do.
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Of course what you do is political and there is no need to be ashamed of that. The alternatives to politics are civil war, police states and anarchy. Relatively speaking, doing politics is great!
It’s political – but not party political
‘My aim in life is to make life pleasanter for this great majority; I do not care if it becomes in the process less pleasant for the well to do minority.’ (Joseph Chamberlian, 1836-1914).
I thought this appropriate to your position and this blog, Richard, though it is from a once great politician and reformer.
What a great pity so few voices of this kind populate today’s Lib Dem party, or indeed any of the mainstream UK political parties. The poisonous spirit of the likes of Thatcher and fakery of the likes of Blair prevail. So, political or not, I for one respect and admire what you do and hope that long may you continue.
Ivan, I can match your Liberal example with a Tory one – the Earl of Shaftesbury – than whom there could hardly be a better example to choose to highlight the difference between modern Tories and the best 19th century Tories.
See; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Ashley-Cooper,_7th_Earl_of_Shaftesbury
I’ve just read an excerpt from his biography, and how eerily equivalent is the situation then, when he first entered Parliament – in 1826 – and now. I quote:
“When the Napoleonic War ended, there was a new set of circumstances to be reckoned with in England, a lack of courage, a sense of fatalism. Also a strange new god had crept into the reckoning of society – the god of economic necessity. In a speech [Shaftesbury] declared that he had read ‘of those who had sacrificed their children to Moloch, but they were merciful people compared with Englishmen in the nineteenth century’ ”
I’ve often compared Cameron’s administration to that of lord Liverpool’s, post the Napoleonic war; to find Margaret Cropper (Shaftesbury’s biographer, quoted above) using language that could apply to now is unnerving, to say the least.
And to emphasize the point, Shaftesbury spent his whole Parliamentary career acting for the vulnerable and disadvantaged – for lunatics, boy chimney-sweeps, women and children in mines and factories, to name a few – refusing all Government office and even preferment.
Would that Cameron’s conscienceless Tories were motivated by Shaftesbury’s vision and conscience!
There is no doubt that the rise in this state of moral vacuity is, in part, due to the ‘coincidental’ rise of both ‘greed is good’ and its quasi scientific backing by the evolutionary biology movement which grew in the late seventies. In his book ‘You are not Your Genes, Biologist Steven Rose (et al) pointed out the dangers of biological determinism propping up the hegemony we have now. Dodgy science is playing its role in this as well as dodgy politicians.
‘We’ve got to be the party of business and free enterprise.’ What ‘free’ enterprise -this is utter charlotonistic guff and Kwarteng knows it – the Tories are still pedaling the same lies that Thatcher wheeled out using 19th Century ‘quaint’ ideas about capitalism that bear no relationship to reality. I’m sure this suits the brokers and ‘wash traders’ of surry in whose interest it is to humour the populace with vile condescensions. Oligarchy/Kleptocracy/Plutocracy is not ‘free’ enterprise but the Tories only rouse is to keep the lie going that as long as you strive, the rewards will be yours-in reality, as you flog yourself to distraction to pay your mortgage doing a fifty hour week, never seeing your kids, you will have even what is left of your ‘wealth’ syphoned off to the finance sector -how are people still swallowing this trash without feeling bilious!! I have had to avoid watching the Tory party Conference for fear of throwing at the sight of these gloating morons!
The “free market” is a zero sum game. The benefits to one country are cancelled out because speculators simply move capital from one country to another, leaving a comparative loss in the country the money was pulled from in both capital and wages.
And as corporations generally move into foreign countries pretty much exclusively making products for the export market, much of the profit with be repatriated to the country of origin. They are there simply to exploit a low paid workforce or cheap resources.
And letting the finance industry free reign in your markets is a surefire way of eventually wrecking your economy. In fact, many of the most successful countries did the polar opposite, that is, protectionism, capital and exchange controls and a healthy domestic manufacturing base!
Aristole said man is a political animal. He was right, virtually everything we do to enable us to live in cohesive society is political. The trouble is some people have become excluded or have excluded themselves. This allows power, the petrol of politics, to fall into the hands of a minority faction who, in due course, come to believe they have some sort of divine right to be in charge.
Well said
Yes, but – and it’s a big but – what Aristotle actually meant by saying that “man is a political being” is that he is made to live and operate within a “polis”, meaning a city state. A polis for Aristotle was small enough for its citizens to “know” each other7n if not literally, then at least by reputation and report = REAL report, of course, and not the bastardised “celebrity and PRL machine that masquerades as such in our society.
In other words, “all politics is local”, and we can be fairly sure that if our politics were conducted on such real personal knowledge, then “the petrol of politics” that David Drinkwater refers too would be far more likely to perform its proper function of driving the engine of governance.
I’m not asking for “small town burglicherkeit”, but for a re-invention of real community of viewpoint between governor and governed, such as Joseph Chamberlainn quoted by Ivan Horrocks, certainly both knew and practised.
Of course, the 16.7 trillion US$ debt has nothing to do with it ?
US national health, to the reps, is like a pile of faeces on the dinner table to us, so probably the debt is being used as an excuse.
Mind you, the con-dems have the same problem here (the chance of getting an operation here if your problem is not life threatening are a bit like winning the lottery now: Low.)
The debt has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. I’ve said it before on this site and I’ll say it again: austerity is the end not the means for these people. They want to eviscerate what little social democracy there is left and they’re using ‘The Debt’ as an excuse to do so. It’s pure ideology.
Quite.
But austerity is practiced, seemingly, against those who usually have plenty of it anyway.
A strange situation, where those who have little, or nothing, have to have less, so that those who have most can have more.
21st century politics.
“While partisans focus on specific things the other side is doing — “Obamacare” and the “debt ceiling” are the buzzwords of the day — the truth is that we wouldn’t be in this budget crisis in the first place if the government hadn’t engaged in bipartisan idiocy”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/forget-partisan-rhetoric-bad-policy-by-both-parties-forced-the-threatened-government-shutdown.html
“Since a new budgeting process was put into place in 1976, the U.S. government has shut down 17 times. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan each dealt with six shutdowns during their terms in office, lasting anywhere from one day to 2 1/2 weeks”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/09/23/225462813/8-things-to-know-about-a-government-shutdown
“I believe that all have a chance and all who succeed have a duty to those who cannot or do not share their fortune.”
I don’t think that many would disagree, the problem is how much of a duty?…..To the last penny you have?……So little you barely notice?…..Half of what you earn?
Only loopy extremists say no one should pay any tax, the eternal question is how much?
Enough
How does one quantify “enough”?
When the needs of society are met
Hmm, my local MP is clearly a very caring/friendly fellow, glad I didn’t viote for him. But also he suggests he and his conservative colleagues are competent and have a plan. Really? No plan other than trying to win the next election imo.
“We’ve got to be the party of business and free enterprise”……the trouble is this is a whopping big lie, the Tories are the party of plutocrats, big business and monopolists!
Kwasi Kwarteng of “Britannia Unchained” fame wouldn’t know a truly Smithsonian “free market” if it hit him in the face! I’m sure though he’s an expert in feudalism and serfdom!