I am not sure how to react to this:
I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can't deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.
I thought — this now seems especially funny — that private British Telecom would be automatically better than crabby old Post Office Telephones.
I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.
I never thought I'd yearn for the National Coal Board or British Steel or, good heavens, British Leyland. But I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate it may soon be much, much worse.
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“I think anyone who has ever tried to contact BT when things go wrong would now happily go back to the days of nationalisation. Soviet-style slowness was bad, but surely better than total indifference.”
If this represents Hitchin’s interaction with privatised corporations he should count himself fortunate as ‘indifference’ is a quantum leap up from the normal state of affairs in which each individual unit is focused entirely on meeting centrally imposed targets that make the old Soviet system seem like Bob Marley after a particularly heavy ganja session. Wherever you go regardless of whether it’s BT, the energy companies, water utilities et al, this has resulted in not so much the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing more that neither hand gives a flying **** what the other is up to, so focused are they on meeting individual targets, even when more often than not this results in a begger my neighbour outcome.
Together with Larry Elliot’s piece today it does rather look as if the facts are finally penetrating. What is surprising is how long it has taken for these people to spot what is blindingly obvious. Trouble with right wingers is that they imagine themselves hard headed realists, when they are the most romantic, naive, utopian dreamers on the planet.
Agreed
I think Mark Twain once said: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
pennies are dropping
I can not believe you are supporting “Soviet-style slowness”… are you not better than that?
I did not write it
And Hitchens does not want it
He is ask f it may be better than waht neoliberalism has delivered
But you didn’t get as far as reading that, did you?
Take the blinkers off
But you said “It’s taken Hitchens a long time to smell the coffee on the economic con trick played on the people of this country at cost to almost all of us. But it looks like he now has, at long last.”
Yes
Did I endorse every word said or one big idea?
For heaven’s sake stop showing how stupid you are
Ay up, Chicken Lickin’s back. It’s like a rerun of the old TV classic The Fast Show; ‘today I mostly be a former head honcho at the World Bank.’
Well whatever you’re calling yourself today the joke really is on you. If you actually knew anything about corporate organisations like BT, if you’d actually worked for one for any length of time, you would have figured out that the Taylorist system the Russians got sold by the West in 1919, which naturally developed into the Soviet system, is alive, well and running on steroids throughout the Western world.
The targets of the five year plan are now the moving targets of the three month APR cycle as ICT technology is used to monitor every working movement every second of the day to a simplistic algorithm process which would have had the old Soviets salivating with envy and admiration.
Of course Hitchin finds this bollox a pig in a poke. What he has not realised, along with yourself, is that at its core it is the same system as the old Soviet one. That’s why so many old Trots like the PNAC’cers around Bush are so attracted to it.
Try and keep up and pick a more original alias in future.
Hitchens has been perhaps brewing up for a decisive moment over recent months but this extent probably surprises (but pleases) most of us. It might encourage some milder Tories who are expected to pipe down but still put a board up to stop propping up callous ideology. The Blairite rump who cannot stop bashing Corbyn might find that their move-right to follow the ‘consensus’ strategy could leave them clearly yearning for the opposite of the wider opinion they claim to align with, not just the view in their own party.
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind – which pretty much sums up the considered opinions of so many media pundits including the very opinionated Hitchin brothers (past and present)
Hitchens can speak for himself and all the other deluded dreamers (right on Fiona!!) who voted for Thatcher and successive Tory poxy-ticians
Even as a 15 year old, not taught about anything to do with politics or economics at school – I could see right through their neo-lib rhetoric. Everything they have done is in the name of self-interest and greed. I knew it then and I know it now.
They never fooled me once. I cannot say the same for far too many others – present company excepted of course.
Trotskyist turned Daily Mail hack and Thaganomics supporter!!-I don’t think this bloke has really seen the light next thing will be Alienomics from Alpha Centauri.
What’s really interesting about Hitchens’ piece is his recognition of the wholly destructive effect of neoliberal ideas and policies on the things that he values as a Conservative intellectual. It’s not that he has accepted left-wing values or beliefs, but that the legacy of Thatcherism is damaging and unacceptable even from a right-wing perspective. There has always been a split within the Conservatives between the progressive Thatcherites, with their ideology that putting everything in the hands of business will inevitably result in an overall rise in the standard of living, and the old-fashioned squirearchy with their paternalistic view that one of the functions of the privileged is (within limits!) to look after the less-privileged. With their belief in making money as the ultimate measure of worth and their apparent willingness to sacrifice anything that stands in its way, the Thatcherites and their progeny are in some ways more ‘Marxist’ than the Old Tories (superstructure dependent on infrastructure). The Old Tories retired into the background after Thatcher dismissed them as ‘wets’, but they appear to be about to make a comeback – no doubt with Boris at their head.
Boris is no wet or old Tory, in my opinion
Agreed, but he’ll do whatever’s needed to dethrone Cameron, and as Syzygysue points out below, there’s growing grassroots opposition to the slash-and-burn approach of Cameron, Osborne et al. IDS is a (farcical) case in point. I think over the next few weeks we’ll see Boris moving to take over the middle ground (I hestitate to call is a ‘heartland’) of ‘caring Conservatism’. It looks as if Hitchens and the Mail are lining up behind him.
He can try
But Brexit gas ruined that chance for him
It us not middle ground
I certainly hope you’re right!
I was intrigued by your choice of words “progressive Thatcherites” and the “old-fashioned squirearchy” to describe the opposing forces within the Tory party.
It would be good to be able to really get under the skin (or rather into the brains) of the Tory voters and understand why they vote the way they do, because there are so few people in this country who have in any way benefited from the “old school” or “new school” of Tory policies it still amazes me that they even get 24% of the registered voters supporting them.
I can only think that the few examples of working class people making good are in some way still “aspirational” for many workers to think they could do the same in this “wonderful free market” without realising they stand about the same chance as winning the lottery.
Combine these people with the more traditional voters who still believe in “traditional British values” whatever they may be, and you have almost a quarter of the voting public completely misled by what the Tories really represent – protecting the vested interests of both old money and new money.
It really is an astonishing con-trick!
Yes they marketed themselves as an aspirational brand and a whole generation of baby boomers wanted to demonstrate their newly found credentials as members of the middle class by joining the Tory Club. The people who had benefited from the post war settlement turned their back on the party that had made it possible. Some irony.
I strongly encourage him to use his new found wisdom in the pages of the Mail and Question Time. We may be able to read and watch the media again if The Enlightenment spreads far and wide.
I don’t think that Peter Hitchens is alone. The below the tread commentators on Conservative Home are almost universally hostile to Osborne and the govt’s behaviour towards Port Talbot, the academies’ idea and the underfunding of the NHS and social care (and much more).
The real recognition needs to be that this gov’t is Conservative in name alone. It is the proverbial gov’t of the City of London and every policy confirms it.
Peter Hitchens has arrived a bit late to the fray.
John Gray ( a former ardent supporter of the ‘new right’ by his own admission) on the other hand seems to have changed his mind when he saw what happened in Russia after the Wall came down. The naked ‘market’ forces released then really spooked him – and rightly so.
His writing in 1998’s ‘False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism’ is prescient as the world he describes then seems to be the one I live in today.
With regard to Hitchens though – better late than never?
Let’s see what next week’s column says….
Now whose being cynical?
Luke 15.10 Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.
When I first read the whole Hitchens piece I thought it must be April the 1st. I don’t believe I have seen more of a volte face than Peter’s epiphany. Finally, after thirty-odd years, intelligent thought is coming round to the idea that Thatcher did more to harm the country and the economy than any other Prime Minister in history, present incumbent excluded due to incompetence.
The real problem is one of incessant individual greed supported by a mass media controlled by like-minded people like Murdoch. I admit the Mail and the Telegraph are sometimes capable of surprising us all. Was it not the Mail who single-handedly brought the Lawrence murderers to book? Still, the Bullingdon boys and boyettes are in charge now and I cannot imagine the Tories changing their spots anytime soon.
I always remember the late Earl of Stockton (former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) warning Thatcher against “selling off the family silver”. She still did it and the UK today has no decent industry left. Is it not bizarre that Indian industrialists are being relied upon to bail out the British steel industry? Where are all the British industrialists who ought to be doing this? Are they all now in Panama?
How is it that we find our country kow-towing to Chinese and French interests to get new nuclear power stations built? Where did all the British know-how and capacity go to? Are they too all to be found in Panama or the Bahamas?