My elder son and I were discussing politics over Christmas, as is our habit, and he accused me of being an idealist. That resonated with another theme, which is being accused of being a Remainer. The reflection resulted in this Twitter thread:
I am bored by being patronised by those telling me ‘don't you know Remain is dead?, closely followed by ‘Move on.' I can tell you, I have. That's why I want to Return. To Europe, for sure. But to something much more than that.
I want to also Return to a positive politics. That's the form rooted in compassion, care and genuine concern. But it's also one that's also learned that economics has moved on from what was taught by that subject in the 1980s, as has our understanding of the environment.
I want a politics that is not based in materialism. Or jingoism. Or nationalism. Or populism. Instead, I want a Return to the principles of mutual respect, tolerance, acceptance and co-existence, with each other and the rest of this world, human and otherwise.
I want a Return to a bias to the least well off. That's because we all know the best-off can already look after themselves. It's those who have trouble doing so, for whatever the reason, that I want to be the priority in politics. I wonder, who wouldn't, and why?
I want a Return to long term vision based on principles.
I want a Return to the belief that society matters.
I want a Return to the days when most believed they could live without the fear that misfortune might bring.
I want a Return to the belief that making matters. I define making widely. It's not just the things we need. It's also the services we need just as much. And the arts, learning and decent societies too. What is not ‘making' is rentierism and dealing purely for the sake of profit.
I want a Return to the time when monopoly was rightly mistrusted, because it always exploits.
I want a Return to the time when professions had ethics.
I want a Return to a National Health Service.
But National Health also requires a National Wealth Service. That means a Return to the common wealth that delivers physical and financial security for those living in our society, guaranteeing homes, energy, communications and transport for all, plus safe savings.
I want a Return to the belief that all people's opinions matter, and a voting system that reflects that, which now means an end to first past the post.
I want a Return to local decision making, but not in a tax system that can use this to reinforce regional inequality.
I want a Return to respect for time off.
I want a Return to the awareness that we might once have desired many of these things, but that we didn't always find how to deliver them. So I want a Return to the endeavour to do so.
I want to return to the idea that what matters is much more than a pile of cash, whether measured as GDP, profit or notional wealth.
I want a Return to the idea that we are all in this together, too long forgotten by almost all of politics, with its focus on tribalism.
I want a Return, in other words, to the common good.
Is that too much to hope for?
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Accused? What did he mean by “idealist”? There is nothing wrong with being guided by ideals, or indeed aspiring for something perceived to be perfect, as long as you don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.
Agreed
Youth is pragmatic now
Pragmatism is essential to get there but it must be based on ideals. Your article is spot on; with you all the way
See also Shaws great comment about all progress depending unreasonable men (and ‘difficult’ women – HT Helen Lewis)
Clearly a mantra that you follow Richard!
I do
According to my wife, who first introduced me to the quote
I also aspire to all that you wish for.
However, “return” implies that there was once a golden age….. and there was not. I accept that a “return” to anything at all would be an improvement to the current government but I would prefer “push on towards” rather than “return to”.
I get the point
It was out iwn doubt about this
But I do think there was a time when such aspirations were possible
Post war possibly? At least it brought us the NHS if not much else.
Clive Parry.
I agree.
I’m not sure we ever had a time when Richard’s great list of ideas/ideals was practiced.
There was never a “golden age”.
It’s a great manifesto for the future though.
And, oh boy, don’t we need to implement it right now!!!
David Attenborough’s latest BBC offering spells out our situation very well.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mn4n
Over the years the EU has tried to equalise incomes across 27 countries with convergence policies, narrow the alcohol tax range (Czechs tax beer lightly, France wine – that gap has to be closed), give us the same laws and bans on cigarettes, ensure we standardise social care, drinking water be free in every restaurant and identical bans on the vice industry across a continent as well as the same protections for workers and land-owners from competition from without.
I’ll be sad for some to see the Erasmus programme go (NI excepted) and felt for the young lass on tv recently who said it was a great opportunity for people to experience different cultures.
I have little idea what motivates your comments most of the time
Unfortunately those promoting “greed” are in the ascendancy.
There’s nothing wrong in dreaming, though.
There was a time not so long ago, in fact within my life time, when many of the things you list actually did exist.
The ideals were what brought the Labour Party into existence, ideals were what gave us the NHS, ideals gave us safety standards for working people in their jobs, we got the comprehensive system in education, free University courses, improved housing largely via council estates after slum clearances and back to back housing with outside toilets were demolished. I remember attending union meetings where hundreds of people attended and where politics was the topic of conversation during lunch breaks. I remember when newspapers reported fact and where politicians resigned or at least took responsibility for the departments they headed. I remember when businesses valued customer service, I remember when banks valued their current account customers and I remember many more similar things. Of course once lost or never experienced those who follow see this as ideology.
These things are now lost to us, brexit will be used to take more things away and most of us will be worse for it.
I recall them too Geoff
They are possible in that case
Well, all I would say to your son is that all ideas start off as ideals.
Rees-Mogg and Co had an ideal about leaving the EU as well as leaving behind the democracy of a nation state and becoming ‘sovereign individuals’.
And it looks as though they are achieving their ideals.
But you cannot ignore the fact that the real enabler of the realisation of RM’s and the ERG’s ideals has been money/wealth/position. Not that they are right, but that they know of how to achieve self realisation in a way that counter-vailing ideals have not.
That is telling isn’t it?
It puts a whole new slant on the notion of ‘idealism’.
Making ideals real is possible then, I would say to your son. So what is wrong with having them? Just because some of us don’t have the means to realise them (millionaire backers and media outlets), does not mean we shouldn’t hold them dear. And besides, having different ideals is healthy.
To me it all goes back to why you do what you do and why others come here. So, hope – yes – hope by all means.
And one day a courageous Government might use its sovereign power to turn the tables on all of this. It could do that now. The politicians in the U.S. are coming to terms with Trump as I write – this may well have an affect on things here.
The divide and conquer tactics of modern Right wing idealists have been costly and one which insurance and other markets might not want to bear. Also Covid has been a sort 2008 moment hasn’t it – it has destroyed the economy and made many politicians who advocate small states and ‘sovereign individualism’ look stupid and ineffective when they could have helped.
So my advice is to hold onto your ideals as they might well be needed because other people’s ideals have not delivered for anyone but themselves – a small group.
When all else can be taken from us our ideas cannot be
And that’s what ideals are
I agree with you….we will be having another walk to discuss this
Why are we so scared and reluctant to engage on the side of what is real,
just because we live in an age of ‘the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed’?
Why cant we even resist our elected representatives being give more than a few hours to debate the most important international agreement for decades, and why are we being cowed into not voting against it ? Are we scared to really engage?
Richard’s – ‘mutual respect, tolerance, acceptance and co-existence, with each other and the rest of this world, human and otherwise.’ will not be achieved by this kind of cowardice.
There is no going back; at least for Britain/rUK/England. The idea of ‘Britain’ that produced its membership of the EU (eventually) in 1973 died with the final passing of the generations who directly experienced world war. rUK/England has turned in toward older, deeper political values that are essentially and obsessively individual libertarian, and simultaneously an essentially Hobbist culture of statecraft. There is no going back.
Scotland, however never shared the Hobbes or Lockean natural rights bedrock of English political culture. The obvious demonstration of that now, is the question Brexit-Unionists demand of the independence movement in Scotland, which has come into its time especially following the 2016 Brexit referendum. Why, Brexit-Unionists ask, do you want to leave one Union, to take back control (they can understand that – but in spite of their own principles, simultaneously reject it as economically imprudent, and therefore irrational but uniquely, only – for Scotland): only to rejoin the EU?
The reason is very simple. Scotland is prepared to join larger Unions, it always was; even to the point of joining an incorporating union designed to make it difficult to leave – in 1707. Joining together in a Greater Britain required a great deal more sacrifice of Scotland and difficulties of adjustment for its people, than it ever did, England; where in England the Union finally fixed major constitutional, religious, dynastic and geopolitical issues, dynamically improved the Union’s economic and imperial prospects, and cost England virtually nothing (what was not to like – save for personal dislike of Scots, in the vituperative likes of Wilkes et al?). Scotland has made an essentially unsound, incoherent, irrational system work, for three hundred years. It has not given up on the idea of a Union that works; it has given up on a Union that does not work for it, and has become an exemplar of bad faith. The EU represents a viable alternative Union, with greater opportunities, that is less restrictive, more realistic in its expectations of sacrifice and that has not long outlived its value. Unions? Scotland has form.
Scotland has hope
Your son is young and inexperienced. You might ask him whether nature is “idealist” allowing complexity to develop to the point that allows him to be part of the only species on the planet to use language to accuse his Dad of being an idealist!
Tell him to come back to you on the subject of “idealism” when he has a satisfactory answer to this question.
There will be conversations…
Certainly the beliefs that are pedaled by the mainstream of individualist, consumerist satisfaction is poisoning any hope for any thoughts of the common good over private profit. Advertising and the drive for ever increasing consumption and economic growth dominates media and economic thinking. Any thought of idealism or some sort of distant utopia is dismissed as cranky and unrealistic. However, Richard’s blog certainly goes a long way to opening people’s eyes to the possibility of progressive change in both the short and long term. History shows that no regime can remain permanent and that eventualy social change can happen, sometimes surprisingly quickly.
I read this some time ago
I cant remember where but I shall paste it here as it seems appropriate….
What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations, forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses.
successive governments that have overseen the rise of a “new society based on low wages, unstable employment and poverty” —
governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?
Its lack of a codified constitution permits numberless abuses of power. It has failed to reform the House of Lords, royal prerogative, campaign finance and first-past-the-post voting (another triumph for the no brigade). It is dominated by media owned by tax exiles, who, instructing their editors from their distant chateaux, play the patriotism card at every opportunity. The concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies outweigh those of the majority; the concerns of corporations with no lasting stake in the country outweigh everything. Broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, retentive: you want to be part of this?
Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.
To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom.
We live in an extremist country; millions for Trident, underfunded NHS being deliberately prepared for privatisation; houses earning more than people; only one banker jailed for bringing the country to its economic knees, immense bonuses for failure; food banks on one side with people earning more money than they could possible spend in a lifetime; the second largest unelected legislative assembly in the world, colossal pay rises, demonisation of the unemployed and the welfare claimant, the legitimization of greed, tax-evasion on an industrial scale by huge conglomerates, a greater level of inequality now than during Victorian times; the greatest transfer of wealth since 2008 to the 1% in the whole of Europe; an 11% pay-rise for MPs; wholesale deference to the rich, the selling off of public utilities at knock-down prices……….
No country on earth can sustain this extremism indefinitely.
Agreed
Peter Ryan’s piece says it all. Thank you. We never had a golden age but we had an age, kick-started by the appalling consequences of the war, of aspiration to make the country fairer. It wasn’t driven by our leaders. It was allowed by them as they let a decent Labour Party mop up the mess. But when they saw how that decency threatened them they took back the reins within five years and embarked on a path of ‘reform’ that, apart from the hiccup of the Wilson years, led inexorably to the miserable autocratic state we have today. If everyone had Richard’s ideals the world would be a very different and better place. Our churches could start by preaching the real Christian gospels to our decadent leader(s).
I want your World too, but I think the high points of all you mention are behind us, and likely to stay there.
On the “Inside,” Politicians and columnists, to name only a couple of players, have found the easy and profitable buttons to push, and that those buttons have very limited consequences for them. Almost no downside, only benefits for them, their backers and their lobbyists.
On the “outside,” voters, consumers, the subject/citizens in the street will find no short measure of grief wanting a return of better standards. Far easier to get by if you tackle the World as it is than fight against it – existential Green issues aside.
Call me jaded, exhausted might be more accurate, but as one watching from Scotland, seeing the UK and its media gaslight Scotland ever more blatantly since the first referendum was announced, few have any inkling whatsoever of how they’re bought and sold. Terry Pratchett’s aspiration – not being needlessly spent – would be enough for now. And even that…
Politics is supposed to be about idealism. It is why the majority of MP’s would all consider themselves idealists. Anything else is just managerialism and technocracy. The skill is finding a path to achieve the ideal and carry people with you. This is where leadership comes in. Unfortunately we currently have very poor leaders lacking the ability to create ideas of a better world but simply rely on populist tropes and attacks on manufactured outsiders to assemble a power base for a minority.
Timothy Garton-Ash has written a keynote article 8-9 pages long in the current edition of Prospect magazine entitled “The Future of Liberalism” which echoes many of your sentiments Richard. He analyses the failings and successes of Liberalism over the last 30 years, and what has contributed to the rise of populism, inequality and the “left-behind”. Although in a sentence or two he calls out “dogmatic market fundamentalism”, as having contributed to the current ills, he completely fails to address the enormous destructive influence of neoliberal (I dont think he even uses that word !) economic policies reinforced by neoclassical economics based on methodological individualism. He is also regrettably clearly still on the gold standard as he thinks money only grows on rich people. He urges us to think of ourselves as a State-Nation rather than a Nation-State, but nowhere does he talk about the power of monetary sovereignty.
It seems to me this article is crying out for an MMT response. I would have a go myself, but I am a poor thing compared to many of the much better qualified contributors here. But if no-one raises their hand, I’ll have a go……
I won’t have the time…..
Isn’t the concept of MMT idealism? Surely your son must know you dream of a better world for all!! Remember beneath any idealist is a cynic waiting to get out and silver is just the lining for a cloud!
I’ll say this, I will not live in a country that permits the death penalty – if the vile Priti Petal should get her way I will move to Germany. I will not condone that kind of a regressive mess
Happy new year Richard!
I think you need to join the Green Party, Richard. One of our campaign slogans is “For the Common Good”. The things you desire are pretty much what we struggle for. As ever, we come up against the crazy addiction to economic growth that rich countries have.
Happy New Year.
I am happy to support Caroline and other Green politicians
I am rather reminded of a comment made in a review of a biography of MacMillan which was that one of his overridden political concerns was to ensure that he & his class didnt end up hanged from the nearest lamp post. Hence his support for the NHS & Social Housing.
I suppose Rees Mogg, Farage & Co are far enough from the upheaval of the Russian Revolution that they dont worry about it, but perhaps they should, and were they to do so it might mean that at least a few ‘idealistic’ policies might be allowed through.
The Common Good is contingent on politicians conducting an open conversation with the public, for example through Citizens’ Assemblies, on what constitutes the Common Good, showing leadership in striving to bring it about and being honest and truthful about the whole process, and how to reconcile disparate and perhaps conflicting aims.
Honesty and truthfulness needs to be at the heart of the political endeavour (and the media who report on it) and those who deliberately lie must know that they will be held to account, perhaps by a Citizens’ Tribunal, and that there will be consequences.
The most sickening aspect of current politics is the way so many habitually lie, even when the evidence is clear and unequivocal, and there are no consequences. So they learn the lesson that lying pays.
Citizen’s Assemblies undoubtedly work for this purpose
I find it deeply ironic that the party of “law and order” is doing its damndest to hollow out the institutions that underpin a rules based international order.
The quote from McMillan probably typifies the Tory attitude to the post war consensus. We better not oppose this “socialism” malarkey after two world wars and a crushing economic depression. There were also three million fully trained ex soldiers out there, many of whom were in solidarity with USSR, who had borne a far greater burden of the war and were crucial in defeating the Nazis. Far better to endure this for a few decades until we get our act together and back to our familiar rentier habits. We’ll even put up with 83% Super Tax. Imagine?
At heart. Tories have never changed. They’ve seen their chance to take us back to the 1930s, and the Labour Party seems to have boarded the same Tardis, with Starmer doing his Ramsey McDonald tribute Act. And he wonders why Labour only have 1 MP in Scotland?
Imagine the great socialists of the Labour Party bending the knee in such a fashion to the likes of Gove and Johnson? Me neither!
I really feel for left/socialist movement in England. They must get back to actively campaigning for socialism. No messing about. Is Labour still the vehicle to achieve this? They have a massive task ahead.
Just what we need to hear just now, to get us focused on what’s to come. A return to principles that benefit the common good. As you say, the rich can take care of themselves …and certainly do.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m sharing this on Facebook.
Please do!
With reference to the ‘accusation’ made to you by your son, I am reminded of some words by Mark Twain and the saying always makes me smile. A smile, not often seen in these masked times, is sorely needed. It works for me.
I am guilty of a lack of precision but here it is:
‘When I was 14 I was appalled by my father’s ignorance. By the time I was 21 I was amazed at how much he’d learned.’
Idealism is what ignites the fire in our bellies. I like having fire in my belly. I always did and I hope I always shall. Keep on keeping on Mr Murphy.
Thanks
Mark Twain was right
I would be interested in your view of which British political party and when last shared the ideals you espouse? In a nutshell is your desire a return or a destination where the UK has never been?
I think Labour once shared a lot of them
I’d say the same of the LDs once
Dammit, even some Tories
The SNP at grass roots does now it seems
I suspect the Greens do
It’s the major parties in England who have walked away