I just posted this as a thread on Twitter:
Gary Neville suggested we need a peaceful revolution yesterday. It's not the usual call for an ex Manchester United player who is now a football commentator. But was he right to do so? A short thread….
I am not by inclination revolutionary. But we need to change our head of state.
And we need to be rid of the House of Lords.
We need electoral reform - because first past the post is nothing like democracy now.
We need to respect the right of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to choose their own futures.
And we need to revive local decision making, and democracy.
Education needs to be back under state control, and not that of private academies.
The NHS has to be locked into the state.
And so does economic policy: the undemocratic farce of claiming that we have an independent Bank of England because politicians can't be trusted with the economy has to end.
The House of Commons must be able to hold the government to account, which it can't now.
It must be able to say ministers lie when they do.
Ministers who lie must suffer penalties for doing so.
Politicians who cause unnecessary deaths must be liable for them.
The ‘Treasury view' which means that whenever someone proposes something for the good of society we apparently can't afford it has to be shattered.
The police must not be used for the oppression of opinion.
We must have statutory rights that courts must uphold. The right to be who we are is essential.
These rights must include the right to free speech and assembly, albeit with a legally imposed duty not to cause offence.
The legal system must be respected and the rule of law upheld.
Media ownership must be transformed.
People must have the right to a trade union, and employers must have the legal obligation to recognise that union.
The right to private property must be upheld. The demand that it be accountable when held in legal structures - whether companies or trusts - must be enforced.
It should be a constitutional requirement that we have overall progressive taxation and the required taxes to deliver it.
The right to support from the state should be enshrined in law.
The state should have a legal obligation to ensure that those who need help get it.
There should be legal restrictions on the delay in the supply of government services, from healthcare, to housing, to justice.
There should be a legal obligation to fund key services like our tax authority, education and social care.
The environment must be protected.
We need a written constitution.
It must reflect the country we are, not the country we once were.
We need a peaceful revolution in other words.
The system of government we have is not fit for purpose.
Almost everything needs to change.
Gary Neville was right to make his call.
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Amen.
I would just like to leave this link here as a great injustice and incarceration of another independent blogger and freedom fighter against the evils you list, takes place this morning at the behest of the rusty iron claws of the Crown and it’s cuddly mask of a lil old lady.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/08/keeping-freedom-alive/
Easy to see our failed state, as MacAskill makes a speech about it in Parliament – aside from a solitary Government minister, not a SINGLE Labour front or back bencher or a SINGLE SNP MP is there to lend it an ear. Poltroons.
We must not let these fascists get away with such escalation of their powers , specifically the right to a jury trial when incarceration is involved or the disappearance of these they fear, we must stand with them. For tomorrow they will come after us.
But Murray did pick the wrong fight
Sorry, but it has to be said
It should not and is not about what the subject matter was. It is about the rule of law, the totally unfair application against Murray and the result in a new precedent of one law for mainstream media journalists and a different and more draconian one for bloggers, and about the suspension of any sort of justice. Prejudiced views about the subject matter should not be the issue.
Of very real concern is the visibly biased views and actions of a Judge in line to be the highest in Scotland. It bodes very very ill for the so called rule of law as against the rule of the fascist state.
Since when did believing in the presumption of innocence until found guilty become “picking the wrong fight”?
I followed the trial via his blog posts and they pretty much always started with a reminder that he had to be careful not to breach the law in how he reported what he knew. I did not once see any such thing in any MSM reports. So basically, writing a blog truthfully and with care for the law, has resulted in a man being imprisoned. Isn’t that pretty much a description of your approach to blogging?
I do not think Craig Murray had wise motives in doing what he did
I think he inevitably risked identifying defendants
I can only repeat, I would not fave done that and I cannot see what benefit was secured by his doing so
In that case this was the wrong fight
Further discussion of this will not change my opinion and so will be deleted, whoever posts it
The Guardian did not report the Supreme Court decision against Murray’s appeal two days ago. It was mentioned several times in the comments section beneath the daily news blog, and questions were asked about this seeming oversight. Each comment was deleted. This is also true of any comment mentioning Julian Assange. It’s very dispiriting, and has destroyed any faith I might have had in the neutrality and objectivity of the Guardian.
I keep logging in to the blog as the comments are generally informative and good value, but I have cancelled my subscription, and now get my news from Poliitico (as recommended on this blog).
As has been pointed out many times by Media Lens, the Guardian is just as beholden to its sponsors and advertisers as any other newspaper, and its ethos is very much to uphold the establishment view.
https://www.medialens.org/2021/two-centuries-of-the-imperialist-warmongering-hate-filled-guardian/
Yes, the silence of the Guardian on the Supreme Court is dispiriting. As is the collective silence of the media on the revelation from Iceland that the main witness for the USA against Assange is a fraud, as well as a convicted sex offender. ( The sex offending is irrelevant really, but imagine the media fury if a witness for Assange were such}. Perhaps the Guardian and others were comfortable with Murray’s stitch-up, because the Scottish judge made an overt and unprededented distinction between established news media and bloggers? They must have forgotten the famous “First they came for….” warning.
Had the Murray trial been decided by a jury, rather than a solitary judge, I suspect the verdict would have been different. The Supreme Court decision not to intervene, might well have been different if the Assange case were not still pending, and if the legitimate demand for Independence did not make it indelicate to be seen to be interfering in Scotland’s affairs.
The increasing ability of Governments to suppress information which does not suit their interests, makes it harder for the peaceful revolution you speak of, to occur, Richard. Murray has been “picking the wrong fight” for many years, and now he has been hammered.
I too was shocked at the decision and more so the sentence. I suspect the powers that be are worried about losing the ability to protect anonymity due to newspapers sailing close to the wind and some bloggers not understanding the rules (not Craig Murray, I believe he thought he had protected anonymity, better than newspapers). In a wider context the Establishment have levers for controlling the voices within the nations, but can’t control international sources. This means bloggers can get information from outside the nations and spread that information within the nation. I imagine powers that be are worried about this because the UK is out of step with international standards and there is probably a lot of pressure from the right on grounds of ‘false accusations) to reveal names. I suspect Craig is meant to be a lesson for others.
My difficulty with this is how you reconcile wanting to SCO, WAL and NI to decide their own futures, with wanting Brussels to be able to decide many things for them in a framework where there is no longer a single member veto.
Have you heard of democracy?
“Have you heard of democracy?”
Yes, I have.
We tend to have general elections every 4-5 years and even referenda occasionally.
Much of what you have listed here has been rejected by the voters in recent years, at times comprehensively.
So let’s put the question back to you: have you heard of democracy?
Most certainly
And when was any of this put to the vote?
I’m one of those who hasn’t of course! But I don’t want a world where people who have heard of it think it means giving decision-making away so that other territories have more say over their affairs than they do themselves.
Mr Hayes,
“We tend to have general elections every 4-5 years and even referenda occasionally.
Much of what you have listed here has been rejected by the voters in recent years, at times comprehensively.”
The problem is that you ‘portamenteau’ the British vote for Brexit, to Scotland and Northern Ireland, which in fact voted against Brexit, in the case of Scotland avote against Brexit far more decisive that England’s vote for Brexit. Furthermore, you seem unable to understand why Scots may want to leave the UK Union, yet wish to be members of the EU Union. Yet this is not difficult to understand; but it requires a basic understanding of the Union, the history of the Union, and of Scotland.
Scotland has long embraced voluntary Unions; what it doesn’t accept is involuntary Unions, or Unions that have outlived their social and political value to Scotland. Scotland has lost a great deal through Brexit, which was foisted upon it unwillingly. At the same time it is well understood in Scotland that since WWII and the end of Empire, the British Union, by almost any economic, political or social measure, no longer serves Scotland well, and indeed has served it ill, with ill-conceive ‘boom-bust’ policies; and the appallingly bad central UK execution of de-industrialisation in the 1980s, with cataclysmic social consequences; at the very same time that North Sea oil was funnelled almost exclusively from Scotland, to boost the fragile economic performance of London and the South East, and rescue the hapless Thatcher monetarist policies that were failing. The best defence of the British Union that can be made of the Union in Scotland, as a measure of its value for the last fifty years may be summed in these prophetic words; ‘they know not what they do’.
The privilege to insist on Brexit, and of breaking a European Union that Scotland had fully embraced (personally, economically and socially, on benefited Scotland on advantageous terms the British had largely written), while attempting to defend a British Union that is serving Scotland very ill (not least through Brexit and its consequences), cannot simply be permanently transferred to the English electoral majority, arbitrarily and in perpetuity to choose the future of the British Union in its own interests alone: indeed for this special interest group unilaterally to select the future of this or any Constitutional Union, is simply and obviously politically unsustainable. This is not a magically conjured entitlement that can be bluffed endlessly in a British Union that Scotland joined voluntarily, and is entitled to end it when the Scottish people determine it no longer serves the interests of the Scottish people.
Well Said.
Footballers on the way up are passing The Conservatives on the way down
Yes. How?
Nothing to disagree with here.
And I’m afraid that you ARE revolutionary in terms of ideas if not revolutionary in approach. But how to get the first without resorting to the last is a big problem. Especially when HM Opposition seem more aligned with the corrupt thinking of the Establishment. Who speaks for us under the yolk of a proto fascist state?
I have no idea how change will be affected. I am conflicted internally most severely. Some days I dream of force and revenge (we have had the Tories in since 2010 and they have done nothing but harm people and I’m now poorer than I was in before 2010 along with many others). Even when they do something like the ‘All In’ campaign to get the homeless off the streets, it comes with all sorts of caveats based on their dislike for the public sector and more risk and expense for local authorities whom are being defunded as I write. There are certain Tory party members and MPs who would not be safe if they were near me I promise you.
But having said all that, I am a student of Timothy Snyder at the moment and I’ve just finished reading his book ‘Bloodlands’ (2010) about what happened to the unfortunates living between Berlin and Moscow from 1933 to 1945. Snyder is a scholar of various holocausts in this period and as some of us will know asks us to look back to understand where we are now – and with good reason.
It’s a book that details the scale of human misery at the hands of the the Nazis and Soviet cod-communism. And despite even managing to give personal voice to the victims amongst all the blood that has been spilt, Snyder most humanely says this on page. 400:
“It is easy to sanctify polices or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding politicians and intellectuals……………..yielded to this temptation during the war………………….People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.
To yield to temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus abandon history.
To dismiss Nazis and or the Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap.”
And the same goes for the Tories in my view. Their policies have killed people and created misery right from 2010 up to Covid. Reading Snyder helps with my anger, frustration and resentment towards the politics that creates today.
I have always believed in your idea of a ‘courageous state’ because it would I feel deliver a happier world – a world that would not be an incubator for fascism and strife that can be used by self-interested politicians to gain traction for a start.
Snyder’s is really a call – a challenge – to how to deal with ignorance – whether the result of a lack of knowledge or because a person’s ideology stops them from seeing.
So the question becomes, how can we get around that? We can tell them how outraged we are, how disgusting we find the Tories. As I have tended to do, we can dream of what we might do if we bumped into one of them on a dark night near Westminster.
But what should we being saying and how should we be saying it? Are we missing something? Am I missing something (I’d never discount that)!?
I honestly don’t know, but as in the book ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ maybe the first part of any approach is to indeed try to see it from the Tories point of view (in their shoes) and start to unpick that and their faulty thinking (a lot of Labour politicians need this too I’m afraid). I think that this will be a knowledge war – and probably best that it is.
But there are choices to make, morally and action wise. And I have explained I think some of them.
Thanks
Much to think about
Pilgrim,
“To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, ”
It is not just understanding their reasoning. Reasoning is often a rationalisation for their emotions. I don’t think I can answer your questions but this might help.
All human being share the same range of emotions. We also have a number of emotional and psychological defences to a greater or lesser extent. People at the extremes often display the paranoid / schizoid position. The paranoia is about fear. Trump activated this with Mexican immigrants, Black Lives Matter, Cultural Marxists. radical Islamic terrorists etc and referred to the Deep State manipulating them.
The schizoid is about splitting the world into good (us) and bad (them). With such a clear distinction it is easy to de-humanise the ‘other’.
The ‘anger, frustration and resentment” we feel can be projected onto them. Attacking them even makes us feel ‘good’. Your ‘dark night on a bridge’ is part of dark fantasy.
But there is hope. It usually becomes apparent to these people that the real world differs from the fantasy. Reality begins to break through. One reaction is to deny it (think election results, vaccine plots, climate change) OR to punish those on ‘our side’ for treason. We had the Purges of Stalinism, the killing of the leaders of the SA in the Night of the Long knives. The National Front leaders of the 1970s ended in bitter recrimination and court cases. I think similar happened in UKIP and the EDL. The Republican party is also riven. Look how they are treating the Republicans who dared to join the committee investigating the events of 6th January.
Evil has the seeds of its own destruction.
Knowledge, the light of reason and a moral compass are our weapons.
And there is a note for us. We have to monitor ourselves so that we don’t fall into the same trap. And we also need, as you indicate with Richard’s book’ , some courage.
A lot of truth in this – selfishness, lack of empathy and ego account for a lot of it in the elite and then the biggie all round, ‘fear’ in whatever form…… Plain ignorance (a lot of the population) can be counter-acted with straightforward factual information but, when other factors come into play, psychology as part of the knowledge war is the way to go (I’m no expert).
“To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus abandon history.”
I agree. In philosophical circles it is often said that ideally one should be able to articulate one’s opponents’ point of view better than they can themselves.
Good list, I’d vote for a political party that signed up to this list (and meant it).
The catch is that a peaceful revolution can only occur if those who have accumulated too much wealth and power decide they are at risk and exchange some of this wealth/power in order to protect the remainder of what they have. I do not believe the British establishment is anywhere near that point, it is still heading in the opposite direction and grabbing whatever they can. The latest wheeze I’m absolutely disgusted by are Labour Lords starting up rent-for-life estates, to relieve the poor of the “burdens” of ownership. Neofeudalism is arriving and it’s acting like it’s doing us a favour. The only reason they’re able to hide behind such generously “low” rents is that the property market in the country has been strangled for so long.
It seems more like they have recaptured Labour(if they ever lost it) and are setting them up to campaign upon electoral reform at the next general election – and lose again, at which point the proposition is put on ice. So when Labour DOES finally win a subsequent election, they won’t have a mandate to push serious reform through the establishment treacle, anything that does get attempted will be watered down and then the Tories get back in.
I don’t see a way out of it.
Historically the British Establishment has been good at making compromises, clearly if they have lost that ability, possibly of course the memory of the French then Russian Revolutions is fading, then they will behave even more badly with the resultant risk of unrest.
Can I just ask about this statement:
‘the right to free speech and assembly, albeit with a legally imposed duty not to cause offence.’
Who decides what is offensive? Is there a right not to be offended?
The idea is well developed in law
We do not have a right to be racist, incite abuse and so on
Our freedom ends when the rights of others are impeded
A great list Richard!
I hope that at least some members of her majesty’s opposition are paying attention.
But it does seem to me that the issue of free speech has become rather problematic, and is in danger of becoming even more so, under this increasingly authoritarian (in some aspects anyway) government. And I’m not sure that UK law has got it quite right just yet.
I suggest that the rule of thumb should be that your right to free speech should trump my right not be be offended or upset!
This issue of “offense” is the only one I am unsure of, simply because I don’t know how “offense” as opposed to racism or abusive speech or incitement to riot (as you say well defined in law) can be defined. Offense is “taken” not given. I might take offense at someone who rails against flat-earthers, should I be able to pursue them in the courts?
Yes, of course that’s an absurd notion, or is it? Holyrood has just passed the Hate Crime Bill which makes many things potentially a “hate crime” that others think of as simply facts. Is someone demanding that people accept biology (male/female) as a fact, but this “offends” someone else who thinks sex is on a spectrum and demands they are investigated for a “hate crime”, is this appropriate? I am prepared to be convinced on this one.
But to end with something I think Stephen Fry once said, “You say you are Offended, so f’king what!”
Let’s be clear – I wax writing shorthand
I had to in a thread like this
It’s apparent in this whole piece on rights – some is as tight as I could make it
“Offence” is shorthand for racism, incitement etc.
I think it being rather over-analysed
But what would be a better phrasing? That is the best question? And it has to be brief
Seems to me to be quite simple.
When someone breaks the law, they have committed an offence. So, say what you like as long as you don’t break the law. Incitement to violence, for example, is illegal. Incitement to intolerance of any of the 9 protected characteristics (limited to those 9 because those are the characteristics defined in law), is illegal.
If I say that I think that I think murderers should be executed, that may cause a lot of offence to people who don’t believe in the death sentence. But being a murderer isn’t a protected characteristic, so people may be as offended as they like, I won’t have given offence in the eyes of the law. I hope such a statement would provoke debate, not some shrill and hysterical “YOU CAN’T SAY THAT!!” type response.
For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t believe in executions – I think it’s retrograde, base, riddled with risk and results in nothing more that the degradation of what I believe to be the ‘good’ self. I think only idiots and really, really angry people believe in the death sentence. And note that because stupidity and anger aren’t protected characteristics, I can’t give offence by saying that. You may be personally offended, but I couldn’t care less.
If I were to say that Muslims, for example, should be fined for wearing head coverings, then I’d be discriminating against them on the grounds of their religion. Probably gender, too. That’s 2 protected characteristics… so even if you thought it was a perfectly reasonable proposition, I would have given offence.
I really don’t see the ambiguity.
I have already addressed this issue
I used shorthand in a tweet
People really ate grossly over analysing it
I was talking about maintaining existing fair constraints on free speech
I know, Richard… and I fully understood exactly what you meant.
In all likelihood, so did everyone who posted something along the lines of “Aaah – but what do you mean Offence?”. I was just using my rhetorical sledgehammer to crack their pedantic nuts, so to speak.
These rights must include the right to free speech and assembly, albeit with a legally imposed duty not to cause offence
That’s an interesting caveat to the right to free speech and freedom of association. Would your proposed criminalisation of offensive assembly and offensive speech be national or international? E.g. if someone living in Cockermouth offends an EU official in Brussels because of their belief that European values are a unique set of things, how would the criminal justice system play out.
You are not J S Mill
And because you only claim to be you do not understand what I think he would have had no problem with
There is a significant amount of academic research that suggests that non-violent protest movements are more effective than violent ones. A case in point is the paper “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” in International Security, Volume 33, Issue 1. https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/33/1/7/11935/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-The-Strategic-Logic-of
The Abstract reads:
“The historical record indicates that nonviolent campaigns have been more successful than armed campaigns in achieving ultimate goals in political struggles, even when used against similar opponents and in the face of repression. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to win legitimacy, attract widespread domestic and international support, neutralize the opponent’s security forces, and compel loyalty shifts among erstwhile opponent supporters than are armed campaigns, which enjoin the active support of a relatively small number of people, offer the opponent a justification for violent counterattacks, and are less likely to prompt loyalty shifts and defections. An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims. These dynamics are further explored in case studies of resistance campaigns in Southeast Asia that have featured periods of both violent and nonviolent resistance.”
The entire paper can be downloaded for free.
I agree
I would never advocate violence
It’s not the thing a Quaker does
Yes but the HoL is the only hope we have to temper this government’s draconian and stupid policies. A constitution is just something to argue about like in the US. Democracy is rule by people of average IQ 100 and degenerates to mob rule with indoctrination. If we don’t have FPTP we will have endlessly changing governments like Israel and Italy. There are many systems of PR and no hope in getting the right one. An omnipotent benevolent dictator is good in theory but unworkable.
Only two countries in Europe have FPTP and stable government is the norm
Your tropes are just that
Yes Richard – all of it.
How some of this can be done in the short term, seems a key question.
‘Academic’ fellow travellers and apologists for the UK system:
https://medium.com/@info_99507/whats-my-problem-with-lord-peter-hennessy-31958d300324
are part of the problem.
There maybe quite a lot of thinking going on:
https://blog.feedspot.com/constitutional_law_blogs/
Is a popular campaign for at least some of this possible?
Worth thinking about
I applaud you for presenting an attractive vision of the future, Richard. The post-war social consensus has collapsed spectacularly, and the selfish and precarious state we have created instead, typified by this corrupt government, is of little use to most people. We need something to replace it, and there is much to support in here.
If only Her Majesty’s Opposition had anything like as attractive a portfolio. I’m not sure I could name a single policy that Labour stands for at the moment.
I’d probably rather keep the monarchy as an apolitical ceremonial figurehead: but I would not quibble if we could replace it with a more or less apolitical elected figurehead like Germany or Ireland.
Similarly, I’d continue the reform of the House of Lords rather than replace it entirely: I can see the appeal of a 100% elected second chamber, but I can see the value that is added by crossbenchers and representatives of religious groups – we certainly should add more ex officio. Perhaps we could start by removing the remaining hereditary peers, and making “life peerages” temporary and non-renewable, say 10 or 15 years.
You could add disestablishment of the Church of England, which increasingly seems an anachronism with every passing decade. Somehow the Anglican churches in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere, continue perfectly happily without being embedded within the state.
Personally, while I think a written constitution is a good idea for a number of reasons, I’d not what that utopian ideal to get in the way of real reform, and it is no guarantee of (as David Allen Green would say) “constitutionality”.
The starting point has to be reform of the voting system to a more proportional basis. And the only way to get there is by creating a broad consensus by re-engaging with the millions of people who do not vote at general elections, because they think their vote makes no difference.
Much to agree with as routes to change
Hi Richard,
Unusual for most Manchester Utd footballers turned football commentators perhaps, but Gary Neville has been commenting on the side of decency for many years, as well as doing decent things such as opening up his commercial properties to the homeless during Covid and other crises. Marcus Rashford is, of course, the other notable Man Utd player in this regard.
All the best,
Ralph
And the entire England team took a knee
Football is displaying a conscience
[…] the thread I wrote yesterday on the need for a peaceful revolution that might restore the countries of the UK and help them […]
[…] is this about? It is about maintaining ‘The Treasury View’. I referred to this in the Twitter thread yesterday, […]
I agree with everything except “The right to private property must be upheld”. Private property is one of the cornerstones of the injustices of capitalism and should be abolished. This would lead to the end of parasitic rent extraction, which you have for so long opposed.
Oh come on, don’t be ridiculous
Surely we need to examine what we mean by property. I don’t think any individual should have the right to own land, for example. Land is a common good of fixed quantity upon which we all depend. It should belong to the nation (not the government) and be held in trust for all of our benefits. We should have the legal right to occupy bits of it and make use of it, but not to own it. Similarly with finite, non-renewable natural resources from the land, such as minerals, oil or gas. These belong to all of us, and the profits from their use should go in to a sovereign wealth fund for all our benefit.
I seek a plan that can work
I am not seeking utopia because most will not agree what it is
[…] is this about? It is about maintaining ‘The Treasury View’. I referred to this in the Twitter thread yesterday, […]
Do you agree with Brett Christophers/Rentier Capitalism?
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/replacing-rentier-capitalism-one-defining-challenges-our-age/
Yes
@Tony Little
“Is someone demanding that people accept biology (male/female) as a fact, but this “offends” someone else who thinks sex is on a spectrum and demands they are investigated for a “hate crime”, is this appropriate?”
This is significant misrepresentation. Queer people such as myself come to this blog to read and learn about economics and taxation, not to have our existence challenged.
Apologies – poor moderation on my part
It occurred to me yesterday that there may be a revolution coming.
I have assumed all my life that the days of violent revolutions in advanced countries were past. The desperation that drove people to surge forward, part of a mob, against a line of armed soldiers, overpower them and club them to death with their own guns isn’t there in the land of unemployment benefit and the NHS. That anger over a void that was spawned by profound loss that might make a parent, grieving their child, decide that expressing their anger was more important than living. Than not getting shot. That feeling of nothing to lose.
In the UK we have re-entered the days of people having nothing to lose as a matter of deliberate choice. The collapse of 2008 was a cockup and it’s easy to see why people voted Tory and LD to change the guard. I did. We were all sick of Brown.
2010-15 public spending was slashed and, per the BMJ, 120,000 needless deaths occurred. And the country voted the Tories back in. Poverty discrimination and shortened lives, “excess deaths” were an acceptable choice to people who had othered the poor. Some of whom now regarded even people they’d know all their lives as “scroungers” or “immigrants”. And voted for the party that would punish them.
And the tens of thousands has multiplied as the relentless effects of that lowered public spending continue to kill off people who earlier would have been saved and now compounded by covid – a litany of complacency, cowardice and corruption.
Are there people who would charge a line of soldiers to make a point? It suddenly no longer seems far-fetched to me. If not now then soon. We had a woman implying NHS staff should be hung like Nazi war criminals to a cheering Trafalgar Square crowd.
I wholeheartedly support your peaceful, thoughtful, progressive revolution Richard because if not then we may have a brutal and bloody one. As Guy Standing wrote the politics of paradise vs the politics of inferno.
You weren’t sick of Brown. You were sick of your perception of Brown pushed on you by right-wing newspapers. He did a very good job in difficult circumstances saving thousands of mortgages and deposits.
I was sick of Brown
I wrote a long essay saying why when he had been Chancellor for a decade