Jon Cruddas, MP and head of Labour's policy review, had a good article in the Guardian yesterday. His point is a simple one: as he puts it -
The task at hand is to rebuild this country.
But then he notes that all the signs are the Tories aren't going to do any such thing. Quoting from Britannia Unchained, written by five new Tory MPs he notes:
The reality is that Britain does, as these authors suggest, face a fundamental choice — whether to manage decline or confront today's global challenges.
Of course Jon is right, and if the authors stuck to that theme they may have an argument that Labour might even share, but as Jon notes, they don't because:
[A]t its core this book is not about social liberalism. Scratch off the veneer and all is revealed: a destructive economic liberalism that threatens the foundations of modern conservatism. The state is assumed always to be malign, and it's taken for granted that the labour market is not flexible enough (is it ever?). For reform read marketisation and intensified commodification.
And he rightly notes:
For these authors — all members of the party's right-leaning Free Enterprise Group — it is a binary world, where everything is forward or back, progress or decline, sink or swim, good or bad. They do not appear to see the world as a complex place. The choice is between regulation and dynamism: their ideal worker is one prepared to work long hours, commute long distances and expect no employment protection and low pay. Their solution to the problem of childcare is unregulated, "informal and cheap childminders". We need dramatic cuts in public expenditure, they argue, to be matched by equivalent tax cuts. The demonisation of the welfare recipient continues apace; a broad dystopian worldview dominates the future. The bottom line for these Tory radicals is that the notion of community, society or indeed country is always trumped by textbook economic liberalism.
This is the world of the right wing trolls.
This is the world that empathy forgot.
This is the world of the modern Conservative Party.
This is a world view that is repugnant.
This is the view Jon has to beat when undertaking his policy review. It's a job he has to succeed at.
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[…] with it as the EU has moved in. Now Spain in going that way. How the right wing must love this: they say they’re the enemies of the state. Actually they’re the enemies of democracy. It is for governments to be accountable: […]
This is the natural consequence of Thatcherism: it is a disabling paradox. I have a copy of ‘True Blues’ from 1994 which surveyed over 2,000 Tory grassroots members, and the party then was 1/3 economic liberal, 2/3 state-traditionalist.
What the modern right cannot stand is the fact that their economic liberalism has failed; deregulation, privatisation, the ‘private good, public bad’ mantra produced the banking collapse, which was only averted by vast amounts of money from the very state these people so despise, and object to paying taxes to. (Incidentally, if they dislike governement so much, why do they want to be part of it?).
Like all true fanatics, they are in denial, and look to put the blame for the situation anywhere but themselves. Rather like, say, Stalin: when his 5 year plans proved impossible to fulfil, it was all the fault of ‘counter-revolutionaries’,’imperialists’, ‘wreckers’. So off to the Gulag with them!
Funny how the extreme right and extreme left so often resemble each other isn’t it?
You think Stalin was “extreme left”? In the books of Ayn Rand, perhaps.
Perhaps you could distinguish between “totalitarian counter-revolutionary politics” and “revolutionary socialist democracy” at some point. One is actually opposed to the other, at least in the political pantheon of socialism.
I suggest that you could be described as a potential victim of ideological capture if you continue along a line of thinking which identifies (“resembles”) counter-revolutionary politicians (Stalinism) with socialists, i.e.”the extreme left”. The one is the gravedigger of the other.
If you need an example of similar repulsive behaviour, by British politicans of “the centre”, of both major parties, at a time of supposed concensus politics, have a leaf through Mark Curtis’s “Unpeople: Britain’s secret human rights abuses” and “Web of Deceit: Britain’s real role in the world” by the same author. You don’t need to be “extreme” anything, in your terminology, to conduct your policies in this manner – you merely need to be out of democratic control, with the ability to hide the character of your actions from the public. And you need to have the interests of the rulers of the country at the heart of your policy, not those of its population.
Fanatics, eh?
Dave, I’m not accusing anyone who calls themselves a socialist of believing in what Stalin did, but whether you like it or not the vast majority of people would identify the Communist regimes of the USSR, China, North Korea, Cambodia as extreme left.
My point is that the libertarian right whose economic ideas have ended in the banking collapse are behaving in the same way as their supposed ideological opponents on the left used to behave when faced with the failure of their ideas in the real world – by denial, blame shifting, and by responding to the failure of their ideas by being even more extreme.
Something of an irony don’t you think?