I'm going to present another article to you in the form of a riposte to something someone said on my Facebook page. If this writing style annoys you I do apologise, but I do find that my ideas often flow much more freely when I'm replying to something, than if I'm building up something of my own from scratch.
I reckon that this reply contains some ideas (some of them my own, but most of them other people's) that might be worth sharing. I suppose it's up to you whether you consider them worth sharing or not. Anyhow, if you like any of them, you can share them, keep them, reuse them, even pass them off as your own for all I care.
The comment in question was one of the very many critical comments about Russell Brand that always appear whenever I mention him. Although it was, in my opinion, an unnecessarily harsh criticism, it was certainly a good deal more thought provoking that the "He's an utter cock who makes me so furious I can barely type a coherent sentence" type diatribes, that for some reason are written almost exclusively by men.
Whatever it is that makes so many people actually take the time and effort to type such vitriol about him, they come across as being so disproportionately angry that I can't help imagining that (for whatever reason) they have built some kind of totemic hate figure in their minds that has the face and mannerisms of Russell Brand.
This is the comment:
"When [Brand] stops pretending his ideas are actually his own I might give him a second thought."
This is my reply:
I wonder how many of your ideas are entirely your own? And how many you have taken from other sources such as your parents, your teachers when you were at school, books, television, magazines, right-wing propaganda sheets, or other people you've met?
I know it takes me a lot of hard work to think of completely new ideas, and even then I often find that my 'brilliant new insight' has has actually been thought of and written down before (on many occasions by someone living on the other side of the planet!).
When I do have a really novel insight, that apparently nobody has thought of before, it almost always comes from the synthesis of two or more separate ideas that originated with other people. Are these synthetic ideas and concepts illegitimate? Can I claim them as my own, or would to do so be a fraud as heinous as the one for which you have mentally excommunicated Russell Brand?
If it is a sham for us to build our ideas upon the work of others, or to cumulatively develop new ideas through conversation and debate, where do we draw the line?
If the reuse or repetition of other people's ideas are excluded as being outrageously deceitful or dishonest, I reckon we'd have to row back quite far wouldn't we? I mean all of human knowledge is built upon the recycling of other people's ideas really isn't it?
If the reuse of other people's ideas is prohibited, I reckon we'd have to go back to something as fundamental as"I think therefore I am" in order to define our own existence without accepting other people's ideas and reusing them as our own. But then, if we're being proprietary about who ideas actually belong to, "I think therefore I am" must belong to Rene Descartes (unless someone else thought of it before him of course), so in order to avoid committing the deceitful and excommunicable offense of using ideas that originated with other people, we'd all each have to define our own unique philosophical foundation stone on which to build our wordviews from scratch upon, which sounds a tad time consuming and unrealistic to me.
I'm definitely not proprietary about my own ideas. That's why I give all my stuff away on the Pay as You Feel principle, and encourage others to share my work and quote me as freely as they like. The more people who see some use in my ideas and borrow them for themselves the better as far as I'm concerned. But I'm still not going to pretend that these ideas don't take time and effort to develop and refine into something that is actually worth sharing, or that all of them are uniquely my own.
I know that I have to work really hard so that I can continue to provide alternative perspectives in my writing, but I'm never going to have the arrogance and lack of humility to pretend that all of these ideas are entirely my own work. My ideas are built upon a foundation of knowledge upon knowledge upon knowledge, all of which has been been acquired, modified, synthesised and shared by billions of other people throughout all of recorded history and backwards further through time into the depths of ancient pre-history, before it ever got to me.
Maybe brilliant and unique insights flow like a never ending river through your mind? (I'm sure we'd all be very jealous, unlike you of course)
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Liberal Democrat wipeout at the 2015 General Election (that everyone saw coming apart from them) I've seen many comments from shell-shocked Lib-Dem supporters and deposed Lib-Dem politicians. There are three recurring themes to these comments, all of which are wrongheaded, and if persisted with, a severe impediment to the recovery of the party that I'm sure that they all want to actually see happen.
In the wake of having the number of Liberal Democrat seats in Westminster reduced from 57 to just 8 out of the 650, the three main themes put forward by Lib-Dems are as follows.
1. "I'm sticking by what we did. Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do."
2. "Just you wait and see. Things are going to get a whole lot worse now, then you'll miss us."
3. "The 2015 General Election result was a terrible defeat for liberalism in the UK."
I'm going to run through these themes one at a time explaining what is so wrong about them.
"Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do"
This thought is like a mantra that Lib-Dems keep endlessly repeating to themselves and to each other, even though it's completely obvious to everyone else outside the Lib-Dem bubble that it isn't true at all.
The evisceration of the Liberal Democrats in election after election since they signed their pact with the Tories in 2010 would tend to indicate that the general public think that they were wrong to do it. The fact that they've lost almost two in three of their voters since the last election indicates that even most of the people who are sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats think that they were wrong to do it.
The desertion of support from the party and the absolute hammerings they've taken in various elections indicate that what the Lib-Dems are saying when they repeat their mantra about having been unfairly punished for having done the right thing, is that "we are right and the public are wrong".
I'd suggest that taking a "we are right and the public are wrong" stance is hardly a great strategy for winning back public support, and neither is the playing the victim card when there is still an awful lot of public anger about what you've done.
I'd suggest that a "we're sorry, we made a big mistake and we want to atone for it" might play a lot better with the public than telling the public how wrong they are and playing the victim card. Maybe the next Lib-Dem leader will be smart enough to realise this and try to change the Lib-Dem message, but probably they won't and we'll have to listen to them talk themselves deeper and deeper into their political graves for the next five years.
"Just you wait and see"
One of the problems with this "just you wait and see" stance is that anyone who has actually been watching for the last five years will have seen plenty of Lib-Dem politicians voting for all kinds of rotten legislation (see next section), and is nowhere near as convinced that they did as much to constrain the Tories as the Lib-Dems are themselves.
Another huge problem with this "just you wait and see" stance is that it's very unlikely that the Tories would be in such a powerful position to impose their extremist ideology had the Liberal Democrats not been so strategically inept and enabled the Tories in the first place. I mean, where did all of the extra Tory seats that gave the Tories a majority in 2015 come from? Almost all of them were taken from the Liberal Democrats, that's where.
In order to understand the strategic ineptitude of the Liberal Democrats we have to look back to the situation in 2010. An unpopular Tory party had somehow failed to win a majority, even though they were standing against an unpopular government led by an unpopular man that had been in power during the worst financial sector meltdown in history. The Lib-Dems had done alright in terms of the vote share, and lots of progressive people still had the "I agree with Nick" factor clear in their minds.
The Lib-Dems made the awful mistake of going into the coalition negotiations from a weak debating position (we've got fewer seats than you so we'll agree to most of your terms) instead of taking a strong debating stance (you need us more than we need you) and drawing a number of red lines (some suggestions listed below), without which no coalition agreement would be signed. Some of these red lines should have included:
- Right of recall for corrupt MPs (a very popular policy when the expenses scandal was still fresh in people's minds)
- A proper referendum on voting reform (a referendum between two new voting systems, not one between a "miserable little compromise" and maintaining the status quo)
- Democratisation of the unelected House of Lords (featuring a public consultation on what is wanted instead)
- No increases in tuition fees (to do so after making a high profile pledge not to would be political suicide)
- Increasing the basic income tax threshold (a very popular policy evidenced by the way the Tories stole it and paraded it about as if it were their own)
- Establishment of the infrastructure investment bank detailed in the Lib Dem manifesto (this would have acted as a bulwark against George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda).
Had the Liberal Democrats held out on these red line issues, the Tories would have either have had to agree and we'd be looking at a completely different political landscape right now, or they would have had to refuse and opt to work as a weak minority government (which would also have been good for the Lib-Dems and good for the progressive agenda).
It's obvious that the progressive agenda would have benefited if the red lines had been agreed to, but even if they hadn't and the Tories had opted for minority rule (under some kind of confidence and supply deal with the Lib-Dems), the Lib-Dems could have gleefully shot down every rotten and unpopular piece of Tory legislation (such as Caroline Spelman's attempt to sell off our public forests) until the next election was called.
The Lib-Dem narrative at the next election (whenever it would have been called) would have been a very strong one indeed, meaning they could conceivably have significantly increased their share of the vote at the next election rather than getting almost completely wiped out as they did in 2015.
Their stance should have been "we wanted to form a stable coalition with the Conservatives for the good of the country, but they refused our offer because they want corrupt MPs to remain untouchable, they want the House of Lords to remain undemocratic, and they want to keep the outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system because it works so heavily in their own favour ... We wanted to put the interests of the country first but the Tories refused to work with us because they wanted to defend corruption, the old establishment order, undemocratic practices and an apathy inducing voting system that is rigged in their favour" and so on ...
If the Lib-Dems hadn't been so strategically inept, the Tories wouldn't have been able to spend the last five years laying the groundwork for what is to come next, and it's by no means certain that they would even have been in power at all. Imagine if the Lib-Dems and Labour had called a vote of no confidence in the Tory government when the economy was flatlining as a result of harsh ideological austerity in 2012 (around the time George Osborne was being booed at the Paralympics). Anyone who imagines that the Tories would have won a majority government at that point must be living in a fantasy world.
The "just you wait and see" attitude is completely ridiculous because without the Lib-Dems' strategically inept decision to bind themselves into a five year government with the Tories, there's absolutely no guarantee that the Tories would even actually have a majority government now anyway.
"A terrible defeat for liberalism"
As someone with strong liberal principles I find this Lib-Dem attitude especially irksome.The reason being that after five years of propping up a right-wing authoritarian Tory government, I think the Lib-Dems have lost all right to even call themselves liberals, let alone speak as if they represent some kind of unique voice of liberalism in this country.
As a liberally minded person, each time I saw the introduction draconian right-wing authoritarian legislation by the coalition government, with the support of Lib-Dem votes, I saw it as a defeat for liberalism.
- When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of the "Gagging Law" (designed to prevent criticism of government policy by charities and voluntary organisations) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.
The idea that after all of this, the Liberal Democrats are still self-righteously thinking of themselves some kind of unique "voice of liberalism in the UK" makes me absolutely furious. What right have they got to think of themselves as liberals after all of that? What right do they even have to include the word "Liberal" in the name of their party after all of that? No defenders of liberalism would ever have voted in favour of any of that, and to continue to sanctimoniously cast themselves as "the defenders of liberalism" is to spit in the eye of all genuine liberals.
Conclusion
I have established my objections to the delusional, self-pitying and sanctimonious narratives emanating from within the Lib-Dem bubble. I haven't pointed these things out because of a tribalistic hatred of the Lib-Dems. Far from it. I have a great deal of sympathy for the dozens of hard working Lib-Dem MPs, MSPs and MEPs to have paid with their political careers for Nick Clegg's strategic ineptitude, and for the thousands of Lib-Dem councilors up and down the country to have suffered the severe public backlash against it too.
I say these things because I sincerely believe that without a significant change of tone from the Liberal Democrats (to "we're sorry, we made lots of mistakes, we acknowledge them and we want to learn from them and make amends for them"), then they're only ever going to suffer even more severe backlashes from a public sick of being told that they were wrong and the Lib-Dems were right, how the Lib-Dems are actually the innocent victims in all of this, and a load of sanctimonious rubbish about how the Lib-Dems are the only legitimate voice of liberalism in this country.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
So what can I say about Nigel Farage's un-resignation?
I can't say that I'm surprised about it. It's not difficult to see that, despite his own admission that "it's frankly just not credible for me to continue to lead the party without a Westminster seat", he's pretty much irreplaceable to them, given that the rest of the party is made up of a collection of failed Tories, bitter angry old men, outright bigots, teabagger style neoliberals, embarrassingly under-qualified amateurs and even a smattering of hopelessly confused left-wingers.
I had hoped that UKIP might be able to move on from Nigel Farage's deceitful attempts to be everything to everybody and establish themselves a position as a genuine right-wing libertarian party because, even though I strongly disagree with the right-wing libertarian stance, I don't see why right-wing libertarians should be so completely unrepresented on the political compass as they are at present.
Another reason I would have liked to see UKIP attempt to take a more genuine right-libertarian stance is because I see right-wing libertarians as slightly less dangerous than the kind of extremist right-wing authoritarians who dominate the current Tory government. As a left-libertarian I imagine that I would have been able to find much more common ground with a UKIP taken in a right-libertarian direction (stuff like standing up for personal freedoms, and opposing the ever encroaching surveillance state), than a party doggedly sticking to the fundamentally dishonest ultra-Thatcherite in Tory constituencies / more-Labour-than-Labour in Labour constituences shtick.
I would obviously have preferred them to move toward adopting a genuine political stance, but there's probably a hell of a lot more votes for them by maintaining their deceitful efforts to appeal to the uninformed and undereducated by telling them whatever it is that they think they want to hear.
The really big problem for UKIP, and the reason they couldn't let Farage go, is that his own admission that it is "frankly not credible" for the UKIP leader to not be holding a Westminster seat obviously applies equally to every other UKIP politician bar their sole MP Douglas Carswell, who although an interesting character, is hardly what anyone would call a charismatic bloke with mass appeal and leadership potential.
Aside from being a bit of an unappealing oddball, another obvious problem with Carswell is that he's still clearly tainted by the fact that until 2014 he was a Tory MP, and by his appalling voting record during his time as a Tory MP. It's was always going to be difficult for UKIP to pull off the "plucky anti-establishment outsiders" look while being led by a guy who was a member of the ruling government party less than a year ago, especially since ever more of the UKIP rank and file are realising where UKIP's money is actually coming from (90% of it from Tory party donors).
Even though Farage's undignified climbdown makes him look like an unprincipled snake who won't stick by his word when he makes an all or nothing "elect me or I resign" gamble and then loses it, I don't suppose it matters to to most 'kippers that he's displayed such an appalling lack of dignity.
If 'kippers had any standards they should be seriously unhappy about the fact that their leader make a ridiculous "elect me or I resign" gamble, then lost it, then made himself appear embarrassingly unprincipled when he un-resigned within half a week, making himself (by his own admission) an uncredible leader.
Most of them won't be bothered at all by it though. They'll be so busy celebrating the return of their uncredible hero, and so confidently immune to cognitive dissonance, that they'll be able to reimagine the whole thing as a heroic triumph over adversity by their straight-talking, never deceptive or dishonest, fag smoking, beer swilling everyman of a privately educated former Tory party activist and commodities trader turned "people's champion".
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I'd like to begin this post by saying that I used to dislike Russell Brand rather intensely, but that he has gradually won me over into thinking that he's actually becoming a decent kind of bloke who wants to do the right things, but just isn't sure how to.
I warmed to him a bit when I noticed his early forays into talking about politics, power and other important issues because I thought it looked like he was trying to do some growing up, but the moment he fully won me over was when he sued the S*n for writing lies about his personal life, then gave his compensation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.
Anyone who is going to expose Rupert Murdoch's minions as liars and then give their compensation money to the victims of one of the Murdoch Empire's most sickening hate campaigns can't be all bad can they?
Rejectionism
I'm not going to say much about Russell Brand's rejectionist views (that were blasted into mainstream public conscience as a result of his notorious 'no point in voting' interview with Jeremy Paxman) because I wrote an article about it at the time (you can read that here if you want).
While I agree with Russell Brand's basic premise that voting is a very very small party of civic engagement, and that direct action is a much more powerful tool for achieving progressive social reform, I feel that his early efforts to engage people in alternative politics have been severely counter-productive.
I'm not saying that everything he says is wrong, far from it, he raises numerable interesting points and his analysis is sometimes exceptional. It's just that he's let himself down really badly by presenting a confused message to his audience, and worse than that, allowing himself to become enticed by party politics in the excitement of a General Election.
The real absurdity of his switch from rejectionism to the blanket endorsement of a political party stems from the fact that when he began deciding that certain politicians within the system were actually worth a vote, the deadline to register to vote for them had long since passed.
I'm not sure whether Brand himself had actually bothered to register to vote (which would have been an odd thing for someone who had advocated not voting to do), but I'm sure that he did nothing to encourage his audience to register as the voter registration deadline approached. I'm also sure that many of his fans would have been rendered incapable of actually doing as he was urging them, even if they'd wanted to, because they hadn't bothered to register to vote.
Caroline Lucas
I can fully understand why Russell Brand decided to ease his rejectionist stance to in order to endorse Caroline Lucas as the candidate for Brighton Pavillion, because she is amazing.
Caroline Lucas has achieved far more as a lone Green Party MP in a hostile Westminster environment in just five years than most of the career politicians from the three establishment parties will achieve in their whole taxpayer funded lives on the green benches. She is a brilliant champion of progressive politics and an inspirational hard worker to boot. I can fully understand making an exception to support one lone, tirelessly hard working, radical MP in a parliament rammed full of indolent, expenses fiddling, self-serving careerists.
Nobody is going to quibble if an exception is made for such a remarkable politician. The problem though is that once you've started making exceptions to your rules, more exceptions can be found, and more exceptions can be demanded of you.
Ed Miliband
It is easy to understand that once Russell Brand made it clear that his rejectionist stance was flexible, the pressure was on him to endorse other party politicians too.
The outrages inflicted by the Tory Party over the last five years are far too innumerable to detail but I'll provide a non-exhaustive list of links to illustrate the sheer scale of it (Secret Courts, discrimination against British families, the Gagging Law, privatising the profits and nationalising the losses, supporting the TTIP corporate power grab, the 'bungled' investigation into the Westminster paedophilia ring, Fracking conflicts of interest, The Liam Fox-Adam Werritty scandal, "Bedroom Tax", the ideological vandalism of the education system, wage repression, aspiration tax, sanctions league tables, Eric Pickles spending half a million quid on luxury limos, David Cameron's repeated lies, the NHS carve-up, stuffing the unelected House of Lords with Tory party donors, letting wealthy Tory party donors actually write legislation for them, David Cameron hiring a criminal like Andy Coulson as his adviser, the unlawful treatment of the mentally ill, the introduction of huge charges to bring unfair dismissal cases, the Tory war on justice, unlawful forced labour schemes, shocking abuses of parliamentary process, the Peter Cruddas scandal, countless multi-million pound DWP fuckups, and the demonstrable failure of austerity economics). It's no wonder that Russell Brand wanted to see the back of them, because who on earth wouldn't if they actually knew anything about all of that?
The lesser of two evils
The whole problem with backing the Labour Party, as most progressives already know, is that the party has only been offering a slightly watered down version of the same Thatcherite agenda as the Tories since the 1990s. There's no grand vision, no inspirational progressive agenda, just a strategically inept political platform of austerity-lite, which commits the cardinal error of accepting the premise of the opposing party (that the austerity con is even necessary in the first place) and thus allows them complete freedom to frame the spectrum of debate.
Not only is the Labour Party the lesser of two evils in reality when compared to the Tory Party, but by adopting austerity-lite as their policy platform they actually used 'but we're the lesser of two evils' as their 2015 election strategy!
How on earth the Labour Party leadership concluded that 'but we're the lesser of two evils' would play better with the electorate than the presentation of a clearly explained and evidence based counter narrative is absolutely beyond me. If they are that extraordinarily inept at running an election campaign, what good could they possibly be at actually running the country?
All in all, I think that pretty much everyone can agree that people continually voting for 'the lesser of two evils' is what has allowed Labour and the Tories to hold a duopoly on power that has now lasted so long that both parties have become hopelessly complacent, riddled with self-serving career politicians and virtually impervious to public opinion.
A demonstration of exactly how not to do politics
In my view, deciding to engage with a mainstream political party just days before a General Election is a demonstration of exactly how not to engage in party politics.
Party politics isn't like a shop that you visit every five years in order to buy a product, only making your mind up about which of them to buy in the very moment before you make your purchase. Politics is all about engagement, not about picking a side at the last minute and hoping that it wins.
Perhaps things would have been very different if, instead of advising his followers to actively disengage from party politics, Russell Brand had advised his followers to join the Labour Party en masse in order to work from within to turn it into a more left-libertarian and more progressive party. Then perhaps he could have personally worked with their communication team to help them craft a progressive message of hope, rather than a dour and gut wrenchingly dispiriting platform of 'lesser of two evils' austerity-lite.
Who knows if such an audacious plan would have defeated the Tory plan to fearmonger and bamboozle the English public into supporting them? However what we can be sure of is that a plan to flood the Labour Party with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of mainly young, mainly progressive new members would surely have produced a very different, and very much more engaging election campaign from the Labour camp than the pathetic, hopelessly uninspiring drivel that the two Eds served up.
The unprecedented SNP landslide victory in Scotland is a shining example that it is possible to achieve seismic political change with a mass membership political party full of politically motivated people uniting behind a clearly articulated message of hope.
Anyone who thinks that the Labour Party can't rise again from the ashes to become a progressive mass membership party it just wrong. If course it's totally fair to assert that you think it won't happen (in all likelihood you're right, and it won't), but you can't say that the idea is completely impossible, because if enough people want it to happen, and they elect the right leader to allow it to happen, then it will happen.
More harm than good
Russell Brand has a public image problem. Not only has he styled himself as a champion of the kind of liberal progressive politics that drives fear into the hearts of billionaire right-wing authoritarian propaganda barons like Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky) and Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), he's royally pissed one of them off by suing him and then making a big point of giving his winnings away to some of the other victims of the guy's powerful propaganda empire.
For all his talent at manufacturing a public image that has made him wealthier than most could ever imagine for themselves, he's utterly failed to see how the negative portrayal of himself in the right-wing propaganda sheets is another completely different public persona that is detrimental to any political campaign with which it is aligned.
Let's put it this way. Pretty much everyone who cares deeply about alleviating the suffering of others and stamping out political corruption would have been voting against the Tories anyway. We didn't need Russell Brand to spell it out for us that the Tories have been doing lots of unacceptable things, we damn well knew it already.
Now let's think about the average consumer of right-wing propaganda sheets (people who actually pay for their own indoctrination under the impression that they are 'just buying a newspaper'). Think about the fact that tabloids are written in very simple English, with very simple arguments for very simple people to rote learn and then mindlessly regurgitate in lieu of actually doing the hard work of doing the research and finding things out for themselves.
Think about the kind of person so hopelessly gullible that they still believe in the austerity con. The kind of person who believes that Liam Byrne's ridiculous 'no money left' letter was a serious admission that the UK was 'bankrupt'. The kind of person who thinks that an unflattering picture of a politician eating a sandwich constitutes some kind of magically decisive debate winning counter argument! The kind of person who believes that they've got to vote Tory in order to save themselves from the 'nasty Scottish woman' their propaganda sheet has taught them to fear (even though the very same propaganda sheet was actively endorsing her on the front page of their Scottish edition).
Now think of how this kind of person is going to react when confronted with the 'news' that a person they have been programmed to hate is endorsing the very same political party that their beloved daily propaganda sheet is constantly slagging off. They're quite obviously going to think "fuck that guy, I'm not letting him tell me how to think or what to do".
The idiocy of it is that they're unwilling to listen to one guy because their daily propaganda sheet has ridiculed him, but they're incapable of thinking about the wider picture, and the fact that by voting the other way they're simply doing the bidding of the much more powerful and much more skillfully manipulative guy (be that Rupert Murdoch or Jonathan Harmsworth).
I don't have the evidence to back it up, but I'm fairly convinced that Brand's blanket endorsement of the Labour Party will have cost them multiple times the votes they gained by it, simply because of the "fuck that guy" effect in people too lacking in awareness to think also think "fuck that guy" about Rupert Murdoch and Jonathan Harmsworth every time they see the blatantly biased coverage their daily propaganda sheets are trying to infect their minds with.
Get engaged properly
For me, the lesson from all of this is quite simple. If you're going to engage with the party political system at all, you need to choose a party early and invest some effort in making sure that it is set up to deliver what you want. Just leaving it until the last minute and then picking the 'lesser of two evils' options is completely the wrong way of doing it at the best of times, but when you've built a public reputation as a rejectionist, it comes across as hopeless confusion at best, and deliberate insincerity at worst - both of which can be used by your ideological enemies to ridicule your endorsement and convince people in droves to vote the other way.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
"You have obviously forgotten the 3 Day week, the endless strikes, the piles of rubbish in the streets, and the Union's [sic] doing there [sic] best to drive this country into oblivion"
This is my reply to his 'answer'.
Well you obviously haven't forgotten it have you? You've clearly totemised it in your mind to such an extent that now almost anything is acceptable in comparison, even the systematic abuse of disabled people.
What is worse is the fact that what you've written isn't even an attempt to defend what is happening now or to explain your decision to vote in favour of it, it's just a demonstration of 'whataboutery'.
All of that stuff that you harped on about happened decades ago (the Winter of Discontent is actually closer in history to WWII than it is to now), but the abuse of vulnerable and disabled people that I am talking about is happening right now.
I think you need to stop re-fighting the ideological battles of the 1970s and 1980s in your mind and try to get to grips with what has actually been happening for the last 36 years, and with the stuff that is actually happening now.
One of the ugliest things about the way you fixate on the past like that is the fact that your side won the ideological war decades ago. You got all of the deregulations and privatisations that you wanted; you got the centralisation of political power; you got the firesale and neglect of so much public housing; you got the destruction of so many workers rights and tenants rights; and you got the ideological ruination of the UK's heavy manufacturing sector. But despite the fact that you got what you wanted, you still won't let go of those familiar tabloid narratives about how much worse it all was back then. Back when people had job security, disposable income, tenancy rights, access to social housing and the like, and when hard working young couples could actually afford to buy their own homes, instead of being completely priced out of the market by an ugly and reckless property price speculation bonanza fueled by vast flows of debt spewing out of the dangerously deregulated private banks, even though both of them are working full-time jobs.
It's like you don't even understand that the genuine left was eviscerated by Murdoch and Thatcher. After this catastrophic defeat, the empty gutless husk of the left was picked up by a self-serving opportunist called Tony Blair who agreed to use it in order to continue Thatcher's right-wing economic project in return for support from Rupert Murdoch's vast media empire.
Blair's continuation of Thatcher's project eventually led to it's logical conclusion: A massive financial sector crash and the complete ideological refutation of the right-wing free market ideology when the governments on both sides of the Atlantic had no choice but to launch the biggest state sector interventions in economic history in order to bail out the stricken and debt riddled private banks.
Amazingly the Tories have managed to use this glaring refutation of their own free-market ideology as an excuse to launch an even more extremist version of it, which they have called 'austerity' and sold to the ever gullible English public by fearmongering about the size of the public debt.
This debt fearmongering campaign succeeded in terrifying the public into supporting ideological austerity even though the 'ever so scary' debt in 2010 wasn't even a quarter of the size of the public debt mountain after WWII, when somehow we could afford to found the NHS, establish legal aid, massively improve pensions, introduce disability benefits, rebuild and expanded public infrastructure, construct 200,000 new houses every year and much more as well.
In the post war period the government built and invested their way out of debt and created the foundations for the longest period of growth, economic stability and increasing prosperity for all sectors of society in the whole of British economic history.
By the time Thatcher put this period of state investment to a stop, the debt to GDP ratio had been decreased from 238% to just 43%. Now after 36 straight years of Thatcherite economics the debt is rising back towards 100% (200% if you include the costs of the bailouts and of PFI, both of which are carefully hidden off the public balance sheet).
Ideological austerity is a con. It makes no sense whatever from a macroeconomic perspective and the evidence is absolutely clear that it has failed in its own terms (unless of course you believe that the objective all along was to transfer ever more wealth to the super-rich minority).
Ideological across the board austerity severely hindered the post-crisis recovery (amazingly per capita GDP is still lower than it was before the crisis), the Tories didn't even manage to reduce the deficit by half when they promised that ideological austerity would have eliminated it already by 2015, and George Osborne ended up creating more new public sector debt in five years than every single Labour government in history combined.
Ideological austerity has coincided with one of the biggest upwards transferences of wealth in history (the richest 1,000 families in Britain literally doubled their wealth while the rest of us suffered the longest sustained decline in wages since records began). Ordinary workers have suffered badly, but the worst hit of all have been the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, which brings us back to where we began. Your recollections of ideological battles that happened decades ago have nothing to do with what is happening now (other that the fact that the ongoing abuse of the vulnerable and the disabled probably wouldn't be happening at all if right-wing free market lunacy hadn't eviscerated the left so thoroughly way back then).
You really need to stop living in the past. You need to stop refighting decades old ideological battles in your head and get to grips with what has been happening for the last four decades, and with what is happening right now.
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