'Sunak has largely refused to diverge from the EU; conversely, Starmer has promised not to rejoin the customs union or single market. The Brexiteers will be betrayed under Labour, but it is not clear by how much more than under the Tories. Legal immigration has surged dramatically; both parties are united in a technocratic belief that the public is best ignored on such matters. On Channel crossings, Labour may ditch Rwanda, but it will end up having to take drastic action, too.
'The Tories’ Left-wards drift continues to shock. Michael Gove is citing the Marxist economist Thomas Piketty and calling for “extracting what we need for public services from those who operate in a rentier fashion”. Jeremy Hunt, whose big idea was to lower the threshold at which the 45p tax rate kicks in, has resumed Sunak’s policy to appoint Left-wing, Remainer economists to top positions, including to the Monetary Policy Committee. Sushil Wadhwani, a member of his advisory council, wants a 100 per cent tax on pay rises above 3 per cent.
'Regardless of who wins, there will be no radical simplification of our absurdly complex tax system. The Civil Service will continue to be ever more openly Left-wing. The Bank of England will still misunderstand how the economy works, fuelling inflation and bubbles, precipitating busts and campaigning against Brexit and for net zero.
'In many ways, Labour is already in power.'
Labour in very many ways has been in power since 1997. Conservatives embrace equality as a good thing, want to tell companies how how many women should sit on boards, are happy for children to be given drugs to stop puberty, even want to ban the sale of fur coats. I could make a list of offences to last a hundred pages.
"I could make a list of offences to last a hundred pages"..I bet you could you boring irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteThe Conservatives have proved the old-style lefties right in one respect. These used to claim the Tories wanted to end the drift towards social equality that began around 1914. They were right. We are back to levels of social and economic inequality last seen before 1939. The prosperous and assertive working class I remember as a boy has vanished. The modern lower classes know their place. The upper and upper-middle classes have swollen mightily in numbers and income. They protect themselves against an immiserised proletariat by a set of crude intellectual and material tricks. Their intellectual trick is to claim that they are the final victory of the old egalitarians, and that the only legitimate activism remaining is to ensure equality for the ethnic and sexual minorities. If ordinary people freeze in the winter because of the green policies and the war with Russia, they shrug and look the other way. Their humanity only comes to life when a refugee drowns in the English Channel. The material trick has been to offshore most working class employment, to import so much diversity that a united resistance movement is now probably impossible – and, above all, to hobble protest with a totalitarian police state that Erich Honecker would have admired. I leave aside the Lockdown and its policing. I leave aside also the semi-forcible injection of the people with an unnecessary and dangerous “vaccine,” of which the producers – substantial donors to the Conservative Party – were exempted from criminal and civil liability for the knowable effects. These would swell a litany to an epic.
ReplyDeleteYes – thirteen years of Conservative Government, more destructive of our freedom and prosperity, and of our most basic identity, than leaving Gordon Brown in charge would have achieved.
Sean Gabb
73 Deal, Kent CT14 6HN
United Kingdom
Sean makes very good points but I think Mr Brown and the left would have been slightly worse. The real left (Corbyn) horrified the pseudo-left and the real right (Farage) horrifies the pseudo-right.
DeleteI agree with Sean but I'd add that it was Labour who pulled away the ladder that allowed working-class individuals to rise through education, namely the grammar schools. And while corporatism and offshoring destroyed the working class economically, it was the sexual revolution and drugs that destroyed them socially.
DeleteAnother factor was the entry of women into the workforce in large numbers - even before mass immigration, that was a flood of new entrants pushing down wages. And so it became necessary to have two incomes to attain a standard of living sufficient to bring up a family well, and men started to pair up with women who had good earning potential, so the population increasingly stratified by IQ, leaving an underclass at the bottom.
True.
DeleteThatcher’s term of office was marked by proposals for more local education authorities to close grammar schools and to adopt comprehensive secondary education. Although she was committed to a tiered secondary modern-grammar school system of education and was determined to preserve grammar schools, during her tenure as Education Secretary she turned down only 326 of 3,612 proposals for schools to become comprehensives; the proportion of pupils attending comprehensive schools consequently rose from 32 per cent to 62 per cent.
Delete(from Wikipedia)
Some would argue that corporations -- consolidated, global, and more powerful than ever -- pushed wages down and removed worker protections. Making it necessary for women to enter the labor force in order to contribute to stretched family incomes.
DeleteWomen's professional accomplishments led to stratification, but one can hardly blame women for skirting potential partners with no education or prospects.
Return to the UK and work for the change you desire. Your efforts will turn the country around.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same old story of failure - take the social policies of the left, mix with the economic policies of the 1980s right and dust with words such as technocracy and equity until nothing works at all.
ReplyDelete