Margaret Thatcher and her heirs have created a selfish and divided society (David Hare)

[Ghost Dog]

Last edited Tue Mar 8, 2016, 09:10 PM - Edit history (1)

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... But it is not the case that everything was in chaos until 1979, since when everything has been bliss. The 1970s were disputatious times, times of profound and often bitter argument. Living through them was not easy, and a lot of us suffered wounds that took years to heal. But the political discussions we were having – in particular about how the wishes of working-class employees could be more creatively taken into account – were about important things, things that, disastrously, present-day politicians disdain to address...

... You may say that the party aims, like all such parties, to keep the well off well off. That, never forget, is any rightwing grouping’s conservative mission, which will offer a blindingly simple explanation for the larger part of its behaviour. And for obvious reasons, the money party in this particular culture has also aimed to perpetuate the narcotic influence of the monarchy. But with these two exceptions, it is hard to think of any area of public activity – education, justice, defence, health, culture – which any of the last seven Conservative governments have been interested in protecting, let alone conserving. On the contrary, they have preferred a state of near‑Maoist revolution, complaining that, in an extraordinary coincidence, almost every aspect of British life except retail and finance is incompetently organised. Who could have imagined it? And after all those dominant Conservative governments! In this belief, they have launched waves of attacks against teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen and women, soldiers, social workers, civil servants, local councillors, firefighters, broadcasters and transport workers – all of whom they openly scorn for the mortal sin of not being financiers or entrepreneurs...

,,, The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher. Whatever your view of her influence, she was different from her predecessors in her degree of intellectuality. She was unusually interested in ideas. Groomed by Chicago economists, she believed that Britain, robbed of the easy commercial advantages of its imperial reach, could thenceforth only prosper if it became competitive with China, with Japan, with America and with Germany. For this reason, in 1979, a crackpot theory called monetarism was briefly put into practice and allowed to wreak the havoc that destroyed one fifth of British industry. As soon as this futile theory had been painfully discredited, Conservative minds switched to obsessing on what they really wanted: the promotion and propagation of the so-called free market. If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism.

It is painful to point out how completely this grafting of foreign ideas onto the British economy has failed. The financial crash of 2008 dispelled once and for all the ingenious theory of the free market. The only thing, ideologues had argued, that could distort a market was the imposition of unnecessary rules and regulations by a third party, which had no vested interest in the outcome of the transaction and that was therefore a meddling force that robbed markets of their magnificent, near-mystical wisdom. These meddling forces were called governments. The flaw in the theory became apparent as soon as it was proved, once and for all, that irresponsible behaviour in a market did not simply affect the parties involved but could also, thanks to the knock-on effects of modern derivatives, bring whole national economies to their knees. The crappy practices of the banks did not punish only the guilty. Over and over, they punished the innocent far more cruelly. The myth of the free market had turned out to be exactly that: a myth, a Trotsykite fantasy, not real life...

... Even disciples of Milton Friedman in Chicago were willing to admit the scale of the rout. They openly used the words “Back to the drawing board”. But in an astonishing act of corporate blackmail, the banks themselves then insisted that they be subsidised by the state. The very same taxpayers whom they had just defrauded had to dig in their pockets to pay for the bankers’ offences. Although state aid could no longer be tolerated as a good thing for regular citizens, who, it was said, were prone to becoming depraved, spoilt and junk-food-dependent when offered free money, subsidy could still be offered, when needed, on a dazzling scale, to benefit those who were already among our country’s most privileged and who were, by coincidence, the sole progenitors of its economic collapse. What a stroke of luck! Socialism, too good for the poor, turned out to be just the ticket for the rich...

/... http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/08/david-hare-why-the-tory-project-is-bust

[daleanime]

1. Bookmarked

[LeftishBrit]

2. k&r

Apart from all else: I think that one problem in politics is that people in power rarely recognize the need that most people have for security. Most people are not serious gamblers: they would rather have a smaller but secure income than chronic insecurity with the possibility of high gain (obviously it depends to some extent on the probabilities and amounts involved). Economies generally work the same way!

Politicians, high-ranking media people, and top entrepreneurs and bankers are generally people who have themselves chosen high-profile, high-stakes, insecure careers. They may really be motivated by risk, and inhibited by too much security, so they think it's the same for everyone! A large part of it is that they mostly start out richer than most, and can thus literally afford to take more risks: Trump was able to survive a business bankruptcy or two because of the money he'd inherited; Cameron and Osborne would not go without groceries if they lost their ministerial posts or even their seats. And part of it is having something of a gambler's personality.

And it has led to an insecure 'non-tenured society', disastrous for people and disastrous for economies. And of course much more disastrous for poor people than rich people, for reasons implied in the last paragraph: thus reinforcing and increasing existing class differences in the name of 'meritocracy'.

It is even worse when it gets mixed with the so-called 'compassionate conservativism' of the likes of Duncan-Smith, who think that poor people are not only failures at the competitive game, but actively immoral, and that they need to be disciplined out of their poverty. As this article implies, this results in libertarianism for the rich and authoritarianism for the poor.

[Nihil]

4. Good points there LB. (nt)

[Bad Dog]

3. The 1970s was more of a meritocracy than today.

Thatcher robbed the Unions of hard fought rights and Cameron wants to go one step further. The Government is dominated by public school toffs and kids born in a sink estate have little to no chance of ever moving out.

[Ghost Dog]

5. '60s Grammar School boy here. Never took it for granted.

Free, at point of service, the first university degree too, '73-'76.

Unfinished business...



Please add thoughts, images from your experience. And, btw, vive la France, eternelle...