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Re: A Plague of Terrorists
Posted by diogenes on 2026-February-23 21:11:53, MondayIn reply to Re: A Plague of Terrorists posted by Bromios on 2026-February-23 19:00:41, Monday
"Rradical centre" is meaningless to me. But anyway, I don't suppose I shall persuade you that neoliberalism has been a social disaster, but I shall just confine myself to a single point on which I have to contradict you.I don't buy your contention that the lower classes have been duped by clever oligarchs into voting against their interests. They know exactly who they're voting for and why.Let us be clear. In Britain, the policy of Reform (and the Conservatives, if anyone still cares what they think) is to tear up the ECHR (the European Convention on Human Rights), in order to deal more effectively with migrants. Doing this will remove ECHR rights from every UK citizen; it explicitly removes limitations to the exercise of state power, so I don't know how you characterise this as 'small government'. But the ECHR is actually embedded in the post-Brexit trade treaties between Britain and the EU. To scrap human rights for British citizens, rights to a family life and to privacy for example, will have consequences for trade, because it amounts to a cancelling of these treaties. Furthermore, Farage has unveiled a series of policy proposals that will target EU citizens in the UK for extra taxes and punishments. This is not just provocative; it is illegal. The EU will have to respond with trade sanctions or every third country will know that it can break its treaty obligations with the EU with impunity. In addition, Reform has said that it wants substantial negative net migration. It has announced that it plans to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants, when hundreds of thousands of young native Britons are already emigrating as a result of the cost of living crisis. At the same time, Reform will encourage elderly expats to return to Britain. In other words, it will decrease the numbers of working age people in the UK in absolute numbers whilst increasing the numbers of pensioners. The inevitable result of the deliberate shrinking of the tax base is that taxes will rise on working people (further diminishing the fertility of the population as families become even less affordable) and the pension age will be raised so that working people will have to wait longer before they can retire. I'm sorry, but this is not in the interest of working class people. And I've only just scratched the surface here. The right have policies targeted at legal migrants, which will impact migrants working in the NHS (and around a fifth of NHS workers are migrants), and working class people rely very much on the NHS. The policies championed by the right will diminish life expectancy. Under the Right's policy of Yankification, consumer rights and worker rights will be eroded. Again, working people do not own the means of production, they are consumers and workers, so all this will negatively impact them. Britain has a higher life expectancy than the US because we are not like the US – we have better food because there is more regulation, rather than everything being geared to the interests of the capitalists. We have way more workers rights; Britons work to live, not live to work, and everything is more relaxed than in the US. When rightists talk of small government they mean small for the rich and the super-rich. But Farage knows that his regime will have to be enforced. So he plans to create thousands of new prison places. He wants to introduce a version of ICE into Britain, introducing all the barbarism we've seen unfold in the US. How this is consistent with a regard for human decency, let alone liberty, is a mystery to me. And what about the liberty to live and work anywhere in Europe, which was taken from British citizens by the right and by Farage when they persuaded a majority to vote for Brexit? The upshot of all this is that 'small government' means lower taxes for the rich who happen also to be the ruling class; but it means a considerably expanded role for the state in the lives of the poor who are not part of the ruling class. It means higher taxes, fewer rights, poorer health, lower life expectancy, and harder lives. I therefore dispute your claim that the oligarchs have not duped working class people into voting against their interests. This is exactly what they have done, and will continue to do. Now, I don't know who you mean by the left. With regard to liberals like Blair and such, they accepted the Thatcher economic revolution as a done deal. The labour movement in Britain was crushed by Thatcher, and this was reflected in the capture of the Labour Party by the corporate oligarchy and its ceasing to be a vehicle for working class interests (except in the period under Corbyn). These people have always pushed the neoliberal agenda. They don't want to change the system. They want more blacks, more women, more gays, etc. in positions of economic and political power, in order to legitimise their rule, first of all in their own eyes, and secondly, in the eyes of the governed. But what they don't want is any redistribution of wealth or power. Anyway, I don't want to extend this any further, and I shan't spend any further time on this thread, but I just wanted to say how much I disagree with the notion that the policies that have been espoused by the Thatcherites, the Blairites, the neoliberals, and now the far right, are in the interests of the working class. They are directly contrary to the interests of working people, and always have been.  |
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