I've been pottering around the blogscape for a few weeks now, reading various viewpoint blogs. Other than politically-induced bulimia, I have discovered (read, decided upon) the following.
'Left' and 'Right' are labels that are outdated, but still useful for people who belong to major political parties. But there is a thing called social policy. It's a relatively simple concept, although you can have it in various arenas. The more you lean on it, the more you are investing into a large-scale view of society rather than a small one. So a light social touch lets people do much as they please, under the assumption this will be 'good' in general. A heavy social touch tells people the exact framework in which they should work.
Now, there's a problem here that there are different concepts of 'good', from no person being left behind, to no person having to support others. Many of these concepts are mutually exclusive. But as far as I can work out, it boils down to 'I want' vs 'they want'. Ask anyone on an individual basis what they want and they will reply. Human beings know what they want. But they don't always know if they are giving as much as they are getting or more. To me, that would be an ideal society, assuming that the excess is used to expand society. (Yeah, Utopiansim. So shoot me. I didn't ssay it was /possible/.) That is the basic 'I want' level. But then people go away and think about how to get it, and somehow that translates to 'they want'.
One level of this is unionism, but the contemporary political spectrum tries to take this further, and tells people 'you want'. At which point I think something is broken, because people start to agree tamely.
However, there's a further problem of ignorance. People don't know what is good for them, long-term. Pay taxes now so your roads will still be functional 10 years from now? Who knows if you'll still have a car? Introduce immigration controls to stop skilled manual jobs going to foreigners? Who's going to do the cheap-ass jobs then? And these are just the headliners.
These are all complex problems, and they are not going to get better just because people vote more, or even if they hold their politicians to account. The huge and complicated snarl that is society cannot be understood by the man on the Clapham omnibus. If it could be, we'd be in a very different position.
Libertarians say (distillation here) that without state interference there would be more room for 'good'. You're wrong, you lot. Democracy may let people vote to fuck you with knives, but it keeps them from doing so without a vote. I've never met a libertarian who wasn't what I would term over-privileged. The only way your philosophy would work is after a massive eugenics program. You're assuming enough resources, as far as I can work out - and political systems assume there are /not/ enough. If they're wrong, the onus on you is to prove it.
Labour Parties (generalisation here) assume that people want to work, and want to contribute to society, but that the poor need help from the rich. To some degree, I agree with that. If I go into a bank and ask for credit, I have a far better chance than if my poor friends do. (I don't mind the poor! Some of my best friends are socially disadvantaged...) But it shouldn't cripple the rich, or even the well-off.
So if you want to avoid me being seriously pissed off, there has to be a lot more transparency. What /is/ the money I'm paying doing? I know you can't break it down pound by pound, but shouldn't money from Chelsea be spent in Chelsea?
Well, not all of it. There's a lot of money on the King's Road and not so much elsewhere, and if you let Chelsea keep its money because it's not needed in the direct area, then you have a tax haven. I am in favour of low taxes. I am also in favour of people paying those taxes. It's not about the nobility of the working class or the rights of man. It's about people not being so envious that they upset the whole system.
Conservatives say mostly that small changes are good, but right now I'm not going to address the Conservative agenda in the UK. I think it's lost its way.
So there you go. The levels of want. I want (but might be damaging) They want (but might be louder than they deserve) You want (but might be ignored). I come down on the side of those who say 'please'.
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatives. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Spot the Deliberate Mistakes
Mike Smith on the Labour List has written a bombastic and yet terrifying article about making policy into law. The Devil's Kitchen intends to boil it up later, but I'm going to take a quick look at it myself. I'd invite my readers to, but I don't have any readers. And anyway, there would be such an overlap between me and the DK if I did, that you'd all know about it.
So here are a few bits... Sentence 1: The Government needs to expand on Yvette Cooper's announcement last week and start to entrench our values and policies in law...
I admit, I missed the announcement. I had to go look it up. And then I had to go floss my head. But the concept of a government not entrenching values and policies in law seems a strange one to me. What have you been doing, boys? Sitting on your hands? You've had since 1997. I just pointed out my own view on this. Labour is the radical party that has done nothing radical this time round. I can't think offhand of much they have done. However, I admit to being only newly awakened from my dogmatic slumbers.
They want to to stop a potential Tory government undoing Labour’s achievements of the last decade. But Tory governments don't tend to dismantle what Labour governments create. That's what being a conservative is about. Small changes, not radical ones. And if the government makes a big swing or changes to society while you're in opposition? Best to leave it there unless you can prove it's broken.
That's just the first sentence. But it seems to me they are holding up the Tories as a threat there, so people will be motivated.
A bit later on: If Labour could shift the ‘centre ground’ of political debate left... New Labour achieved office because the Tories were on the downturn /and/ there was a shift to the right /by/ Labour. I don't know how much weight to give to either of those, but NL certainly didn't want to shift the ground to the left back then. I see this as an appeal to the working class. "We haven't abandoned you. We were just pretending to."
(I recall Blair shocking the Labour party by saying that they needed to be more Thatcherite - not just in their conviction politics, but actually in their economics. Alas, I can't cite this. If anyone /does/ read this blog and can help me, I'd love to know.)
The entirety of paragraph 2 makes sense if paragraph 1 is correct. Given that Labour had time to get into power and keep it, there is room for a swing to the left that drags politics along with it. But I don't believe it happened. I believe that Labour pandered to the working classes without giving them anything that could be supported. Remember, 'pander' is a work that means 'to pimp'. Increasing public spending is not left-wing. It is bribery. Left wing policies work to improve the safety net for the poor, and to make it more comfortable to land on and less inviting to stay on. Producing a class of NHS middle managers so that they can pay for your housing boom is not left-wing. So I attribute the 'hug a hoodie' campaign to Tory disarray, and a perception of the central ground having moved, not its actually having done so. Civil partnerships and environmental change were always going to be on the cards, and it was always likely that the conservatives would be dragging their feet on them. It was just 'steam engine time'.
Alright. Paragraph 3. Parliamentary sovereignty means that the British people have no fundamental rights and there are no laws which parliament cannot change or abolish with a simple majority. Apparently this is only a bad thing if the Tories are in power. The Terrorism Act is used to stop people on the streets if policemen have had a bad day. (See Eyes passim) That is one law that I really do not want enshrined any further. There are others, most of which have to do with my personal information being held by 300,000+ potential idiots.
... Given this, the Tory response to this ‘unprecedented’ crisis could be truly terrifying and hugely damaging. Crises are by their nature unprecedented. Otherwise they'd have known solutions. And yes, I think it will be a very damaging and painful experience. Amputation usually is, and we don't have the money left for anaesthetic. Or, to put it another way, the public sector is going to have to shed jobs until the Job Office bursts at the seams. And then there's still the balance of trade problem.
Paragraph 4 is basically Labour threatening to stab the football if they are put in goal. The proposals announced by Yvette Cooper to introduce a legal duty to tackle child poverty could provide a model to embed the gains made over the last 12 years. Last I looked UK child poverty was still shamefully high. 24th out of 29 European countries. At least we're better off than Lithuania. We are not going to hit the 2020 target of abolishing it. When that was announced, I thought it was a pipe-dream, but I'm veering towards idiotic statement of intent. And then a constitution for the health service and a requirement to provide certain levels of care... I'm going to leave that one alone. Everyone knows the current NHS system is moribund, and it needs taking out and shooting. And everyone knows that the new contract system happened under New Labour, and I'm pretty certain everyone knows that junior doctors don't get the time on the wards that they need any more either. And if I get off on a rant about this, it'll never stop.
What is being proposed is a general increase in public spending by providing more bureaucracy. I can't see another layer of systems improving efficiency, really I can't. It's like nailing go-faster stripes made out of wood onto a donkey. It doesn't help, and it's only satisfying for the people doing it.
Paragraph 5 is good 'tell 'em what you told 'em' stuff, thus revealing that Mike Smith studied essay-writing. It's preaching to the choristers - and given the current situation, it's preaching to those who have arrived despite the snow. Those are either the ones who really believe in God, or the ones who want to impress the choirmaster. People who go to LabourList are unlikely to be politically neutral. So what Mike is doing is helping them to word their own arguments, and telling them they are right to feel worried about the Tories, and they should spread the word. It's setting up the fight as Red vs Blue, Left vs Right. This is, to my mind, a bad thing.
So, not a fisk. But you do get a nice image of someone nailing things to donkeys to take home and try to forget.
So here are a few bits... Sentence 1: The Government needs to expand on Yvette Cooper's announcement last week and start to entrench our values and policies in law...
I admit, I missed the announcement. I had to go look it up. And then I had to go floss my head. But the concept of a government not entrenching values and policies in law seems a strange one to me. What have you been doing, boys? Sitting on your hands? You've had since 1997. I just pointed out my own view on this. Labour is the radical party that has done nothing radical this time round. I can't think offhand of much they have done. However, I admit to being only newly awakened from my dogmatic slumbers.
They want to to stop a potential Tory government undoing Labour’s achievements of the last decade. But Tory governments don't tend to dismantle what Labour governments create. That's what being a conservative is about. Small changes, not radical ones. And if the government makes a big swing or changes to society while you're in opposition? Best to leave it there unless you can prove it's broken.
That's just the first sentence. But it seems to me they are holding up the Tories as a threat there, so people will be motivated.
A bit later on: If Labour could shift the ‘centre ground’ of political debate left... New Labour achieved office because the Tories were on the downturn /and/ there was a shift to the right /by/ Labour. I don't know how much weight to give to either of those, but NL certainly didn't want to shift the ground to the left back then. I see this as an appeal to the working class. "We haven't abandoned you. We were just pretending to."
(I recall Blair shocking the Labour party by saying that they needed to be more Thatcherite - not just in their conviction politics, but actually in their economics. Alas, I can't cite this. If anyone /does/ read this blog and can help me, I'd love to know.)
The entirety of paragraph 2 makes sense if paragraph 1 is correct. Given that Labour had time to get into power and keep it, there is room for a swing to the left that drags politics along with it. But I don't believe it happened. I believe that Labour pandered to the working classes without giving them anything that could be supported. Remember, 'pander' is a work that means 'to pimp'. Increasing public spending is not left-wing. It is bribery. Left wing policies work to improve the safety net for the poor, and to make it more comfortable to land on and less inviting to stay on. Producing a class of NHS middle managers so that they can pay for your housing boom is not left-wing. So I attribute the 'hug a hoodie' campaign to Tory disarray, and a perception of the central ground having moved, not its actually having done so. Civil partnerships and environmental change were always going to be on the cards, and it was always likely that the conservatives would be dragging their feet on them. It was just 'steam engine time'.
Alright. Paragraph 3. Parliamentary sovereignty means that the British people have no fundamental rights and there are no laws which parliament cannot change or abolish with a simple majority. Apparently this is only a bad thing if the Tories are in power. The Terrorism Act is used to stop people on the streets if policemen have had a bad day. (See Eyes passim) That is one law that I really do not want enshrined any further. There are others, most of which have to do with my personal information being held by 300,000+ potential idiots.
... Given this, the Tory response to this ‘unprecedented’ crisis could be truly terrifying and hugely damaging. Crises are by their nature unprecedented. Otherwise they'd have known solutions. And yes, I think it will be a very damaging and painful experience. Amputation usually is, and we don't have the money left for anaesthetic. Or, to put it another way, the public sector is going to have to shed jobs until the Job Office bursts at the seams. And then there's still the balance of trade problem.
Paragraph 4 is basically Labour threatening to stab the football if they are put in goal. The proposals announced by Yvette Cooper to introduce a legal duty to tackle child poverty could provide a model to embed the gains made over the last 12 years. Last I looked UK child poverty was still shamefully high. 24th out of 29 European countries. At least we're better off than Lithuania. We are not going to hit the 2020 target of abolishing it. When that was announced, I thought it was a pipe-dream, but I'm veering towards idiotic statement of intent. And then a constitution for the health service and a requirement to provide certain levels of care... I'm going to leave that one alone. Everyone knows the current NHS system is moribund, and it needs taking out and shooting. And everyone knows that the new contract system happened under New Labour, and I'm pretty certain everyone knows that junior doctors don't get the time on the wards that they need any more either. And if I get off on a rant about this, it'll never stop.
What is being proposed is a general increase in public spending by providing more bureaucracy. I can't see another layer of systems improving efficiency, really I can't. It's like nailing go-faster stripes made out of wood onto a donkey. It doesn't help, and it's only satisfying for the people doing it.
Paragraph 5 is good 'tell 'em what you told 'em' stuff, thus revealing that Mike Smith studied essay-writing. It's preaching to the choristers - and given the current situation, it's preaching to those who have arrived despite the snow. Those are either the ones who really believe in God, or the ones who want to impress the choirmaster. People who go to LabourList are unlikely to be politically neutral. So what Mike is doing is helping them to word their own arguments, and telling them they are right to feel worried about the Tories, and they should spread the word. It's setting up the fight as Red vs Blue, Left vs Right. This is, to my mind, a bad thing.
So, not a fisk. But you do get a nice image of someone nailing things to donkeys to take home and try to forget.
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