UK Politics

(similar smoke-and-mirrors nonsense which drives me mad: brown the secret socialist vs blair the secret thatcherite)

Blair's Thatcherite tendencies are surely no secret.

Mature public debate (and therefore democracy) does not exist in the UK. Not sure it ever has.

i also think mark steel is part of the problem not part of the solution, and wish HE had turned every one of his columns into just three neat sentences and let someone else have a go

That's Tory enough for me to denounce them. The "at least they're not the other lot" arguments don't wash wiv me no more.

However, the government is doing very little to tackle the issues that face most young people (18-30 year olds). University tuition fees + spiralling house prices + the end of final salary pension schemes = a whole generation of much poorer, more debt-ridden people. Maybe the case is that because most young people don't vote, they can be walked all over.

At the same time, Labour have done nothing to try and prevent MDs awarding themselves non-performance-related pay increases.

So perhaps Brown has tried to tackle the problems of the British underclass, but inequality in UK society is getting worse. Particularly in London...

the thing that drives me mad is the idea that Blair is small-c conservative: he is essentially social democratic Labour - dogmatic socialist Labour + Thatcherite (after literal conservatism had already been subtracted from the Tory party)

This is terrible!

I think there's two strands going on with the Brown eulogisation; there's the entirely reasonable view that Brown is, as Hattersley put it in his column this week, 'a Labour man'. He has an understanding of the party, it's members and it's historic mission. This view is independent of what Brown actually does in office.

The second takes the above feeling and mutates Brown into Red Gordon, as opposed to Tory Tony. This is pretty unsustainable IMO, and indicates the way in which the party has moved to the right. Despite Brown's intransigence over PPP/PFI, despite the single-parent benefit cuts, despite the adherence to Conservative spending plans, that some believe Brown to be 'Red' is an act of desperation that indicates the despair at Blair and his coterie.

The interesting aspects - usually missed by the Press - are the way in which the first position maps onto a real divide within the party - between New Labour and Labour; between the Kinnock bunker acolytes and the Smith faction. Smith's legacy - and why the grief in the party was utterly genuine - was his style. He was inclusive and had an affection for the Labour Party that extended to all the viewpoints to be found within it. Blair, like Kinnock before him, didn't share that view. Whilst ideologically speaking Brown might not be the secret commie some would have him, he's straight out of the Smith tendency and for that reason alone, I'd much prefer him to be leader and PM.

I read what Euan Ferguson had to say in Sunday's Observer about the Lib Dems "rebranding" their policies and drawing a parallel between that and the "Santa hats" worn by disconsolate pub staff at Xmas, in the mistaken corporate belief that this will entice punters in, when in reality more often than not it drives them away. Ditto with the Lib Dems. I would like to go back to the situation where all the parties adhere to what they were originally set up to do and stick with it. If they continue to set their policies in order to please Paul Dacre or Conrad Black's leader writers, then they will deserve neither my pity nor my vote.

Sirs, you can be sure that the abolition of the Corn Laws and the opposition of Whiggery in all its forms will remain forever the guiding light of myself and all those who share my beliefs.

What was "Manchester Liberalism"? I've always been interested in the idea, because Manchester's political history intrigues me no end: just cited it in the revived "Miracle of the Smiths" thread on ILM relating to Morrissey's essential puritan socialism, but I find it significant that Moz didn't take a strong political-socialist position himself (he was anti-Thatcher, yes, but seemed to call only for a vague, ill-defined alliance of outsiders and individualists to somehow depose her) because I've never thought of Manchester to be the sort of ULTIMATE unionised Old Labour heartland that the other towns and cities created by the Industrial Revolution became. It certainly doesn't have the Communist history (AFAIK) of South Wales and the Scottish central belt.

I once saw the phrase "Manchester school" or something similar used relating to what the old-school paternalist Torygraph columnist T.E. Utley couldn't relate to in Keith Joseph's thinking, so I assume it was economically laissez-faire but morally hardline (as opposed to the balance of gentle social liberalism with cultural and ecomomic protectionism that someone like Utley believed in).

Marcello is very close to the truth, as ever ... but perhaps modern society is too rootless for Labour to ever again represent the massed, collectivised working classes or for the Conservatives to once again speak for a desire to keep everything pretty much the same. Doncaster and Sherborne 40 years ago were, respectively, puritan socialist and romantic Tory places: you look at old film now and you can sense the very smell in the air, the dress of the people, even the way they walk. Are there any comparable experiences today? It seems to me that the main reason why both Labour and Tory parties are more concerned with electability than with their own traditions is that those traditions no longer exist. At least the Lib Dems are, for all their faults, both liberal and democratic. The Green Party, SNP and Plaid Cymru also have pretty self-explanatory names, even if the voters don't necessarily seem to agree.

Also, university tuition fees could (if the goverment has its way) be an issue that matters to the majority of school leavers.

it is startling to recall that the first Tory cabinet minister sacked by Thatcher for being too much of a "wet" (Ian Gilmour, 1981) had actually been more supportive of free-market economics than many of the old backbench traditionalists only 16 years earlier - he had called for licenced commercial radio in 1965, when the Tories took up the pirates' cause as a reaction to the Labour govt, and especially postmaster-general Tony Benn, attacking them on state-socialist grounds (Benn later denounced Radio Caroline as "early Thatcherism").

in fact, the Tory MP who held Peterborough by three votes in 1966, Sir Harmar Nicholls, had chaired a commitee a year or so earlier recommending licenced commercial radio on land. he was a director of Radio Luxembourg, who made most of their programmes in London and would probably have bid for a UK licence had they been offered in the mid-60s; his own business concerns were clearly his highest priority. moments like this are the roots of the 1980s, and everything after.