Well, it depends what you / John Lydon mean by “the left“ and “the right”. You might think it’s obvious but I don’t think it is, because few people now understand what socialism means, the Labour party is eager to distance itself from socialism and few people understand what the old-fashioned Conservative party stood for. Those demarcations seem to have blurred. What is becoming apparent is that people want change, the two party system is fragmented and the electorate will vote for whoever they think is going to bring some sort of change, even though that change isn’t defined by the people they are voting for, except in the most vague and populous terms. That means they will swing wildly across a political spectrum according to whom they think is going to provide this change.
So, who is it that you say is snivelling? Politicians? Journalists? Neighbours and friends? I’m left-wing and I’m not snivelling afaik. Obviously, I’m no litmus test but I’m intrigued by this description.
There’s also the fact that the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that what was regarded as being mainstream at the time John Lydon was in his prime is now wildly to the left of centre. I don’t regard him as any credible or informed political commentator, in any event.
I have no interest in what is either cool or uncool in politics, and I am deeply suspicious of anyone who thinks that this is any sort of important measure. Does it even referred to any political ideology? Does this just mean what is popular at the moment?
What I do think is dangerous is that in the uk, we are copying the United States habit of referring to “the left“ and “the right”, with a degree of rigidity and certainty that doesn’t reflect our current political landscape. What those terms mean in the United States is not what is usually meant by those terms here. We just have a different political history and it cannot be said that we now have a two party system of left/right.
People really haven’t had a serious debate about what sort of society we want, what our values are and what we’re prepared to do to achieve them. since the end of the Second World War. I notice in local online discussion groups and online, that taxation is often regarded as almost on a level with robbery by some people yet at the same time there’s an expectation the infrastructure will be maintained by the local authority and the government, accompanied by indignation when services aren’t provided, when when elderly people, the sick and so on aren’t looked after and school buildings are unusable. They’re still a belief that there should be a safety net for people who are out of work at the very same time as people out of work are being labelled as skivers. They’re just so many contradictions in what people think they want. Do we, for example, want a nationwide and comprehensive education system where parents are happy to send their children to the local school, or not? Or is it more important to maintain private schools and divide up children according to whose parents can pay and whose cannot? As an example.
Lastly, people are very uncertain about the future. The rich are getting very much richer while the rest of us are getting poorer, even whilst many who regard themselves as well off don’t understand that in real terms they are becoming poorer and their children will struggle and less they inherit a lot.
As Gary Stevenson has said, we don’t have a capitalist society now we have an inheritocracy i.e. wealth is retained in rich (£billions) families and passed down, wealth is not reliably created for the average person by hard work. We have a truly unequal society that is getting more and more unequal and, consequently, more and more unhealthy and unstable. . This ferments dangerous social unrest. Working hard at an average job will no longer feed, clothes and house a family as it would’ve done 50 or 60 years ago. Unless you can leave your child around £1 million, they’re not going to be able to house themselves with any degree of comfort or security. In these increasingly desperate circumstances, disparaging people of different views gets us nowhere..
We urgently need more views and more discussion. It really does not assist anyone to describe people whose opinions you don’t agree with as “snivelling“. I certainly don’t think that people are feeling shamed, though I also don’t know what they would be ashamed of and how.