In thinking that Left = Good and Right = Bad has gone too far?

[WilmaFlintstone1]

A few things have made me pause in the last few days and I realised I have become increasingly irritated by the Left vs Right discourse,

Take the recent spat between Lee Anderson and Jack Monroe. Now neither of them covered themselves in glory but I don’t think demonising him because he is Tory and praising Jack because she is a Lefty is right. They both have deep flaws and neither is getting it right.

The Margaret Thatcher statue is another thing. Why are people pelting it with eggs? Firstly in a country where there are food shortages it’s immoral to be doing this. Secondly I am not getting the wholesale glee with which certain commentators are reporting it. The very woke lot being all “hey, people are selling eggs by the statue” to wholesale amusement. I just keep thinking “FFS get over yourselves.”

Now I hated Margaret Thatcher BUT she was the first female PM which was in itself a massive step forwards. I am not about to go pelting her statue with eggs, yes I’d rather the investment has been put into local services in that community but pelting a statue with eggs won’t change that.

Its become as though some people will pass any behaviour because it’s Lefties sticking it to the Right.

For removal of all speculation I’d probably consider myself a Lefty and they tend to get my vote…for what that’s worth in my heavily Blue area

isn’t it possible that there are deep flaws both sides?

Just to add that, pre Blair, spending on welfare as a proportion of GDP peaked at 12.5% (under John Major). Under Blair/Brown, it dropped to around 11-11.5% for a decade (which is where it had been for much of Thatcher’s reign!)

There was, however, a spike to 14% during the global financial crisis (attributable to a rapid rise in unemployment, rather than the expansion of the welfare state).

I’m sure the above is a bit simplistic, but the notion the Blair and Brown essentially created the welfare state is an odd one.

Fluval don't go confusing the faithful with actual facts!

It’s not just odd, it’s bonkers. Particularly since the very first act of the Blair government after it was elected was to cut single parents’ benefits. I vividly remember shouting at the radio when it was announced.

Yup - www.independent.co.uk/news/blair-backs-harman-over-cut-in-loneparent-benefit-1295256.html?amp

All part of Blair/Brown’s drive to get people off benefits and into the workforce.

If every nmw worker suddenly "worked harder and improved themselves" you'd either lose your cheap labour completely or have to increase their wages to a point you stop making a profit and remember in capitalism it isn't enough to just maintain profit it has to always grow.
When labour costs are too expensive, businesses have to innovate to improve productivity. Fewer staff, paid better to do the tasks which require creative thought, and automation to do the repetitive work.

Anything to continue the Ponzi scheme.

The point to note here is that automation has been destroying jobs for years and people spend longer in education and training. Yet there has been no reduction in NMW jobs and wages generally have been stagnant across this time.

I know this is controversial but many things caused Brexit. Populism, racism, xenophobia, misplaced nostalgia, lies told by the victors*, scapegoating Brussels and Cameron's blundering get mentioned all the time.

But if Scotland had voted for independence in 2014 all the above reasons would have also applied in modified form. You never hear about that. And the pro-independence campaign also relied on self-determination, control of their own affairs, long-standing desire for independence and a referendum on the subject and their right to choose it. These were also reasons given for Brexit.

Because Britain's intelligentsia is overwhelmingly pro-Remain they don't want to acknowledge that Brexit - right or wrong - was always going to happen eventually and it was a long time coming.

*Johnson's tendentious bus slogan was nowhere near as much of a lie as the Indy claim that they had legal advice saying an independent Scotland would stay in the EU, nor was the claim as critical.

Because Britain's intelligentsia is overwhelmingly pro-Remain they don't want to acknowledge that Brexit - right or wrong - was always going to happen eventually and it was a long time coming.

I think they were optimistic. They believed that logic, reason and truth would out and the people of the UK would vote Remain for all the right reasons. They underestimated the impact of Austerity, years of Europe/foreigners being blamed for everything (often by our current PM) in the press, the medacicity of the Conservative party and avarice of its leaders.

And I dont think anyone predicted the response to being urged not to trust people who had studied stuff and knew a lot about it experts. Like, WTAF was that about? 🤦‍♀️

I think we’re still in the “we don’t believe in experts” phase (see also, the pandemic).

The pandemic cemented the "don't listen to experts" narrative in the minds of some and created a demographic of folk whose non-compliance defines them.

The UK is fucked.

The full quote was "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."

And this was said in the long aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, caused by a mass failure of economics. Gove is a twat, but he wasn't wrong about that. There were a lot of people getting it wrong including him.

Political debate has become pretty screechy on all sides. Just look at the way Gove was being interviewed when he said that.

I appreciate that this came up on the topic of Brexit, and so that Gove quote is of a lot of relevance in that context, but the rejection of experts over the last decade or so isn’t an exclusively British phenomenon, and the attitude obviously didn’t start with Gove.

I’ll be lazy and point the finger of blame at social media, but happy to defer to an expert 😁

One of the things that always strikes me with this sort of left=good idea is how reductive it is. For one thing it seems to see left and right in a very cherrypicked way, certain commentators mentioned, others not. Always the best of the leftist thinkers and the worst of the conservatives. And sometimes quite reductive categories around both too.

Or in other cases doesn't really even seem to admit that there is a wider field of thought that consititutes these positions, it's just a listing of various policies by various parties that the person speaking approves or disapproves of.

I also find that people who say things like that often don't really know the most serious arguments made by conservative thinkers. There are always all kinds of people on both sides who have less than compelling reasons for their views, or they don't really articulate their views well, or sometimes they just seem crazy or horrible. But in most cases those aren't really the viewpoints that need answering or are really productive to engage with. Brexit is a good example, there are a number of reasons a reasonable person might support it, but probably the most important conservative argument, and the one many of the others are rooted in, has to do with seeing the nation state as currently the most effective form for liberal democracy and really representing the political autonomy of people and groups. Which is a perfectly justifiable opinion that many political philosophers would agree with, which has nothing to do with xenophobi ad is arguably a kind of opposite to imperialism, and many people feel intuitivly to be the case though they can't always express it easily.

Then of course it also ignores the history that suspicion of the EU was once a characteristic view on the left, rather than the right. If left= good, what happened there?!

A mature political discourse can't happen when that kind of position is simply dismissed as bad, and a lot is lost when we can't try and hash these ideas out, or can't open ourselves up to the possibility of being convinced, because then we'd be evil people.

Similarly the idea that conservative people don't care about others - there are plenty of people who show that to be completely false. The point of contention typically is about what kind of society will ultimately be best for people. Take someone like Glen Loury in the US, who argues that the welfare state increased significantly the number of children born outside of wedlock, who then are at far greater risk of poverty and other ills related to that, and is quite happy to crunch the numbers on that. He's a kind man, and he doesn't hold that opinion to be a jerk but because he thinks it describes a real social problem that makes people's lives worse.

That's a great comment MangyInseam

Regarding experts - yes, they're frequently wrong. Aside from politics , everyone is aware of mad swings in expert opinion in, say diet or parenting tactics. And everyone knows how institutional corruption works, and power differentials and office politics and they don't believe experts are immune from those forces.
There's a class element at play too, experts are middle class and up, and seen as constantly interfering in the ordinary practices of everyone else. When you try and change someone else's ways there's a tacit disdain in there. Or that's how it feels to be on the receiving end.
I've seen the whole 'nudge' approach to social engineering described as a kind of internal colonisation. (Can't remember where, but it stuck with me)
It's really hard to pinpoint and it's really hard to articulate, but the intuitive resistance to it is real.
The small c conservative mindset will instinctively clash against change that is mandated, in however subtle a manner, on theorising rather than experience.

I think it's a natural instinct that can't be eradicated so sneering at such people for being evil or xenophobic or whatever won't help.

Another part of this is that we live in iconoclastic times. There is this desire to smash up the tried and tested.

Which is by essence anti-conservative: and in fact a lot of people on 'the right' aren't conservatives at all. My idea of a conservative would be Matthew Parris, Roger Scruton or the Pope. But not Steve Bannon, Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.

Great post by mangyinseam. I read it three times.

Part of the difficulty is that in politics, both the left and the right now include significant liberal elements which aren't really characteristic of those viewpoints. It can be really difficult to distangle economic liberalism from political conservative parties and social liberalism from leftist parties, and a lot of those are also very economically liberal now too.

There are some similarities between leftism and conservatism that are both on the opposite side of liberalism, and all the more so if you mean communitarian types of leftism rather than socialist state types. The switch of many workers to conservative parties across the west reflects that to a significant degree.

Another round of applause for @MangyInseam. My views, expressed and often shouted down here, spring from exactly that set of perspectives. I flip-flopped back and forth over the EU referendum because whilst I voted to join and stay in originally in the 1970s, the Maastricht Treaty kicked off a completely new direction of travel. I still think freedom of trade, travel and work is a splendid ideal, but Brussels was aiming towards a European super-state, and I preferred to have more of a voice as a voter which was impossible with the huge Euro-constituencies.

XingMing that is a viewpoint I can fully agree with, and many people I know did vote Leave for the same reasons. I can respect that and disagree at the same time. I'd class myself as on the left, but I'm a pragmatist at heart and so the Momentum brand of left is something I have no time for. However, I have even less time for the brand of right our current government is pursuing. I still vote in Dutch elections (we don't lose our right to vote after a vertain number of years) and I usually veer between D66 and PvdA, who are both reasonably pragmatic and slightly left of centre.

Centrist 'One Nation' Tories are horrified by the behaviour of the current shower, and hardly enamoured of the policies either. The political centre is shamefully under-represented by the grand-standers on left and right. I really don't know who I would vote for if there was an election tomorrow.

This is very true. However I definitely know who I won’t vote for. If there was a box for Anyone but the Tories, my X would go in that one. I really can’t bear the thought of any more of this.

I know and like our likely Lib Dem candidate personally and put his placard up last time, but he and his wider family are a bit XReb.

I also liked the Labour candidate on paper, but didn't meet, because he never bothered to do any canvassing.

The incumbent Tory doesn't seem to talk to voters at all.

So on balance, if they can't be bothered to canvas the doorsteps and talk to voters, I am likely to fall back on the people who won't change things radically. I'm not rich, nor poor, and I'm not expecting my life to be transformed, but I don't get anything from the state that I haven't paid into.

I would add, that I don't expect to get anything I haven't paid for either.

There was a really good podcast on the BBC called The Coming Storm. It's about how Trump's attempted putsch was fermented on the Internet, and how it means times are likely to remain more turbulent, in the same way that the invention of the printing press caused political upheaval*. Well worth a listen. I wouldn't want to spoil the plot, but it suggests the Qanon conspiracy was originally caused by a 4chan joke.

This is the environment that politicians and their voters exist in now, one that doesn't encourage civil, informed debate.

*It's a scary comparison, ie, wars across Europe, including one that caused more deaths in Britain and Ireland than either world war. If you blame them on the printing press.