My principal objection to the “approved” Labour Manifesto is not simply that there’s a gaping, uncosted maw in its spending promises but that there’s nothing “progressive” about it at all. On my albeit cursory reading, I see little to nothing about improving the UK’s dreadful productivity problems, nothing about stimulating growth, nothing about repealing badly drafted laws that needlessly curtail and undermine our liberties.
It seems to me to amount to a massive return to twentieth century State Socialism, which, when it wasn’t a complete human catastrophe as in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, was more or less complete economic failure. There will be a massive extension of an interventionist (interfering) State, which will mean more and more petty officials bossing people about over their diets, their child-rearing practices and their “unhealthy” lifestyles.
I’m personally dismayed, as I think an intelligent and agile opposition with sufficient numbers to hold the Government to account is essential. There’ll be a Tory landslide, because only middle class social justice warriors will vote for this guff. Labour’s traditional working class voters have not only dwindled in number, but they’ve been deeply put off by the modern Left’s obsessions with divisive and nasty multicultural identity politics.
They're sick of being accused of “ray-cism” by bourgeois metropolitan bohemians (who despise them) when they express concerns about mass immigration, which affects them disproportionately. Mass immigration not only makes it impossible to integrate newcomers with very different cultural practices, but poorer areas have been disproportionately affected by it (wealthy constituencies accept immigrants in the tens, while poorer areas like Salford accept them in the hundreds; that’s one sure way of making indigenous people feel very pissed off).
A rather perspicuous observation from Mr Charles Moore:
If a political party thinks it can win a general election, it writes its manifesto for the voters, especially the wavering ones. It tries to make it short, sweet and – except for a few key inducements – vague. If it has no such expectation, it writes it for its activists and its client groups.
It nurtures every bee in the party’s bonnet, and pretends that the resulting buzz comes from voter excitement. Labour’s manifesto is of this latter type.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/12/pm-m...lly-interchangeable/
As an old-fashioned George Orwell-style Leftist who sees liberty as a supreme virtue, I feel utterly dejected and disconsolate about the contemporary Left, who will, I predict, take a well-deserved trouncing at the General Election.
With a list of lamentations like this, perhaps I should change my name to Jeremiah.
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