Labour Isn’t Working

Enoch Powell once said, "All political lives end in failure", and what is true of individual politicians seems to be true of governments as it is also often said that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. We all know how the Callaghan government lost power for Labour the last time ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ back in the 70s. We also know that Labour has lost the next election too, alienating so much of its support, people like me – for example – who can now never vote for them again, despite having voted for them at every election (local and national) since I became old enough to vote back in 1977.

However, what has surprised me was reading this:

The root trouble was really the wider disaffection of middle opinion (not necessarily middle-class opinion) against a programme of ‘consolidation’ which at best was drab and puritanical, and at worst illiberal and restrictive of individual choice.*

This quote doesn’t refer to the current government, although it could well, do, nor does it refer to the Wilson/Callaghan era of Labour governments either; it does in fact refer to the infamous post-war Labour government just before it lost the 1951 election.

So, what I think is interesting about this is not the fact that the Labour governments end up losing an election at some point (as – I suppose all governments must do eventually), but the fact that they seem to end up losing them for the same reason each time.

It seems the world over (except the USA for some reason) people are constantly seduced by the left-wing ideal of fairness, justice, equality and so forth. However, they always end up with something ‘drab and puritanical, and at worst illiberal and restrictive of individual choice’ every single time. It has happened so often throughout history, it seems that we can no longer escape the conclusion that this… this ill-liberality is inherent in the left, that it cannot exist without this enforcement of people into the right shape for its ideology.

If the people are lucky, though, they can – like the UK – vote them out… eventually. Others, like Cuba and North Korea are not so lucky, like the Russians and East Europeans earlier, and the Chinese soon – we hope – they have to wait for the regime to collapse.

*Pge:104 Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace – Kenneth O. Morgan OUP.

Notes and Comments: 27/03/2008

NOTES:

A very good article by Rodger Kimball about how the wonderful 1960s, especially that ‘very good year’ 1968, weren’t. An edited version of it appears at The Grauniad’s CiF where I added this comment:

My comment:

Excellent article!
Right on the spot, expect for this 'the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom', when everyone knows that religion has nothing meaningful to say about morality. It is - at best - amoral, but more usually is the very antithesis of morality as the current hoo-ha about the embryology bill proves.

There are several points in the article concerning the mythology of the 60s and the disasters that the mistakes form that period caused that I want to get back to some time in future pieces here. However, this will have to do for now.

Here’s one I’ve had hanging around for a while:

The joy of boredom, link from Arts Journal:

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next. Ralley has noticed a kind of placid look among his students over the past few years, a "laptop culture" that he finds perplexing. They have more channels to be social; there are always things to do. And yet people seem oddly numb. They are not quite bored, but not really interested either.’

A long piece, but interesting about how we seem to be losing the space to be ourselves to technology.

COMMENTS:

Low voter turnout in an article at The Grauniad’s CiF by James Ball

My comment:

I think most 'non-voters' are like me in having no-one on the ballot paper they want to vote for.

I have always voted Labour in the past (latterly in spite of Blair, not because of him), but now my conscience will no longer allow me to vote for them any longer. I don't see the point of the Lib Dems, let alone any of the even smaller parties and I don't envisage myself ever being capable of voting Tory (let alone with the odious Cameron in charge).

So what can I do?

The only option in future elections that would get me into the voting booth would be a 'none of the above' option with severe penalties for candidates and parties whose share of the vote falls below the total for the 'none of the above' option.

The Celebrity World Meta-Fiction

Here’s an interesting article by Marina Hyde at The Grauniad’s CiF site on the McCartney and Mills show. I believe she has only touched on the most important aspect of the thing and so I added this comment:

Well, Marina, you have hinted at it in your piece, but what many people do not seem to realise is that the whole of - what we might call - the 'celebrity world' is a form of fiction, a sort of 'reality' show played out in the various media. It is a mistake to regard any of it as really real in much the same way as only the extremely gullible believe that so-called 'reality TV shows have anything at all real about them.

The 'celebrities' who understand it is all a game - a performance, a role to be played in the spotlight, like McCartney himself are the ones that get through the whole experience relatively unscathed while those who believe it is somehow real, like Mills, Britney Spears and so on become damaged by it.

The Old Gang

"Well, I suppose we all like to think something like that, from time to time," he said. "But, on the whole, none of us around here have much time for that sort of thing. Not as a rule, anyway." He sighed, got to his feet slowly and picked up his glass, looking around at each of the others.

Norman nodded, but the others, in various ways, indicated that they were, for the time being at least, all right as far as refills were concerned anyway. They all glanced around at each other, sighing and shrugging.

Arnold, who, for some reason, everyone deferred to, usually had the last word in each situation they found themselves, for one reason or another, involved in. He was not their leader, they were not a gang. All that kind of stuff was long in the past of their lives. But, having assured everyone they were a bunch of blokes, mates even, who occasionally went out drinking, or fishing, or just anything, together quite often, or 'all the bloody time' as Norman's wife often insisted, was neither here nor there.

The Moving Image

Like a film speeded up, like a film slowed down?

Reality is nothing at all like a film. Film makes everything unreal, turning the oceans of the world into a fish tank. It turns the world into a zoo. We watch from the other side of the barrier. But, unlike a zoo, there is no living entity behind the screen. We could not step through that screen into the world that lies behind it like some religious nutter stepping into the lion enclosure.

So, film and its bastard offspring TV are nothing like the real. A moving - and it always has to be moving - constantly shifting image. We can't step into the frame and take the Mona Lisa by the hand. Nor can we touch someone in a photograph.

What is real in the image? What is the image in the real?

These are questions - television, film, and photographs show events - actual moments - unless manipulated - that happened, whether real or fictional. A painting may have never happened, probably didn't.

In the Beginning

The road snakes off into the distance.
She stands, waiting for life to begin
now that her old world is gone,
left behind over a train ride ago,
when all was green hills and valleys,
and now she sees shoreline and sea.
The hotels lined up behind the road,
and this could be her new found land
where she could invent a new life.


[Please note: as with all the pieces marked as Fragments these poems are unfinished and abandoned early drafts.]

The Folly Of Youth

A while ago, in an article about the resignation of Peter Hain, Andrew Rawnsley wrote this:

Mr Brown did move quickly to reconfigure his cabinet to fill the Hain-shaped hole. By promoting a trio of thirtysomethings, he evidently hoped that a younger-looking top table will make this look like a government with plenty of tomorrows.

It seems that those at the top in British politics still haven’t learnt the most important lesson from the time of Tony Blair – ‘the folly of youth’. It was – arguably - the inadequate immaturity of Tony Blair, his ignorance of history and the world - in short his ‘youth’ - that led to the many, many mistakes of his premiership, most notably of course his disastrous Iraq adventure.

Rather than learn from this mistake, both the Conservatives and the Liberals have tried to repeat it, going for young men: Cameron and Clegg respectively, in the hope that they too can get some thing out of what seems like society’s unhealthy obsession with youth.

However, the political parties are merely reflecting a trend seen through the rest of society. The media itself seems always to be chasing a more youthful demographic, in part, driven by advertising, which regards the young as the ideal catch as they are seen as protean, still unfixed by habit and familiarity. Consequently, as advertising spending drives so much of the media – the rest of the media has to follow.

At the same time, there has been a loss of confidence in what can be called ‘Western values’, which means that there has also been a loss of confidence within the education system. A system that is no longer sure about what it should be teaching, or even how to go about teaching it. An education system that panders to youth’s immaturity by being ‘relevant’, making uniforms fashionable, even changing the PE kit. I would have thought that one of the defining features of being young – immature - is not knowing what is ‘relevant’ to you, almost by definition. But the real danger here is that children’s already narrow horizons, by dint of them being children, will remain narrow, if not get narrower if they are not constantly allowed to experience things that lie outside what they already know.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the current epidemic of what are called in glib marketing-like terms ‘adulescents’ or ‘kidults’, people like this, are the result of this narrowing down of children’s horizons while they are at school, leaving them unaware that there is a bigger, wider, world out there.