A rightwing Jon Cruddas?

Olly Deed of LabourList describes me as a rightwing Jon Cruddas in an interview about the impact of the internet on politics and government.

I think it's meant as a compliment - to me, but not perhaps Mr Cruddas.

I met Olly after speaking at a Fabian conference, and he has some interesting insights on the subject himself. 

I really do wonder how it is that the British Left, which once stood for the dispersal of power and against remote elites, has ended up on the side of remote officials, quangos, human rights lawyers and Eurocrats.  Not exactly true to the spirit of the Levellers or the Chartists, is it?

Posted on 13 March 2010 by Douglas Carswell

Comments

There once was a time when the poor were in fact underprivileged and discriminated against. Long ago, but it did happen. At the time the left campaigned the removal of these disadvantages- some did so out of genuine concern for the poor, some did so as a means of obtaining status and hence power for themselves.
Such discrimination is a thing of the past- but many now argue for the poor to be privileged for one or other of the same reasons.
To maintain privilege for any section of society requires enforcement by government agencies. In short the left sought to remove agencies that opposed its favoured constituency and now seeks to institute agencies that support its cause.
Of course these agencies cost a lot of money, both in their direct costs, and in the mis-allocation of resources that they enforce. Overall they make the country poorer, both in financial terms, and in terms of the liberty of the individual.

Posted on 14 March 2010 09:43 by Pat

Yes, I agree that Labour has sold out to bureaucracy, the creed of centralisation and we know best, and so on, but this was probably the price to be paid for our membership of the EU, in which we, as a country are told what to do not by the electorate but by unelected officials in the EU. But frankly, I don't expect it to be much different under David Cameron. After all, he has said that now that the Lisbon Treaty has been signed and sealed, there is nothing to be done about it. In other words, we are going to be subject to the same rules and regulations, quangos, red tape and centralisation under the Tories as we were under New Labour.

Posted on 14 March 2010 09:50 by Pete F

Lberty is everything. The lefties tied liberty to communism - the Cl4 bit. That has proved to be, well, cobblers really. OTH the Right tied liberty to land ownership (you had to be a landowner to vote) and that also proved to be cobblers. In recent times both left and right favoured oligarchy - wealth and power to favourites. Now, the left has lost all credibility because the cl4 thing was abandoned and the right abandoned oligarchy and moved leftwards (if you like) to Liberty. So where do latent lefty totalitarians have to go if they want power (and boy, do they want power). They can only go to bureaucratic leftyism on the way to totalitarianism. The fight for liberty was won, so what to do next?

Posted on 15 March 2010 13:02 by Lola

Your question is an acute one, and might be applied more widely. How did "socialism" come to mean enslavement to faceless officials?

I was reading a biography of someone I suspect is a relative of my own, Guy Mark Pearse. Pearse was a late 19th century Methodist preacher in London and one of the early socialists. But there is no trace of what we today understand by socialism. Pearse was concerned to rescue the poor and vulnerable from exploitation in the big city, by making collections and creating a sense of community and of helping one another. All the statist rubbish we endure today is not even present to his mind.

We need to get back to this model. At the moment, Socialism is the enemy of precisely the people that Revd. Pearse was trying to help; forcing people into destitution, privileging special groups against those with no access to the law, breaking up families and loading the hard working with debt.

We need a new socialism, one that focuses on people.

Posted on 15 March 2010 13:17 by Roger Pearse

The left want's to democratize the E.U., and the lisbon treaty helped do this through transferring powers from the E.C. to the parliament, yet Tories such as yourself opposed it, implying you would rather see E.U. power be exercised by bureaucrats than democratically accountable MEPs.

In term's of quangos, your right, sometimes the modern left in Britain is too defensive of them, but that's usually because nobody has come up with a plan to transfer power from quango's to citizens, without creating new injustices.

I hope the modern left forumulate a credible plan to transfer power from quango's to citizens, and earn back it's reputation as emancipators.

Posted on 16 March 2010 17:14 by luke

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