The Election

When you say "never"...

 

sweller wrote

Drag the editorial staff the Daily Worker screaming and kicking into the
early half off the 20th century and get them to admit that pole dancing
is a proper job for a working class lass and publish pictures of our
brave Sisters in Adversity on page three.

 

Not getting into power is not the same thing as having no support.

Because that way there might be an opposition.

But when they called themselves socialist, they got a massive vote
(the biggest any government has ever had).

I think it more likely that they don't want the Tories than that they
do want Labour.

 

Andrewr At Work wrote

They did. They had great power in the 1970's, power enough to bring
down a Government, power which they exercised. OK ultimately they
overstepped the mark and frightened the voters but they had the power
nonetheless.

 

Andrewr At Work wrote

See now that is just so much absolute bollox that is. I know this
because I said the self same thing not so long ago in here and was told
the same. Well I didn't say it about the book, I haven't actually read
it, for that particular ideological predisposition I am just about old
enough get my clues from first hand experience and eye witness accounts.

 

Andrewr At Work wrote

One day mebbe.

Well of course not. Which as it happens was the very point I and thus
you am apparently completely and utterly fucking wrong about.

Been certainly, dunno about gone though. It has left it's mark in
subtle ways.

Fr'instance, we pretty much all accept that a centrally funded body
responsible for the overall state and care of the nations health is the
way to go. There are differences in implementation offered by the
political establishment of all colours but the mainstream, which is
where the voters are, is NHS to the core.

And then there is democracy itself. Everybody having a vote is straight
out of the left wing primer.

Universal education, ok so it has been abandoned by nu Labour but
everybody else and if you add what is left of Old Labour that is
probably a majority who are in favour of not paying directly to educate
our pension funds.

Pensions are another thing...

The list goes on and all of it what we take as granted from roots in and
left wing and humanist ideology. Good innit?

 

Andrewr At Work wrote

Never is a long time but you are almost certainly right so "socialism"
has to find ways to coexist with all this. I think the Trades Unions
are best placed to do just this sort of thing but sadly their mind set
is still hundred years behind the rest of society so we might end up
having educated woolly minded liberals do it for us in our own best
interests and it will take three times as long to get it right.

Who can argue, there are many aspects of Socialism that turn out to be
undesirable even for downtrodden masses with aspirations as low as
simply reaching proledom. Bourgousiness, which is in all our hearts and
minds, doesn't sit very well with collectivism does it?

As our individual wealth has risen these core "Socialist Mantras" have
been seen less and less as essential and dismissed. In their place we
have this new and exciting compromise product called Social Democracy. A
system whereby the educated woolly minded liberals demonstrate their
inability to curb aspirations the "career focussed" and thus demonstrate
why it will take three times as long to sort it all out.

 

No.

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Andrewr At Work wrote

It's work isn't done, it has barely started.

We are still a kin million miles away from even lip service to equality
of opportunity for all men and wimmin don't even figure in the equation
for half the world and that is just one little no compromise fundamental
that simply won't go away. Ever.

Nothing to do with numbers but their position in society to act as a
genuine go-between to resolve differences between capital and labour
such that both can benefit to the max.

At the very least the TUs have to hold up their hands as being
extraordinarily inept at managing the media. Although much can be put
down to their failure to modernise their aspirations.

The development of society into this utopia where we can all be rich and
healthy and free and responsible and so can our kids and the bloke next
door and with the absolute minimum of effort on our part. This is what
everybody wants isn't it?

You want it to make sense? That will cost extra.

 

No: it's the same as not having enough support in just the right
places (which is why this election is about fewer than a million
people).

If there is no way to have a `different' government, you may as well
live in a dictatorship. If you have an opposition capable of opposing,
you live in a democracy: it is possible to change the way government
does things.

How do we know? Nobody's saying it.

Orwell was a con-artist at the best of times.

Over five million people live in "absolute poverty" in the UK,
according to a report published today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1207241.stm

Incidentally, the same report says that absolute poverty has increased
in Russia since the fall of `socialism'.

Who else is there?

 

I don't really want to vote tory,

www.tacticalvoter.net

 

Andrewr At Work wrote

All right then, being as you all asked so nicely.

"As our individual wealth has risen these core "Socialist Mantras" have
been seen less and less as essential and dismissed."

Fairly self explanatory I would have thought. Not many folks disagree
that some of the old ideas important to socialism are really not as
relevant as they used to be.


In their place we
have this new and exciting compromise product called Social Democracy.

Ordinary democracy isn't any good see. Minorities still get trampled on
but this time it is with the will of the people and that isn't allowed.
There is Liberal Democracy but it is a poor choice of title and has bad
connotations for Sun/Mail readers so will never happen in the UK.

Connotations are all a pert of the game. Social Democracy, when sold as
"A step onward for The Revolution Comrades. A step upward for the
Working Classes." <pause for applause> has it all. It has got the S
word and Democracy. It has new and revolutionary and universal and all
sorts of other old buzz words that give the Left Wing a hard on. They
fucking leapt at it.


"A system whereby the educated woolly minded liberals demonstrate their
inability to curb aspirations the "career focussed" and thus demonstrate
why it will take three times as long to sort it all out."

Trouble is that in the leaping they don't bother to look. In order to
move on quickly from The Revolution to Social Democracy, there had to be
changes in the public face of the Left. Voters, stupid to the core
though they may be, aren't really too happy with a bloke who is crying
"death to the infidel" one day and "would you all like to come round for
tea" the next. So many of the old guard had to go.

A bit too eager to get a new guard into place and not paying enough
attention to that little inner voice warning that there was something
wrong with the woolly minded liberals opened the doors wide to the likes
of Blair and Mandelson and Beckett and that Press Bloke. The rest will
be history.

 

No, they _claim_ to.

Blatant mis-quoting. What it actually said was : "Nine per cent of UK
households reported that their income fell "a lot" below what they
needed each week to keep them out of absolute poverty. "

Note the word 'reported' in there.

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Not mis-quoting at all.

Who else would you ask about poverty?

You could also look at Figure~3 (page 62) of the PDF at:

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP01-010?OpenDocument

which has absolute poverty in the UK (based on income) at about 15%,
if you exclude the over 60s.

 

Don't delude yourself that degrading wage slavery has gone away, it may
have changed, but fundamentally it's still there.

Personally, I'd be very wary quoting Orwell as source material to base an
argument on, particularly RTWP and "Down and Out..", he can be a touch
unreliable. Still an excellent author though.

Try to get a copy of "The Crystal Spirit" by George Woodcock (it's out of
print, unfortunately) it's an engaging and intelligent, contemporary,
analysis of the author and person.

 

On many issues the leadership are acting outside the policies and wishes
of the party membership: PFI, tuition fees, employment law, deregulation,
areas of privatisation, not to mention the adventuring in Iraq. The
decisions being made are not the wishes of the rank and file membership
or, on the whole, the electorate.

Which is why the Conservative's "Let down by Labour?" slogan has the
potential to be successful - somewhat cheeky I know.

By taking back I mean, in the context of LN's question, how do we
re-engage people in party politics. The answer: by giving them back
control of their political instruments.

You somehow interpreted that as opening an Ernst Thalmann Tractor Plant
in every town.

In areas of economic management Labour made fundamental, and quite
painful, changes to its ideology to appease the media and electorate, not
necessarily "ape the Conservatives" but make changes to approach.

In many aspects the changes were quite meaningless (dropping Clause 4)
but marked a watershed. These were done for the reasons you outline, to
loose the baggage.

Some of the changes were far reaching - handing over control of interest
rates to the Bank of England - and have much wider repercussions on a
socialist mindset but have provided economic stability for business to
build on. It would be foolish to destroy that stability.

However, the party leadership so caught up in the trap of government:
providing for business, it forgot about major tenets of social provision
and providing change - which is why they won the '97 election: for change
- it is because they failed to provide the change that people feel
disengaged.

For you to say the electorate only want Tories or Tories is rather silly.
Although it appears, to some extent, that's what we've ended up with.

 

It's not even been.

 

It made sense to me, after a fashion.

You, yourself have stated that Socialism has no place in modern society
as it is no longer required.

You based that statement on the evidence that the grinding poverty of the
1930's is no longer with us and the fridges only dreamt of in 1984 are
everyday items (although it may be worth considering that this is a
device by Orwell to show the shallowness of the 'Party members', that
they measure happiness in terms of white goods).

Unfortunately this 'evidence', as Steve points out, has caused a shift in
attitudes and has left us with the half arsed compromise: Social
Democracy.

Despite this evidence we still have massive inequity, economic slavery
and failing social infrastructure; because the popular view, as Steve
points out, of correcting inequity is now seen as unnecessary these
complicated and interrelated problems become compounded and will take
longer to untangle.

But Hey! I've got a Barrett home and everything is A-OK in my world.

 

Not you, but the article itself.

If I were to commission a survey to determine whether people had
enough of the basic needs I'd certainly not do so simply by asking
them. First off, an objective measure is needed:: "Do you have enough
money to live on?" is pretty much guaranteed to get a higher
proportion of "no"s than "How often do you not have enough money to
buy food and have to skip meals?", for example. Then you need to score
it based on other factors too: someone claiming to not have enough for
food but who does have Sky TV, a car and enough to go down the pub
three nights a week may still be counted as below the 'poverty level'
by surveys such as this.

In questionnaire design for Quality of Life surveys, it's hugely
important that various questions are analysed with respect to one
another, so that very specific questions can be formulated to ensure
internal integrity (i.e. that individual questions don't overlap and
potentially contradict) and validity (that they do actually measyre
the things they're supposed to). See my book on the subject[1].


[1]
http://www.campusi.com/bookFind/asp/bookFindPriceLst.asp?prodId=1891941003
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Do you mean folk have to work in order to eat? In the EU the balance has
swung too far the *other* way IMHO in some ways. Maternity rights for
instance, completely out of control.

On the other side, our system of capitalism could so easily be improved,
tweaked really, to provide about the best balance of human existence
that is practically possible. Some examples, in essence for larger
companies of 1000 or more employees and all PLC's.

Pension, incentive, bonus and stock options for Directors and Executives
should be enforced pro-rata across the entire workforce. That is to say
they cannot vote themselves a better deal than awarded to all staff.
A salary multiple ceiling of (say) 50:1 within a corporation.
Realistic stock options should be automatic for all employees with a
reasonable term of service.
When companies are sold/merged/striped the staff must benefit pro rata
as much as the directors/markets.
The staff of a company, as stock holders, should hold a positively
weighted vote in corporate governance.
Directors should be much more accountable to their stock holders for
their decisions.

I'm talking as someone who owns several small companies and has had
others in the past but has worked for companies as large as BT and AT&T.
Some of this could and should be enforced on smaller companies, but not
all of it, as SME's have very particular requirements in terms of
Entrepreneurial activity and flexibility.

The EU is a huge economic power block. If it decided tomorrow, as a
common market, that no multinational failing to implement the above
types of levelling measures could trade their goods within the
EU.....very few companies could afford to opt out.

I am anti many facets of the EU, though pro Common Market and the EU
concerns me in many ways. One of these concerns is the influence
Corporations now hold over it and therefor over us. Recent decisions in
copyright law for instance, you and I cannot legally make a backup copy
of a CD or DVD. Incursions on P2P networks. Software patenting (in
turmoil admittedly). These types of law are anti folk and Pro minority
interest and it smacks of a very USA style of government control.

'Hog