Conservatives are capitalists. They recognise a government role in adjusting the more cruel outcomes of capitalism's mechanisms, the vulnerabilities of certain members of our society facing technical change, individual circumstance or misfortune, or society-wide threat (as in war time, or international shifts in economic balances, or breaches of the rule of law governing social behaviour) but essentially markets clear, capitalism itself delivers distribution.
So they should propose a Conservative vision of the place of government in a capitalist society, not proposals of where a socialist state might be reduced. After all, a grossly fat socialist state is not going to be improved much by being slimmed down; lean and hungry is even nastier than fat and complacent, particularly when it comes to the nomenklatura and hangers' on of big state-high tax governance.
So let's hear it for entrepreneurship, banking practices that evaluate and embrace risk as a source of profit, nationalism tempered by trade advantage considerations, the last couple of years of schooling integrated with the first years of apprenticeship in the modern economy and work, the ending of core state provision exploiting contract outworkers in pseudo-private employment, the abandonment of economic inactivity at 60 or even earlier. And so on into the horrors of the brownian client state.
40,000 'jobs' cut by natural wastage is not good enough. Fat-thighed socialism does not make itself more attractive by losing a bit of weight; it smirks on, in all its falsely-grinning determination to maintain its privileges and inequalities.
Conservatives cannot adjust socialist reality. It needs to be rejected tout court as inefficient and unattractive; an aesthetic disaster that can only be abandoned.
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6 comments:
Would I be so bold as to pose a question?
Why 'Hatfield Girl'? Hatfield College in Durham? Or Hatfield the admiral? Or Hatfield in Hertfordshire?
Mine? Well, Spitfire, amazing WWII plane - love it to bits and have studied it intensively. 13? Simple, my favourite number.
come on Mr Spitfire ! that's a picture of a Comet she's got there in the top right-hand corner
you'll kick yerself now
FFS! Yes, I am officially retarded. That's were the aeroplanes were built - which I should know. Bollocks to me...
In the end, I agree up to a point. However, any government who advocated the rejection of the post war settlement of soft socialism would never get into power in this country.
Once the Conservatives had largely stripped back that statist opinion, but the recession of 1992 acted like the privations of the 30's as a reminder about the 'unfairness' of life. Even people who had done well out of Thatcherism rushed back to mother socialism thinking that the gains could not be undone.
But they have been, and the until the country is in absolute visible collapse then there are just too many people who have been educated into the 'New Jerusalem' settlement to shake the pull of the left. We are stuck with it, and any reversal will be gradual and probably by stealth.
Spitfires were built in Brum weren't they? Now a Mosquito is entirely another - well, almost a piece of furniture really. My father built them near Wheathampstead, by hand, it seems from the tales of yore told when 'what did you do in the War?' was talked of.
He had a go at Blue Streak and the TSR2 as well later; not what you'd call a lucky aircraft engineer. I think they all felt rather let down by the abandonment of aircraft engineering in the UK. Wilson it was with his white hot technology narrative.
"Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism."
It's hard to imagine anyone wanting socialism, TE, except for the narrow, ruling caste of beneficiaries. And part of their maintenance of themselves in power by force, includes mass lying on a scale that itself makes the lies difficult to envisage. It was not socialism, soft or otherwise, that made the post War settlement in our society, although that is part of socialist agitprop.
The welfare state was ideated and introduced long before socialists deprived so many of freedom and democracy, it is not their brain child or their achievement; in our country it was the High Tories after the War and the real Liberals before, and right back into the 19th century. And it is capitalism that produces the wealth and independence for all that enables those in misfortune to be helped.
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