former angels

Working class conservatism has been pushed aside by: the ending of apprenticeship systems that provided hands-on teaching in skilled trades; the extension of university -style teaching and qualification to inappropriate occupations; the denial of fiscal support to family structures (whoever, by gender, or culture, or generation is filling the roles that families need to offer to create safe worlds for children to become adults); the collapse of community as housing has become an investment opportunity in the face of staggering taxation levels, even confiscatory acts, on any other kind of private saving; and the determined, ideological assault of the 'trotskyoid' left on the idea of the family as one of the bases of social cohesion and co-operation.

It is easy to disrupt and control dysfunctional, poorly managed, marginalised families; but the assault on the the families of skilled working people and their communities that has been going on for all these decades from the ideological left was failing until globalisation wrecked their economic validity.

The Labour party under Brown is determined to further the statism and fragmentation that results in easier social control even though it is sufficiently ashamed of its purposes to refuse to declare its policies. There is little hope if the Brownite faction cannot be replaced with something that opposes these ends.

The Conservatives have a reservoir of support that has deep roots and can be called out if policies that sustain family, qualification, social mobility, and reasonable aspiration to home and community are offered.