The Achilles Heel of the Tories is their unfairness.
The Tory Party is Hobbsian; elitist and hierarchical by nature, based partly on the tradition of a managed democracy. When people vote for the Tories they vote for the status quo, which they see as British, for little Britain, not Great Britain. They vote for exclusion not inclusion.
Historically speaking the Labour Party is a democratic bubbling up of people demanding rights and equality not the party of top down control at all, despite its attempts at social engineering. To a Democrat and a Socialist every voting soul has the same value as every other, we are all the prodigal sons and daughters of social democracy.
Rather than believing in a natural British, organically grown, Duchy Original traditional establishment, Democratic Socialists hold faith with a properly functioning representative democracy and the ideal of a fair society.
The Tories will lose votes over time. Young people of voting age live in constant, and usually happy, proximity with people of different cultures; they reach out to each other using the Internet, befriending without prejudice and those reactionaries born in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s will soon fade away and die together with the Tory Party.
The idea of meritocracy is hot with the young people of voting age: the idea of fairness and reward for effort, though favouring meritocracy can lead down reactionary path. The impression is that young voters are also willing to reassess the merits of Democratic Socialism, but don’t take communism seriously. In Britain, occasionally even the most progressive of them go ‘Aaah!’ at a royal wedding. They are often monarchists rather than republicans and, to my dismay, hold fast to this achronicity.
However, it is far more British to be fair than it is British to be support the monarchy. The Tories have many weaknesses, but their Achilles heel is that they are, at root, at source, by their nature, unfair. They represent the victory of privilege and despite their rhetoric, they are not meritocrats at all. They lack a central quality of what we think of as Britishness. Their support for the dual school system system where children of the elites are streamed into top universities via the public school system illustrates the essential unfairness at the heart of Toryism. For this reason it will not survive.
However, in the meantime, in the short to medium term, the Conservatives are clever strategists. They read the Art of War by Sun Tzu and write about ‘The Big Society.’ They practice Soft Power. They may not be fair, but recognise now that people are social animals largely motivated by their unconscious. They want to deal with us in new ways. These ways informed by the sinister research into social control carried out in US universities.
Effective right wing policy over the years has often been an intelligent response to the arguments of socialists and social democrats. The policy to make secret ballots for union leaders compulsory. The policy to sell off social capital - council houses, the appeal to the greed of people by offering them shares in the British Gas.
The Tories practice a form of soft power. They are attempting to co-opt as many people as possible. They recognise that social entrepreneurs are their natural constituency. They aim to transform and harness the social in social democracy for their own purposes and create new ways for their supporters to band together asymmetrically.
But we can call their bluff. They are unfair - nasty some have said. Of course the word Fair has been done to death. Nevertheless, to defeat the Tories, the Labour Party should adopt this slogan and really mean it.
Vote Labour for a Fair Britain!
The Tory Party is Hobbsian; elitist and hierarchical by nature, based partly on the tradition of a managed democracy. When people vote for the Tories they vote for the status quo, which they see as British, for little Britain, not Great Britain. They vote for exclusion not inclusion.
Historically speaking the Labour Party is a democratic bubbling up of people demanding rights and equality not the party of top down control at all, despite its attempts at social engineering. To a Democrat and a Socialist every voting soul has the same value as every other, we are all the prodigal sons and daughters of social democracy.
Rather than believing in a natural British, organically grown, Duchy Original traditional establishment, Democratic Socialists hold faith with a properly functioning representative democracy and the ideal of a fair society.
The Tories will lose votes over time. Young people of voting age live in constant, and usually happy, proximity with people of different cultures; they reach out to each other using the Internet, befriending without prejudice and those reactionaries born in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s will soon fade away and die together with the Tory Party.
The idea of meritocracy is hot with the young people of voting age: the idea of fairness and reward for effort, though favouring meritocracy can lead down reactionary path. The impression is that young voters are also willing to reassess the merits of Democratic Socialism, but don’t take communism seriously. In Britain, occasionally even the most progressive of them go ‘Aaah!’ at a royal wedding. They are often monarchists rather than republicans and, to my dismay, hold fast to this achronicity.
However, it is far more British to be fair than it is British to be support the monarchy. The Tories have many weaknesses, but their Achilles heel is that they are, at root, at source, by their nature, unfair. They represent the victory of privilege and despite their rhetoric, they are not meritocrats at all. They lack a central quality of what we think of as Britishness. Their support for the dual school system system where children of the elites are streamed into top universities via the public school system illustrates the essential unfairness at the heart of Toryism. For this reason it will not survive.
However, in the meantime, in the short to medium term, the Conservatives are clever strategists. They read the Art of War by Sun Tzu and write about ‘The Big Society.’ They practice Soft Power. They may not be fair, but recognise now that people are social animals largely motivated by their unconscious. They want to deal with us in new ways. These ways informed by the sinister research into social control carried out in US universities.
Effective right wing policy over the years has often been an intelligent response to the arguments of socialists and social democrats. The policy to make secret ballots for union leaders compulsory. The policy to sell off social capital - council houses, the appeal to the greed of people by offering them shares in the British Gas.
The Tories practice a form of soft power. They are attempting to co-opt as many people as possible. They recognise that social entrepreneurs are their natural constituency. They aim to transform and harness the social in social democracy for their own purposes and create new ways for their supporters to band together asymmetrically.
But we can call their bluff. They are unfair - nasty some have said. Of course the word Fair has been done to death. Nevertheless, to defeat the Tories, the Labour Party should adopt this slogan and really mean it.
Vote Labour for a Fair Britain!
Hobbesian? Pourquoi? How is or was Thomas Hobbes linked to the Tory Party? I don't geddit.
ReplyDeleteHere is a quotation from Karl Marx's "Value, Price and Profit (1865):
ReplyDelete‘What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.
‘One of the oldest economists and most original philosophers of England — Thomas Hobbes — has already, in his “Leviathan”, instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors. He says: "the value or worth of a man is, as in all other things, his price: that is so much as would be given for the use of his power." Proceeding from this basis, we shall be able to determine the value of labour as that of all other commodities.’