Polly Ticking

A friend on Facebook (don't grimace - he is an actual friend too) alerted me to the following piece on The Guardian web site today (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/12/could-you-build-new-part-of-the-left-labour-jeremy-corbyn?CMP=share_btn_fb).  It's about the journalist's attempts to build a new party of the left.

He takes soundings from many sources: former and current politicians, strategists, media advisers etc., and after a few false dawns alights on the idea of forming a coalition of the left, based on shared core beliefs: the NHS and old-skool choons like that.

I think this is a winner.  My belief has always been that the left in this country (England) has never got over the New Right administration of Mrs Thatcher doing away with the post-War consensus.  The PWC, for those of you under 40) was a set of sacred policy cows that all the parliamentary parties tacitly agreed to maintain to enforce when in power.  These policies were specifically to maintain and defend social justice and equality.  So for example, education and health care would be free for all those who wished to avail of it.

It seems strange now that The Conservative Party would sign-up to this, but it's not if you consider the seismic changes that The Right has undergone in 35 years.  Conservatives used to believe the state as vehemently as did those on the left.  They believed also in free health care and education for all.  Yes, they wanted to keep their inherited wealth and property for themselves, but they also felt a duty of care to those who were born without these privileges.  The Left of course wanted to wrest a larger slice of the opportunities available by abolishing private education and health care.  Only then they argued would these services by of the optimal quality and guaranteed to survive and flourish.

This Conservative notion of paternalistic benevolence was swept away by Thatcher.  Since then, the Tory Party has developed a phobia about The State.  The State is a necessary evil at the moment, but with careful fiscal management, it can be atrophied to almost nothing, which is (oddly) quite an anarchic idea.  The Left reacted by breaking apart into those that went along with this (the-people-have-spoken-we-must-listen) and those that wish to see a return to the pre-Thatcherite days of cross-party belief in the social benefits of the PWC.  Jeremy Corbyn is I'm guessing a firm believer in the PWC, whilst Liz Kendall is not.  And like all siblings who fall out over something instinsic and important, they're really fcuking hate each other.