Numeracy and literacy are not what they were.

Yes I do remember the 80s and 90s, the thing is our politicians never learn from history. Thatcher went to war in 1982, did they learn from that? no. poverty is still rife in the 21st century as it was in the 19th century and i’m talking this country.

Ok, you may use the word reduction on how many people live in poverty today compared to years ago but, come on, in 21st century to still have people living below the bread line is a joke.

The leaders of the top countries, USA, UK, most european states etc are now looking into bio fuels to run the cars we use, in doing this the countries that rely on wheat and rice are going to suffer.
Brazil grow sugar kane to make fuel, do you know how big their fields are where they grow this stuff?… about the size of Europe. Ask people who live in India how much they pay for rice, or, why there have been riots on the streets in Egypt becuase people cant get enough wheat to make bread.

Progress, dont make me laugh.

Do you remember what they 80s and 90s were like?

Now I’m hardly going to say Labour have been great, or that they have achieved the things I’d desperately wish to see for this country. And at times they have done some pretty appalling things.

But we now live in a country where politicians consider poverty reduction (which has happened, all be it slowly) a policy aim, and where unemployment, (down dramatically on every count) a social ill rather than an inevitability and a “price worth paying”.

Being annoyed at the Iraq war is fair enough, likewise ludicrous anti-terror legislation and the pious attitude to teenagers drinking.

But don’t ever downplay how bad the 80s and 90s were in the UK by pretending things have got worse. The fixation of those years on ideas instead of people has changed. Not just because Labour came to power, but because the public have now pressed the tories to change its position too.

Whats needed in this country is a goverment that is’nt a lap dog for the American’s.
That has got to say “enough is enough” and starts to look after its own no matter what colour or greed, but making sure never to bring religious faith of any sort into politics.

If you’re wondering why I mentioned religion then just take a look at how the evangelical right have taken over the Whitehouse.

Funny really, the Americans were looking for weapon’s of mass destruction and they invented their own…Neocons…and Britain… well like I said Thatcherisim.

> Being “fair-minded” is, it could be argued, a philosophical approach to politics.

Fair enough. But…

> the conservative ideological view that sees society as merely the aggregation of individuals pursuing their own individual needs.

If we’re going to caricature our opponents, then I suggest it’s “fair-minded” to at least do it accurately. What you’ve drawn there is a rough caricature of a liberal, not a conservative.

So the common good is not ideology free; it is in fact equivalent to your own “progressive” ideology.

Ah, the NHS, so triumphant that no other country dares attempt to imitate it.
I wonder why not?

Surely this is an issue that can unite both the true humanitarians (those of us on the right / centre-right) and even the faux carers on the Left? No?

Answers on a Digital Postcard please to:

“My Fellow Socialist Traveller,
Comrade Broon
No. 10 Downing Street”

I fully acknowledge that both the left and right have ideologies that hide from them inconvenient fact. If we take one of Marx’s descriptions of ideology, it is a camera obscura which makes small things appear large and, in some cases, makes some important things disappear altogether and non-existent things to appear real.

An example of this camera obscura operating in this article is your simple praise of the NHS as a common good. To the left, the NHS must be good because its means are those preferred by the left (single payer tax, free at the point of use, centrally controlled by a large bureaucracy). The facts on the grounds are that the NHS allows more people to die than need die proportionate to the resources it uses, that it isn’t even especially egalitarian in health outcomes compared to other systems.

The ideology of the left tells them to look to America for a comparison, and to obscurie other comparisons in Europe (where equality is still the mission but the means are slightly different. The most obscured fact is that health care systems have to be designed on the basis that health care is a scarce and expensive resource and that the common good cannot be served simply by aggregating it all into a welfare system, there needs to be a procedure in place to expand and improve it. There are certainly leftish ways of looking at that problem (the new Dutch system would be a good template for the left) but the way the ideology is setup in the UK, that would not be possible. The result result is more poor people to die for the sake of proving a leftish ideology.