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David Cameron – “I love you, and I am a socialist” “I love you, and I am a socialist”
This is what I, via the wonders of television, watched being said to David Cameron.
A young doctor made this comment to Mr Cameron when this leader of a British political party turned up at a demonstration of doctors and, whilst denouncing the Labour party government for not providing jobs for all qualified young doctors, promised “every single one of you” a job (or words to that effect).
To some people the above proves that Mr Cameron is a good leader of the Conservative party, to other people, such as myself, the above shows that David Cameron is not the leader of a ‘Conservative’ party at all.
We see the same facts but interpret them differently.
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The socialist doctor who loves Dave Cameron is not deluded. People who call themselves ‘conservatives’ and yet will vote for Cameron rather than UKIP, they are the deluded ones.
NuLab and the Camercons are both, the pair of them, fascist parties. They may be Fascist Lite, but there is no question in my mind that is the line both parties have taken.
We need to take our country back from these people. Is UKIP imploding? We don’t hear anything about that in Oz.
Use the Australian media, and you wouldn’t know Cameron exists, let alone UKIP.
Slightly off-topic, I know, but I just thought I’d ask what responses of people on this site were to a Budget that is tax neutral, but that moves the burden of taxation from what people have to pay (income and corporations tax) to ones they can choose to pay (cigarettes and 4x4s).
Obviously, I feel that the abolition of the 10p rate of tax, quite clearly indicates that it is the poor who are funding this, but I understand that, here, that might not be considered a bad thing, as they are more intense consumers of government services.
David Cameron’s response seemed very weak to me, suggesting no alternative vision. I just wondered if this Budget moved the country further towards liberty or further away from it?
Probably only shows that he’s leader of an Opposition party.
Forgive my ignorance, but am I to deduce that qualified doctors are having trouble finding employment in the UK? That’s pretty astonishing to someone on the other side of the pond, but I guess it shouldn’t be, considering the wonders of the NHS.
That a budget is even more directed towards political social engineering makes it in no way better. The issue should not the ‘smokers cost the NHS more’ but ‘I should not be paying for the NHS’.
It is vital to never legitimise an illegitimate process by arguing for this tax rather than that tax within the state’s own chosen frames of reference. That is how they wish the debate to be framed and that is what Samizdata will never ever accept. Never fight on ground of the enemy’s choosing.
David Cameron promises jobs for doctors? What if there are too many doctors? Will he be paying them my tax money to do nothing all day?
You know who I want to lead the Conservative Party? John Wayne. I don’t care that he’s dead, he’s the best man for the job.
John Wayne?
Nah.
Gregory Peck!
Perry – I don’t think recognising a qualitative difference between two things with which one disagrees, and saying that one is worse than the other is the same as ‘arguing for’ the one considered ‘less bad’.
Why refuse to enter the debate? What you call the meta-context and others might call ‘the assumptions of the debate’ can legitimately be called into question, but you cannot reframe a debate without being willing to participate in it.
It occurs to me that you are missing a trick. By refusing to apply a critical analysis to the Budget you are refusing to engage with the single issue that most politically-interested people will be conversant with today.
What better time is there to expose what you see as the flaws in the whole concept that underpins the Budget than at Budget time? What better time to make a vigorous statement of the social engineering project you see as underpinning it?
Perry has explained why. By accepting the very starting point that the state is entitled to levy X percent of GDP, you have conceded key ground.
Some taxes are worse than others and do more damage to freedom and economic growth, so it is possible to debate the pros and cons. But this blog is not about such marginal tradeoffs. We have rather bigger fish to fry: querying why we need to have a big state in the first place.
Let’s leave the finer details to the think tanks. That is what they are paid for.
“Fascist” is much too strong a word – either for the Labour party or the Conservative party.
Both parties are interventionist (very interventionist indeed), but whilst playing the odd dirty trick, they are not really going to ban all opposition and set up a dictatorship.
As for the line in the post about the Conservative party not being a Conservative party at all.
It is a complicated matter, there are a lot of good people in the Conservative party (“you would say that you have been in it since you were 15” – O.K. but it remains true), but Mr Cameron says and does things that, in my judgement, indicate that he is not much of a Conservative.
Now people who know far more about the modern Conservative party than I do (such as Guy Herbert) tell me that I am wrong.
Well I hope that I am wrong, but I can only judge by public statements and actions.
I have no way of getting into Mr Cameron’s mind, and we do not move in the same social circles.
To me Mr Cameron seems to be an upper class version of Edward Heath. Again I could be wrong, I hope I am wrong, but I require evidence that I am wrong – not just arguments from authority
On the specific point about doctors – and I apologize for not making things clear.
There is a new computer system for allocating jobs to newly qualified doctors. Like everything in the modern mega state is a mixture of Orwell’s “Big Brother” and the reality show “Big Brother” – in that it has vast power, but is also a total chaotic mess.
One could quite rightly say (and Mr Cameron did say). “this system does not work”.
Where he made a mistake (if it was a mistake rather than an effort to win people over) was to give the impression that he was going to give them all jobs.
“It is the job of an opposition leader to make lots of promises”.
I know that is a popular opinion, but I respectfully disagree. I think that people (after awhile but before an election) see through it – and, even if they do not, a government elected on the basis of promising lots of different things to different groups is crippled in office.
“Once one is power then one can act sensibly”.
No, again with respect, one can not. A politician’s promises are like a great weight round his neck, as he swims in the fast flowing river of events the promises (which he made so lightly and to such applause) drag him down.
Nathianel Tapley:
I have put my thoughts (such as they are) on today’s budget as a comment on Johnathan Pearce’s good posting on the matter.
You may wish to do the same.
I admit that I allowed Brian’s comment about a “tax cut” to lead me into a budget comment on is cricket post, but we really should not do such things.
On “his” cricket posting of course.
“It would only take you a few seconds to review what you type, and yet you just bash out the comment and send”.
I know, I know.
Paul, your comments are some of the most interesting here. I normally have very high aversion to typos, but not at all in your case.
“Fascist” is much too strong a word – either for the Labour party or the Conservative party.
I disagree (well, I would wouldn’t I), I believe that Fascist is a precise and technically accurate description of the policy stances of the major UK political parties.
No parties argue seriously against private ownership of property, capital or the means of production, but both parties are now heavily into direction, regulation and control. They both see the political imperatives as over riding any principles of freedom, choice or private action. No party now seriously distinguishes between the public sphere and the private sphere.
It may be Fascist Lite, as I said, but Fascist it is.
I agree with Chris Harper. It is not goose-step racist fascism, but it is increasingly fascistic in the method of economic control and increasingly social control: leave people in nominal ‘ownership’ of the means of production (such as their lives) but so completely regulate what they can do with them that in truth the ‘owner’ is really just a state sanctioned caretaker.
The Soviets had design bureaus (owned by the state)… but the Nazis had Messerschmitt, an actual company. Yet clearly Willy Messerschmitt clearly was not at liberty to get out of the aircraft business and start making refrigerators if he had wanted his company to (not that he would have wanted to, but that is not my point). The fascist approach is that you can own stuff just as long as you use it to do what the state wants you to do with it… so do you really own it? That is very much the modern statist objective.
Yes, modern regulatory statism really is Fascism Lite.
Re Paul Marks “Fascist” is much too strong a word – either for the Labour party, or the Conservative party.
I am not so sure – Fascism was in fact a left-wing revolutionary alternative to socialism/communism. The Fascist “Third Way”, was a third way between capitalism and communism. Rather than class war it espoused class collaboration. Sounds ok – in theory.
Remember Blair’s “Third Way”? I note Toney now seems to have quietly dropped that phrase.
Fascism didn’t nationalise. Instead it achieved a similar result by taking control by using the state to regulate and control, leaving everything in the same hands as before, but markedly different too.
OFWAT, OFGEM, ID Cards, regulation and more legislation passed than any government of the UK ever.
Does any of this sound familiar?
The state is well on the way to achieving control over where you can and can’t smoke. What you may, or may not drive. Who you may, or may not, employ. Who you may, or may not, do business with. How you may, or may not, express yourself. The list goes on.
Is Fascism really too strong a word? Or is it just not noticeable enough yet?
I’ll not get into whether UK political parties are “Fascist” but many of the compaints that the “Conservatives” are no such thing may be mislead.
The first vote I was able to cast was in the 1979 general election, and it went to a party that spoke about “rolling back the frontiers of the state”. As that was the Conservative party, I regarded myself as a Conservative for many years. I am also a sad git who reads history books for fun, and doing that, I learned that Mrs Thatcher was not a traditional Conservative when compared to her modern predecessors.
Some of Cameron’s puplic utterances also seem to conflict with what would be regarded as traditional Conservative views. I can’t tell how deeply he holds the views he expresses although I am a former member of his local constituency association and have met him many times.
I think this is the nature of a two party system; each leader takes their party their own way leaving the membership to follow or not. All members of any party have to make compromises and accept the party closest to them on economicaly right/left and socially authoritarian/liberal axes. If the stories of Conservative associations haemorrhaging members are true, Cameron may have gone beyond the compromises they are willing to accept.
“Too many doctors”? Lump of labour fallacy: There is a fixed amount of work to be done, for which we only need a fixed number of people. Of all the things that one might suggest as having a fixed level of demand, medical care is one of the most unlikely.
The price (i.e. wage) for doctors should fall to the level needed to clear the market. The problem is not “too many doctors”, but state intervention that acts to prevent us from discovering this clearing price, and to preserve the oligopolistic privileges of the incumbents, to the detriment of the consumer.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some (at least) of the junior doctors who might be out of work soon agree that it would be better for wages to find the level at which they would have a job, than for the current system to prevail. At least, that’s what the posts on Boris Johnson’s blog said.
Having said all that, this is, almost certainly, not what Cameron meant. He probably did mean spending your tax money on paying the state-mandated wage.
People above may be right concerning “Fascism” if it is just considered as an economic doctrine.
However, I tend to think of the political side as well (dictatorship and so on). Now whilst it may be true that the economic doctrine eventually leads to the political system – it has not fully done that here.
it may be true that the economic doctrine eventually leads to the political system – it has not fully done that here.
No, it is just that we don’t have anyone else to vote for.
From this side of the pond it’s hard to tell much difference between Cameron’s Conservatives and Blair’s Labour. Today’s Conservatives certainly don’t look or sound anything like Mrs. Thatcher’s Conservatives. I recently asked a British expat here in South Korea just what had happened to the Conservative Party? His response: “They’re in power.”
This idea that Britain somehow has a “conservative” or even a “Thatcherite” government is common – and false.
The Blair government is actually quite radical. It has not nationalised lots of things (although it has nationalized the railway structure – in spite of which people still demand an end to the “privitized railways” blissfully unaware that railtrack was nationalised years ago), but it has done lots of other things.
As well as a great increase in government spending and taxation (partly hidden by various Enron style book keeping tricks), there has been a vast increased in regulation (partly thanks to the E.U.).
There has also been constitutional wreaking (in relation to Scotland and Wales, the House of Lords, regional government, the removing of Royal links to institutions and so on) and the general march of “Politically Correct” ideas.
And yet we are told we have a “right wing” government (and so on).
Oh well even the National Socialists were supposed to be “right wing” – the term is without meaning.