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Samizdata quote of the day If you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is … well … shit.
– with his usual tact and sensitivity Devil’s Kitchen hints at a reason why the voters of Glasgow East might just consider not voting Labour any more
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I so hope labour get bitch-slapped in Glasgow East.
Personally I doubt it. Labour’s in trouble, no doubt about that, and even some of the East End’s red-blinkered voters can tell you why. But actually losing Glasgow East? That would be bigger than anything the Tories suffered in the ’90s. (Somebody may try to “prove” me wrong by quoting majorities, but you have to understand the firmness of the Labour vote there: these are people who voted Labour – with no little enthusiasm – in 1983; these wards were responsible for a council that flew the red flag from the City Chambers at the height of the Cold War; dynamite wouldn’t shift Labour from Glasgow’s East End.)
I’m a natural pessimist; I could be wrong. I hope I am, but I’m not holding my breath.
Wow…I wish someone in the US would say that to African-Americans about the Democrats. They’d probably get shouted down as a racist, though…
This is the most precise description of the Labour voters’ ETERNAL IDIOCY ever…
When a society permits or actively uses the mechanisms of its governments to tend and repair the victims of adverse circumstance, then all its members will seek to be “victims.” RRS 2004
Can someone explain why is it that Glasgow East is so leftist?
Because Glasgow East is a poor underclass area with very high rates of unemployment and benefit claimants etc. Poor people vote for socialists because as a general rule people vote for their own class** interest. They vote for that which will most benefit themselves, or benefit the class to which they belong. If there were one party offering tax breaks for cyclists and one offering tax breaks for drivers, most cyclists would vote for the Cyclist Party and most drivers would vote for the Driver Party. Which is why democratic politics is based around recruiting a coalition of various classes which is in toto sufficient to win the poll, by creating the impression that your administration will benefit those classes at the expense of their enemy classes (cycists will get tax breaks, drivers will pay more taxes vs drivers will get tax breaks, cyclists will pay more taxes).
Which is why there is little hope of gaining political power based on matters of principle if those principles don’t offer obvious short term benefits to a winning minority coalition of the population. Which is why libertarianism rarely gets anywhere, even if it’s right. Telling somebody that they’re trapped on benefits (probably true) and the solution is to take their benefits away guarantees that they’ll vote for somebody else who promises to serve their class interest. Almost nobody is prepared to make a personal sacrifice for the good of the economy or a nebulous future collective good, be they rich or poor. Which is why I entirely agree with Sean Gabb (for instance) when he wrote that libertarians focussing on dismantling the Welfare State display a failure of political understanding. Politics isn’t about being right, it’s about winning. Far too high a proportion of the population are now dependent at least to some degree on the Welfare State to create a coalition against it (not just unemployment benefit remember- also the NHS, state pensions, child benefits, social housing, tax credits… the list goes on and on).
The only political way to make any gains here in Ukay is to promise to leave the Welfare State as it is and concentrate on freeing the rest of the economy in the hope of rapid growth that will allow ever more people to be levered out of welfare, literally letting the Welfare State shrink as more and more people don’t need it any more and shrinking the self-interested statist constituency that way. Which will be difficult to do but is at least a political strategy which has a hope of gaining traction. Our focus should be on attacking the massive bureaucracy/quangocracy which is not widely beloved by the population, pointing out that that vast wasteful spending of “middle class welfare” on such crap as the Arts Council and NICE is treated as an untouchable first cost by our rulers but could be cut away entire without harm to welfare etc, saving us all many billions of groats.
Sorry for waffling.
**class being defined loosely and circularly as any group with a definable common interest.
Ian: “Glasgow East is where the underclass live” would have sufficed, although I should have been able to figure it out myself before asking a trivial question:-)
The last paragraph is food for thought though.
Because they are holding the map upside down?
Seriously, Ian B. I have two opinions relevant to your comment. One is that “letting the Welfare State shrink as more and more people don’t need it” overlooks the much greater standard of living that can be had on welfare now compared to what qualified to start with. The ruling class will always define poverty where it suits their purposes.
The other comment is about tax payers. The one advantage of sprawling government (from our tactical perspective) is that it sucks up more and more taxes. The ‘soak the rich’ myth simply cannot generate significant revenue even if they soaked them all the way to the poverty line. The reality is that they must soak the middle class. And when more than half of the population is getting less than they are giving for their taxes, the problem shifts from convincing people ‘this is right’ to showing them ‘you’re being screwed’.
And it’s not just the tax payers. In order to keep people in welfare, at least in the US, the system is engineered to prevent rising out of ‘poverty’. Ambition and initiative are punished, savings are confiscated, acquiring property disqualifies. If only the people ‘benefiting’ from welfare knew that they were nothing more the fertilizer for the schemes of politicians, perhaps a few of them would vote for personal independence.
Ian B,
You’re wrong.
…leave the Welfare State as it is and concentrate on freeing the rest of the economy in the hope of rapid growth that will allow ever more people to be levered out of welfare, literally letting the Welfare State shrink…
And you know you are because you mention “middle-class” benefits. Let’s assume that no society is ever perfect (even if it’s been changed by Barack Obama) well, there will always be calls for spending on x,y and z. Quite frankly a better economy would merely encourage the statist spendthrifts. A century ago they might have been “Isn’t it awful that Tiny Tim has no shoes”, but now they’ll be campaigning to get our money spent on Tiny Tim getting a PS3 to replace his PS2 because otherwise he’ll be “socially-excluded” because all his mates have a PS3. Apart from the ones with a Wii but that really would be pissing our sponds up against a wall.
Given that no society is ever perfect (hell, there’s loads of things I want but can’t afford and I’m hardly underclass) the ambitions of the welfare-meisters will never know any bounds. Not. Ever.
The only solution is to do a Frank Field, think the unthinkable and get sacked for it.
Appropriate comments that apply to the US as well. The problem is that, at least in the US, there is (essentially) no difference between the two parties in how they run government.
We have a de facto one party system here.
Midwesterner and Nick M: I can’t think of a complete enough answer that doesn’t go on to book length 🙂 So I’ll try to give a short inadequate one. My first point is that I believe that libertarians tend to bang on about welfare far too much. I entirely understand the arguments and agree that it’s a Bad Thing, and it would’ve been much better if there’d never been a welfare state and NHS etc, but just as one requires a different strategy to get your car out of a ditch compared to the simpler strategy of never driving into one, we have to look at where we are, not where we want to be. The Statists have spent a century organising deliberate dependence on their structures and it simply isn’t practical to just pull the rug out. The old boy next door to me with his prostate problem is too late to get private insurance and he’s dependent on his council flat and state pension too. And so on.
As far as Nick’s point about the constant demand for more welfare, fair enough; but if we’re working on the assumption of a libertarian government being elected (however unlikely that really is) then quite clearly they’d be elected on a no-welfare-expansion ticket. To say we would not pull the welfare state away is not to accept any more expansion. It’s simply to say that for the time being (e.g. a first parliamentary term) people can feel safe to vote for us knowing we won’t suddenly cut off their benefits.
It seems to me that to some extent the focus on welfare comes from the kind of people libertarians tend to be; better off people who want to pay less tax. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is a particular perspective that tends such people to look around for lesser mortals to blame. Lazy layabouts getting my money, etc. I can’t find the reference now but I remember reading a good article a while back that showed that there is far more “churn” on welfare than most people think. The number of committed scroungers is actually quite low- The Sun can always find a family with 25 kids living in a mansion at the taxpayers’ expense, but most people do want to work if they can and always have, and we can do most good by freeing up business to create jobs for them. We can radically reform the tax system to take away penalties for coming off benefits (I am strongly in favour of abolishing the state distinction between employee and business, allowing people to freely make more money in a variety of ways at once for instance).
And I argue that we are too ready to look at the bottom of the heap instead of the top. Public spending is now around 600bn; health, benefits and defence account for about 200bn of that, another 30bn on interest payments on the national debt (thanks Gordon!) but there is still huge scope in the remainder for a radical slashing of government- and that is where I argue that our focus should lie. As a Gabbite (heh) I take the view that an incoming libertarian government must have as the primary focus the job of destroying the power base of the “Enemy Class” or we are doomed.
We’ll only have one term to get things right and obliterate our opposition with our spectacular success 🙂 That means freeing up the economy; but it also, as a political goal, means genuinely destroying the whole structure the Statists have built over the past century. Entire government departments must go (e.g. culture media and sport, the DTI), every quango and regulator we can lay our hands on (bye bye the Arts Council, OFCOM, NICE, the Tomato Marketing Board and so on). We have to kill every outflow of government funds towards Enemy Class structure- NGOs, the charities, etc, we need to kill every government social engineering campaign. That’s a lot to get done, and we don’t need starving urchins in the street to deal with at the same time. Which brings us to another thing-
Libertarians are big on charity replacing welfare. But, and it’s a big but, we also need to recognise that as things currently stand the charities are absolute bastions of the Enemy Class, producing the “advocacy” i.e. propaganda to keep the state ballooning and the money cannons firing in their direction. The absolute last thing we should do, from a political perspective, is hand them the gift of millions of benefit claimants as their new clients and again, imagine their propaganda coup of some tit from Barnardos standing surrounded by a crowd of ragged urchins decrying the government who flung them out on the streets.
Anyway, could say more, that’s where I’m coming from. I’m trying to look at this politically rather than ideologically. If we’re looking at the fantasy of a future libertarian government, it’ll need a term to start proving libertarianism==success, slashing the progressive power structure (and a large part of that I forgot to mention above is of course wresting education from their slimy grip) and that’s enough to be getting on with. When I said “middle class welfare” I meant the golden shower flying in the direction of the likes of Dame Suzi Leather, the jobs and money for the boys and girls at the top of the heap. That should be our first target. Not the stereotypical neds of Dewsbury.
Freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. … Unless it is resisted, the erosion of civil liberties will continue until there is no such thing as liberty and all opposition to authority will have become crime.
To concentrate on the quote, rathe than Ms Greer:
She is correct as to the facts. The wrong response though would be to say things which are subversive or inflammatory simply for the sake of it.* As a society and government becomes more totalitarian, more rigid and more irrational, honest and rational speech will inherently become subversive. No one had to be deliberately inflammatory to be labelled a subversive in Stalin’s Russia. To be deliberately offensive in order to secure the right to free speech risks handing ammunition to those who would seek justification to limit that right.
*Ill leave it to others to decide if Germaine practices or advocates this.
Darnit, posted this on wrong “quote of the day” thread – someone please delete.
To come back to Glasgow East, it is a firmly working class constuency (even if few people there work nowadays), and the habit of voting Labour is just ingrained, they are “Labour People”. However, the whizzkid minister James Purnell has just this morning announced his plans for welfare reform. Since he is a NuLabor minister, I take it as read that they will be bullshit and amount to nothing, but they have certainly stirred up the doleites phoning in on Radio 5 Live this morning, many of whom seem to be from Glasgow, because I can barely make out a word they are saying. Given that the SNP is every bit as left wing as Labour, in fact probably more so, they make the ideal recepticle for a protest vote. Purnell’s announcement makes the loss of Glasgow East much more likely now. Let’s see how things pan out.
(scene: Easterhouse estate, Edinburgh)
Local: Who are ye ?
IDS: I’m Iain Duncan Smith, the Leader of the Tory Party.
L: What ye doin’ here, it’s all Labour round here!
IDS: Yes, and look at it!
Hugo … that was hilarious. Thanks for brightening my day.