My ballot paper is signed sealed and on my desk ready for posting.
I got a flyer in the post from the Lib Dems saying "there is NO WAY" the tories can win in southwark South and Bermondsey (it has been a stronghold for the Lib Dems). The Tories have 8% and it is unlikely but not impossible. I refuse to vote "tactically" for the Lib dems as the lesser of the evils between Libs and Labour (I only vote conservative as the lesser of the evils between the 3) because if everyone always voted tactically, change and progress would be slow. And a vote does count even if it is to help narrow the margin between the loser and winner. As my Mum grew up as a Cape coloured under apartheid and wasn't allowed to vote, I value my vote and stick by the principle to do the best I can with it.
I work for a county council and it's amazing to see which people in which party hold which views. It isn't always what you'd think. Very leftish councillors, when asked, say, about travellers, suddenly swing further right than Mussolini. Frightening.
Well, David - (sorry I'm getting back to this late, haven't been on the site properly for a few days) - I feel illuminated about Frank Furedi and it just shows my ignorance...I thought that the RCP was still Trotskyist well into the early 90s judging by the stuff they talked about on street corners whilst selling LM.
I thought Furedi established the RCP - so how can you move from Revolutionary Communism and Trotskyism and educate your members with the writings of Marx and end up on the 'nihilistic libertarian right'?
So how is it writers talk about them using entryism and appearing to support right-wing views when they in fact don't??
"hm. it's a tricky one. the world's changed but socialism never changes. how do we get out of this moebius loop?
i know! let's just pretend that it's 1975 again!
yippee!"
Socialism changes all the time and it's always meant different things to different people. I'm not a rabid opponent of new Labour. I think were (and still are) right about many things, including some of their criticism of old Labour are true. We can't continue to operate the same version of the welfare state as the one that was put together in 1945. We can't pursue economic policies designed for an economy dominated by heavy industry. These things are practical things than have changed since 1975.
On the other you have thing like a belief in using the tax system to redistribute wealth and the belief that while business making profits is a good thing, it's not the only consideration for economic policy. These are principles. I can accept the opinion that they were wrong in 1975 and they're still wrong now or vice versa. What I can't accept is that somehow these things were right in 1975 but are somehow wrong now.
I also don't except Gerry's ideology is dead thing. The belief that ideology is dead is an ideology in itself. It's all very well to support 'efficiency' and 'what works' but are you seriously suggesting everyone has the same idea of what 'what works' means?
In terms of the above post, the RCP, now Spiked are not, by any sense of the word - left-wing extremists.
Frank Furedi writes regularly for the Daily Mail and is an extremist of the nihilistic libertarian right. His attitude on counselling, for example, is that people should stop moaning and pull themselves together. Hardly a lefty.
The RCP were Trotskyists about 30 years ago but, Living Marxism was always broadly a magazine of the liberal right. Living Marxism's last editor and now Spiked's boss, Mick Hume is a columnist for the Times, owned by that well-known Bolshevik, Rupert Murdoch.
If you've spotted a sinister left-wing agenda in their writing, Emma, I'd be really interested to find out what it is.
Is that like pruning when you've got out of the bath, only with an inverted 'j' on your right index finger (except you, obviously, Hayley)
If Dan Brown's Parisian Crypology detectives ever found your prints, they'd know it was you - "zese prints, they ave the letters from too much typing. All except the right index finger - she 'as no j on eet"
"It must be Hayley - her typewriter, she as no letter j"
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