A Place to Stand

Douglas Carswell the libertarian Tory MP, of whom I have written favourably previously has been interviewed, in favourable terms, on Mark Reckons, one of the relatively few LibDem blogs that don't censor to promote racial genocide.

The full interview is here & worth it.

I put up this comment starting with a quote of his. I think this worth recording because it shows why I am sympathetic to the real "left" but why the term is damaging when facing the real enemy which is the overbearing & parasitic state.

"the Left ... has captured key institutions. The Left’s long march through our institutions explains the leftist disposition of so much of the quango state"

You can reverse that interpretation. Perhaps the greatest problem of government is its tendency to grow as it comes to be dominated by empire builders (Pournelle's Iron law).

It is at least as much the case that big government has been in a long march through the left than vice versa. Thus, for example, we find donors to, at least, the LibDems, increasingly consisting of quangos, civil service unions, government departments & government funded fakecharities. That is why Labour is no longer in any way a working class institution. The Greens are considered part of the "left" because they support every sort of regulation & subsidy & despite being committed not to progress but a return to medievalism. The same has happened to the LibDems, as I have said elsewhere, in that in its subservience to big statism (support of the EU & of fascist wars) it has driven out the traditional liberals.

The terms left & right do enormous harm because they interfere with any assessment of real positions - in what way, for example is opposition to the EU or support of inexpensive electricity "right wing"? The term originally came about because the aristocracy entered the French chamber first, through a door on the left hand side & thus ended up on the right. Today support of government over ordinary people is considered left wing - the precise opposite of what they wanted then.

I note also that in the interview Douglas says that he now supports proportional electoral systems, so long as it doesn't involve a simple party list with apparatchiks at the front. This is a change from when He & Daniel Hannan wrote The Plan. It is also something I have mentioned in comments on his blog. I'm sure he would not change his opinion purely because I said so but would check out with sources & people he knows but it is a definite move in the right direction.

I am looking forward to seeing what the new intake of Conservative MPs will be like. There are certainly going to be a lot of them & my hope is that they will be, like Carswell & Hannan, more liberal, in the true meaning of the word, & less Conservative than the average of the current lot.

As an example of how the "left" has not occupied the judiciary but vice versa one can see that High Court Judges, however "leftist" their rulings are said to be, & lawyer serving they actually are, are still upper class public school types as they were a century ago while Labour leaders, who a century ago were working class, usually former trades union leaders, are now (eg Bliar, Harmen) upper class ex-public school lawyers.

Labels: British politics