New Light Needed...
Interesting counterplay between the two opponents, and I don't mean Ronnie O'Sullivan & Luca Brecel in the quarters of the World Snooker. I refer of course to the PM and the leader of the Opposition and their respective administrations. On the one hand, Sunak's government's Illegal Migration Bill including the power to detain under-18's - children in British law - travelling alone or with family; and the Labour Party removing the whip from Diane Abbott for some somewhat ill-conceived remarks on the nature of racism.
On the one hand, the Tories continue to deploy their long-standing, vote-garnering [they hope] old standby, law'n'order: Draconian legislation to counter largely overstated or even non-existent threats. On the other, we see the Labour Party engaged in a non-too-subtle purge of the Left within the party, attempting to placate the centrists and to an extent out-manoeuvre the right-wing press. Both are understandable and simultaneously lazy thinking, relying on dogma and appearances rather than on debate and action. To a Tory government that is fundamentally anti-state - if they ain't, God knows what they stand for - spending the public's money on the public is anathema, so passing a few vote-catching laws usually stands them in good stead in avoiding actually doing any governing. To the current Labour Party, we seem to be into yet another phase of the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" reaction to the all-encompassing Right: government, establishment, media; and most significantly of all: Über-Capitalism.
Simply passing unenforcible and immoral border security laws will not be enough to carry the Tories through, after their miserably disastrous mismanagement of the country for the last thirteen years: but it's a cheap option for them. As for Labour, pushing themselves back towards the centre ground to ape the success of New Labour in the late nineties, the lessons from that one are obvious. It is also lazy thinking because it denies the possibility of any alternative form of socialist thinking besides centrism and communism: a notion even more ridiculously reductive than Tory thinking [which it is, by definition...]. The Conservative Party and the Right ran out of fresh ideas two hundred years ago, with the single, disastrous exception of Neoliberalism; the effects of which we are suffering to this day. There are plenty of good ideas knocking about elsewhere, though, and it's about time we started looking at genuinely new ways of political and economic thought and find a way through the Great Grimpen Mire of economics and social management. Cheap and lazy won't keep us afloat in that endeavour...
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