In a piece pondering the nature of the political middle ground, Fabian Tassano spots a little sly projection:
According to the Guardian, for example, Cameron recently claimed that “the poor, obese and lazy spent too much time blaming social problems for their own shortcomings.” However, that looks like a bit of tendentious rewriting on the part of the Guardian since, as far as I can make out from other media coverage, what Cameron actually said during his tour of Glasgow in July is that “social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.” The distinction between the quote and its misrepresentation is illuminating, since the people who blame ‘society’ for poverty, disease and so forth are not typically the poor themselves, but the il-liberal elite (e.g. Guardian writers).
I like the Tassano post:
“Earlier this year the Financial Times carried an analysis of the post-Blair ideological landscape, in which it got close to some of the key issues. Its argument that both main parties are trying to grab “the centre” is revealing. For “the centre” is now apparently the area where one is irrevocably committed to very high levels of intervention, above and beyond minimum welfare, education and medicine. “The centre” seems to mean such things as monitoring of families, compulsory parental training, extension of compulsory education, progressive reduction of civil liberties, and various interventions to bring about greater equality of outcome…
The fact that a party is labelled as right-wing, or once was right-wing, or is notionally to the right of another party which is left-wing, is not sufficient to make it actually right-wing. The definitions have changed, the ground has shifted, and terms such as “centrist” and “moderate” now apply to policies which would have horrified many Tories of the Heath era.”
I keep hearing about this “rightwing press” and “rightwing establishment” but my tax bill ain’t shrinking.
“I keep hearing about this ‘rightwing press’ and ‘rightwing establishment’ but my tax bill ain’t shrinking.”
And I’d guess you, like many others, no longer *expect* it to, at least not significantly, which is perhaps more to the point.
What tickles me, grimly, is hearing about the “rightwing establishment” in the pages of the Guardian, or the usual blather about challenging some terrible bourgeois consensus in the media, schools, etc. The Guardian’s own middle-class readership of around 300,000 is in very large part made up of teachers, social workers, educational advisors, broadcasters, media types, etc. The paper’s influence is thus much greater than its limited sales would suggest. Many of the views propagated by the Guardian are, to a significant degree, the views of the current educational establishment. (Max Hastings famously said of his writing for the Guardian that “it is read by the new establishment.”) Thus the ever-so-daring “challenge” to an alleged “rightwing establishment” is very often a restatement of orthodoxy among the political, educational and media elite.
It’s the same old same old, really. Illiberal leftists who want to imagine themselves as Luke Skywalker figures, heroically resisting some evil “hegemony”. The fact that the “hegemony” is very often their own doesn’t seem to register. Such is the nature of fantasy.
“I keep hearing about this ‘rightwing press’ and ‘rightwing establishment’ but my tax bill ain’t shrinking.”
But grumbling about how much tax you have to pay means you’re a bad person. You should want to give more! Bad Johnny.
Carbon
“You should want to give more!”
Most lefties I know are pretty averse to paying more tax. For some reason, though, they seem to think that there are plenty of *other* people who could, and should, pay more. Funny that.
People who feel taxes should be higher are welcome to volunteer a donation from their own pocket.
Horace,
That’s socialism for you. Getting what *you* want with someone else’s money. How selfless is that?
Yep, it is a conceit of our current left-wing establishment that they see themselves as rebels and outsiders, where in fact they are the complete opposite.