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Is the world really turning Right?

An article in today's Guardian discusses this question, presenting a few statistics from recent elections. To anyone with no committment one way or the other, it was evident that the Left had come to the end of the road by the end of the 1980s. Since then it has thrashed around trying to give itself voter appeal with no sound theoretical or philosophical base to work from.

Events over the past five years show the Right has also come to the end of the road. But it has succeeded in maintaining its support, especially in the English speaking world, by appealing to raw selfish instinct. This underpins the neo-Liberalist agenda. It will slowly lead to the breakdown of society as it is nothing more than dog-eat-dog.

Those who do not wish to see this happening must now take a step back and return to first principles, which is unlikely to lead to socialist solutions (which were only ever palliative) but to something else altogether, the outlines of which cannot yet be clearly discerned but which will not lie anywhere on the conventional left-right spectrum.

Those on the "Left" must redefine what it is that really concerns them. Those on the "Right" who want to avert the dog-eat-dog society need to do the same thing. Coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, people of good will might discover that they could put together a programme for political reform that both could agree on.

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