tisdag 11 september 2018

Time for a new centre party in Britain?

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, shocked by the shift of the Labour Party back to the Marxist Left, has argued that it is time.

My reaction is just a weary, “Here we go again!”. In the 1980s it was called “Militant”. Now it is “Momentum”. Behind it are the same public sector white collar staff and college lecturers.

We need to think beyond the one-dimensional Left-Right political model. Left and Right are both failed paradigms. Both are driven, conceptually, from the extremes. It was Lenin who said that “The wind always blows from the Left”. At the other end of this spectrum is the false libertarianism inspired by thinkers such as Rothbard, Benson and David Friedmann (son of Milton),

More success is likely from a party which stood in a triangular relationship to Left and Right, as indeed did the British Liberal Party until the end of World War 2. If it had held to its guiding principles, an alliance with the centrist SDP would not have hapened since it would have been conceptually impossible.

Perhaps an updated Gladstonian Liberal Party is just what the country needs. Where it realises this or would support it is another question. Given that its values were Judeo-Christian, it is unlikely; we will continue to flounder around. The future will look more like the present post-election mess in Sweden, a state of affairs that affects all western-type democracies.

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