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Liberal inversion of political principles

I was not sorry to see that the LibDems received so little support at the election. It is sad that the party has taken up a set of policies that were diametrically opposed to those the Liberal Party had stood for from the 1830s until the late 1970s, when they seem to have forgotten what Liberalism was all about.

The same can be said of the Labour Party, which was founded as a popular movement on much the same set of policies as the contemporary Liberals. Labour held firmly to them until it was taken over by intellectuals in the Fabian mould, and by Keynesians, in the late 1930s. These gave the country Fabian and Keynesian policies when Labour came to power in 1945.

Then came the disastrous influx of Marxists in the late 1970s, followed by New Labour opportunism, which was based on next to no coherent principles at all. It is a tragic story, because it leaves Britain with no effective alternative to Conservative politics, although it is not a problem confined to Britain. Radical politics needs to be reconstructed from the ground up. Can it happen?

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