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The Daily Cut and Thrust / Re: This Europe Stuff
Last post by karlmark -The hope is that the Tories split and the moderates can come to the centre ground along with the LD and the Anti Brexit party (whatever they are called) and some of the centrist Labour party members.
Apologies for long-windedness as I seem to be suffering from verbal diarrhoea again.
But to where does that split lead? What are the policies that will be followed? At some point we have another recession coming; what are the policy responses at that point given a background of historically low interest rates and excessive private debt? Does this new centrist vision have answers to any of those questions?
The first step is accepting that there are current widespread and deep problems out there and at some point the economic situation will deteriorate.
The right has given its response which is to leave the EU. Some on the left support the idea of leaving in order to further their own backward vision of a Utopian past. This is why there is a seeming struggle between left and right and presents a real conundrum for centrists: in a democratic system (deeply flawed though ours is), the only way to continue with the previous economic policies is to leave the EU. Why? Because the system is inherently unstable (as most are of course) as it relies on a relatively skilled highly-paid sector generating consumption in order to employ a flexible, low-paid, insecure and unskilled sector. The sector you end up working in is determined largely by your parents, luck and government support. If it becomes too difficult to transfer from the low to the high sector then imbalances start to appear and support for policies to redress the balance increases. It is natural for people's politics to trend more conservative as they hark back to a an earlier perceived halcyon period and is a condition to which we all succumb.
The policies offered for redressing the balance are a function of how large the perceived gap is between the high sector and the low sector. At the moment, the gap is, or is perceived to be, large and the policies being offered are more radical as a result.
This leads to radical right policies of blaming immigration and appeals to patriotism to restore a nation robbed of its prestige by foreign entities, ergo, Brexit.
On the far-left, the policy offering is one of Brexit, but a shift to also discredited policies from before the birth of neo-liberalism.
What is the centre ground in this example?
Firstly, a recognition that there are problems that need to be solved that recent policies have not remediated and even more recent policies have compounded. The response should be obvious, and that is to cancel Brexit due to the enormous waste of resources involved. Further to that, a proper overhaul of the education sector to move it away from being an exam factory to actually meeting the needs of our economy and potential instead of some myopic vision of a Chinese engineering powerhouse.
Britain excels in IT, the media, creative and cultural industries. We can never compete with China and India in basic manufacturing.