Politicians of the ‘centre ground’ have led us to the brink of catastrophe
Not that this is anything new of course. The formative years of my generation – those born in the eras of Thatcher, Major and Blair – were spent against a backdrop of increasing prosperity and declining political engagement. Whichever party you put a cross next to on the ballot paper it seemed like the outcome was always the same – a predictable set of policies within increasingly narrow confines. With more money in our pockets, or at least the illusion of it, many people started to drift away from the political process entirely. In an era of cheap credit and even cheaper materialism, those who did register to vote often did so for no other reason than the prospect of an improved credit rating. The citizenship of past generations was replaced, to an extent at least, by a generation of pushy consumers who identified not with political parties but with brands.
Even the political left accepted the politics of moderation in its own way, ditching the idea of class solidarity in favour of touchy-feely tropes about individuality and identity. Radical political groups began to draw up shopping lists of the hot issues they could campaign on and talked about the rights of small sections of the population while ignoring the problems facing the wider community. To be left was to be parochial in one’s concerns. Because ideas that might compete with liberal capitalism failed to attract mass audiences, front organisations sprang up which drew members of the public to causes of a more palatable nature. Contrary to common wisdom on the left, the British people didn’t spurn radical politics because of a hostile and conspiratorial media; they did so because they had money in their pockets and were under the strong impression things were going to stay that way. It was therefore left to radicals to attract support by convincing the wider public that they too were sufficiently versed in the politics of moderation.
And then Lehman Brothers collapsed. Cheap credit dried up and people were thrown out of work by the bosses of companies they had until that point viewed as benevolent and kind-hearted pillars of their local community. The grand proclamations of an “end of history” made by certain academics began to look like bombastic wish-thinking.
And yet in the aftermath of the crisis party politics remained largely unchanged, and the election across Europe of governments committed to austerity betrayed a feeling that a few years of belt-tightening would give way to a swift return to prosperity. Interestingly, the newly triumphant politicians of the centre-right looked not to the depression of the 1930s for lessons in dealing with the financial crisis, but to the 1980s – their formative political years – and sought to push-back the state in a way their political role-models had done a generation before.http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/06/12/politicians-of-the-‘centre-ground’-have-led-us-to-the-brink-of-catastrophe/
Lesson being learned-what starving an economy can do to your country when it's contracting-a shit storm....
