News Flash: Conservatives Discover Inequality

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


News Flash: Conservatives Discover Inequality
In Britain, top Conservative Party leaders are now sounding the alarm about their nation's growing gap between rich and poor. But the UK's wealthy have little reason to really worry.
August 4, 2008

By Sam Pizzigati

Inequality in Britain, the only developed nation in the world with an economic divide that rivals the gap in the United States, came under attack last week — from the country’s Conservative Party. The British “financial gap between the richest and the poorest,” charged a top Conservative leader, Chris Grayling, in a nationally hyped speech, now stands “at its widest for generations.”

“The gap between the life expectancy of the richest and the poorest is now at its widest since the Victorian era,” Grayling would go on to add. “There could be no clearer indicator of a society that is getting things wrong.”

Such a declaration — from a top conservative — would be almost unimaginable in the United States, where right-wingers typically either deny the reality of inequality or minimize its impact. Indeed, this past spring, new federal research revealed a “large and growing” gap between the life expectancy of rich and poor Americans, and no top conservatives made any public fuss.

So what makes top conservatives in the UK more inequality-sensitive?

Credit that “sensitivity” to the dynamics of partisan politics. In the UK, conservatives don't have to take the blame for recent surges in British inequality. inequality has soared over the last decade with the Conservative Party’s top rival, the Labor Party, running the show.

Tony Blair and his “New Labor” allies took parliamentary control in 1997. Right from the start, they distanced themselves from “old” Labor Party priorities — like discouraging the concentration of wealth. New Labor, noted Blairite powerbroker Peter Mandelson early on, would be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes.” .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew2008/aug4a.html

[bluestateguy]

1. I would trade our conservatives for British Conservatives any day

Parties of the Right are not pleasant, but they are necessary, and can even be a good thing, as long as they are kept out of office.

[Recursion]

2. Tories are "cool" in a way Repugs aren't

There's a certain aesthetic sensibility to Toryism that Republicanism (which is at its heart bourgeois) never got. Plus Tories are often dovish.