Have Western Politics Shifted eo the Right in the 2010s?

[Andrew]

Yes, The Listener & The Spectator have been my staples in the past. Really miss the Listener! Unfortunately in this age of market economics, there's no "market" for it!

[eighthobstruction]

....one wonders whether the term right wing means much, we have idealogues taking advantage of situations and state sponsored shenanikins blurring the lines.muddying waters so there can be no scrutiny....like what was Dominic Cummings saying on Twitter that encouraged a prospective political adviser to write such Fascist remarks,,,,At this moment all the advisers writing will be being looked at with interest....The latest efforts to organise the BBC....worry the BBC lovers.....again avoiding scrutiny....is Putinesque or Erdoganesque....with their intentions being -they will lie and ofuscate, get state shadows to do the dirty work (Iran)....because they can - nobody is stopping them....

[LMcD]

Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, Jaffa cakes, repeat ad nausiam

I thought the courts had ruled that Jaffa cakes weren't biscuits. Perhaps we could have a once-in-a-generation referendum to settle this important issue once and for all - no ifs, no buts.

[Serial_Apologist]

....one wonders whether the term right wing means much, we have idealogues taking advantage of situations and state sponsored shenanikins blurring the lines.muddying waters so there can be no scrutiny....like what was Dominic Cummings saying on Twitter that encouraged a prospective political adviser to write such Fascist remarks,,,,At this moment all the advisers writing will be being looked at with interest....The latest efforts to organise the BBC....worry the BBC lovers.....again avoiding scrutiny....is Putinesque or Erdoganesque....with their intentions being -they will lie and ofuscate, get state shadows to do the dirty work (Iran)....because they can - nobody is stopping them....

I think that's a question well worth examining when considering the terms Left and Right in politics. Personally I continue to think the old definitions of Right and Left remain pertinent in the present situation, but have, as always, been used for defamatory, declamatory purposes - a now very old example being to portray Stalinism, and the various offshoots that have been used to condemn socialism and communism, as "left wing politics at their most extreme", as a sort of warming of where anything approximating to them could lead if we don't watch out. Whereas Stalinism was in effect a self-justifying creed and practice foisted on Russia by a self-selected gang of extreme right wing thugs feasting off the embers of the Russian revolution in the wake of the civil war that followed, subsequently extended to what became the E Bloc countries following WW2. This was unfortunately an outcome not forseen by the genuine revolutionaries who fought the existing order to achieve social change, because it was not a part of the "model" as had been adumbrated by Lenin, who had predicted either the triumphant eclipse of capitalism, worldwide, or defeat and the return of capitalism - and the result divided the international far left for 60 or more years thereafter, some claiming capitalism had been restored in the form of the Soviet bureaucracy (the "state capitalists"), others that the process of change had been stalled by the obstacle posed by the self-arrogated power of the bureaucratic caste and the state apparatus it had established, although the ideal strategy for change remained largely unscathed apart from differences over tactics. What constitued Left and Right thereafter was conveniently handed to capitalism's apologists and advocates on a plate, and I don't think many of us on the freedom-loving left have ever quite got over that.

[Bella Kemp]

Nothing is ever quite straightforward. One of my sons married his husband last year - utterly unthinkable for something like this to happen just a few decades ago (and even more unthinkable for this to be something that was brought into Law by a Tory government.) Racism was so entrenched when I was younger that politicians such as Enoch Powell were given a platform to spread their poison and this poison was actually debated as though it were a reasonable point of view - who can forget the Dockers Union marching in support of this villain? Women's Rights have made huge advances - when I was at school the Cookery Classes were only for us girls (we had to look after our future husbands!) And let's not forget the voice that has been given to children in recent years- we are now uncovering just how much abuse was going on in this past that was supposedly better and more left wing.
And do you know what I remember most? - the extraordinary lack of real hope for the future. There was a general belief that East and West would eventually nuke each other. The government even produced a helpful booklet that they distributed to every home telling us what to do when the bomb fell. But I suppose humanity will always believe that the past was somehow better (I seem to remember a passage in Barnaby Rudge where one of the characters lamented the good old days that will never return).

[Serial_Apologist]

Nothing is ever quite straightforward. One of my sons married his husband last year - utterly unthinkable for something like this to happen just a few decades ago (and even more unthinkable for this to be something that was brought into Law by a Tory government.) Racism was so entrenched when I was younger that politicians such as Enoch Powell were given a platform to spread their poison and this poison was actually debated as though it were a reasonable point of view - who can forget the Dockers Union marching in support of this villain? Women's Rights have made huge advances - when I was at school the Cookery Classes were only for us girls (we had to look after our future husbands!) And let's not forget the voice that has been given to children in recent years- we are now uncovering just how much abuse was going on in this past that was supposedly better and more left wing.

One lesson that should never be forgot is the one that reminds us that such gains are always provisional, and when won are only granted because the ruling classes have nothing to lose by granting them. In other words someone on his or her high horse suddenly twigged that there was nothing further to be gained by continuing to repress, in this instance, gays.

Blacks, gays, social workers, "do-gooders", muslims, the white underclass, the whols sorry litany of easily identifiable targets to distract from the actual object of blame - who have I missed out? - never the rich, the CEOs of massive conglomerates, corrupt police, even the banks! The rich & powerful can always find someone to target for vilificational scapegoating when it's not straightforward exploitation. They had also profited by way of the benefits of exporting capital to nations under right wing despots they effectively supported by way of the CIA, dirty wars, and invitations to tea at Buckingham Palace. In other words by displacing the worst aspects of capitalism's contradictions onto those least able to fight back - something the ruling classes had done here ever since the inception of the British Empire with a lot of helpful rhetoric and pageantry back home. And in any case racism and sexism are continuing problems fostered through the social media by omnipresent attitudes stoked by glossy unattainable body image norms now even being foisted on young boys by way of voyeuristic so-called reality TV programmes, the latest expression of peer-group inculcated pressure whose root causes are not so difficult to understand.

And do you know what I remember most? - the extraordinary lack of real hope for the future. There was a general belief that East and West would eventually nuke each other. The government even produced a helpful booklet that they distributed to every home telling us what to do when the bomb fell. But I suppose humanity will always believe that the past was somehow better (I seem to remember a passage in Barnaby Rudge where one of the characters lamented the good old days that will never return).

That general belief was deliberate myth-making, as anybody who saw the Pilger interviews of leading CIA figures from the Cold War period brazenly admitting such will have had to acknowledge or be called out as liars. I'm not saying the past was somehow better - it is usually right-wing nostalgists who argue such. What I am saying is that I cannot ever remember a period as protracted as the present when what you call "the future" was so much in question, and in so many ways: the future prospects of worthwhile lifelong careers, affordable home ownership and saving for a pension; a sustainable, inhabitable planet.