QED

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

just what is wrong with a transaction tax ... do not say that it will restrict trade in the real world

By 2007 the trade in derivatives worldwide was one quadrillion (thousand million million) US dollars - this is 10 times the total production of goods on the planet over its entire history,"

and you can add the forex to that as well .....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

meanwhile while we were looking elsewhere

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

wel it is now quite radical to be a one nation conservative eh ...

The epigraph to Mount’s book is the joke made, in 2008, about the credit crunch: “Never in the field of human commerce was so much paid by so many to so few.”

op ed in Torygraf

review in Graun


ah labour party conferences were collectors items eh .... not any more and the tories are as bad ....which party has an explicit aim of mass membership nd endures troublesome conferences and removes leaders who are unfit for purpose [kennedy Ming etc?] but totally lacks popular support

do the people like bread and circus oligarchy .... but just do not favour the current crop?

would we do as well with a politburo ....

i rather incline to the view that we have a cock up of an oligarchy but a fine thieving bunch of plutocrats in power ....

[Serial_Apologist]

wel it is now quite radical to be a one nation conservative eh ...



op ed in Torygraf

review in Graun


ah labour party conferences were collectors items eh .... not any more and the tories are as bad ....which party has an explicit aim of mass membership nd endures troublesome conferences and removes leaders who are unfit for purpose [kennedy Ming etc?] but totally lacks popular support

do the people like bread and circus oligarchy .... but just do not favour the current crop?

would we do as well with a politburo ....

i rather incline to the view that we have a cock up of an oligarchy but a fine thieving bunch of plutocrats in power ....

The aetiology of the skewering of a British social democratic route to socialism, for want of a more precise word, has still to be written.

I well remember the time when the Labour Party abandoned any hard-fought for pretense at inner-party democracy, owing to the fact that it was the left within the party that had been fighting for the constitutional changes to make it happen, arguing that Clause Four would be inoperable without the principle of democracy first emanating from the party in power that sought to implement it: democratic accountability being synomymous with empowerment on the wider plain for the disempowered. I remember it because I was there.

Inner party democracy had always of course been inscribed more in word than reality in the Labour Party. Yet, we figured, if the Liberal Party can have party policy decided democratically on conference resolutions, why not us? Well. Militant didn't eactly help - their "tactics" being well portrayed in that marvellous play "Our Friends in the North" - giving the newly incumbent Neil Kinnock the excuse the right in the party needed to abandon, first, conference/policy accountability, then introduce a "focus group" notion of contituency/ward discussion on policy "proposals" emanating from the NEC for local input as a sop to those naive enough to believe the top of the party would take any notice of resultant ideas, proposals or amendments. Shortly after I myself was forced to leave - not due to expulsion, I hasten to add, but by family circumstances. From afar, it was a short distance to abandoning any pretence of listening to the grass roots, and the jettisoning of Clause 4 proudly proclaimed on the membership card from the Party Constitution. Some bright young chappie was starting to hit the television studios with his bubbly charisma and talk of a Third Way - though goodness knows there were plenty who'd been speaking of such things for decades, uninvited and undined by the media - but none of us, right or left, had the faintest idea who he was, or where he'd come from.

[aeolium]

S_A, don't you think the two really disastrous events in turning the Labour party into one that largely borrowed Tory party policy were first the 1992 election defeat which (in my view falsely) associated a progressive tax policy with unelectability in the minds of some senior Labour politicians, and secondly the death of John Smith, which brought to the fore that wretched 'bright young chappie'?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

the left in the labour party and unions was a truly awful bunch of people in my experience S_A ... dogmatic aggressive ranting and unelectable ... except by block votes and uncomradely stitch ups inside its own organisations i suspect but do not know that the lab party was losing members in the 70s [i left in 64] ...when the SDP started i jumped at membership of a progressive and open party and then there was that Owen creep ... and the merger and here we are ... we need something a lot better than the Labour or Lib Dem parties and we do not have it .... it is not going to come from PPE Oxbridge Spaddies playing brand games with politics ...

the parties are not just bereft of ideas and values that you could go for, they are also socially bankrupt as well ... dead organisations ...

in the few years as a school governor that i undertook, every vacancy which should be an elected appointment was a dragooned volunteer .... parents were not engaged with the school as a community institution ... in some ways the great briit public gets the politicians of its choosing not just its voting or abstentions, if you follow my drift .... i should imagine the real audience for serious politics in this country is about the same size as R3's ...

[ahinton]

just what is wrong with a transaction tax ... do not say that it will restrict trade in the real world

For my money (not literally!), the principal answer is that it will be passed on to others just as bank charges are, so it will not benefit anyone in the ways that a tax may be assumed to do.

[Serial_Apologist]

S_A, don't you think the two really disastrous events in turning the Labour party into one that largely borrowed Tory party policy were first the 1992 election defeat which (in my view falsely) associated a progressive tax policy with unelectability in the minds of some senior Labour politicians, and secondly the death of John Smith, which brought to the fore that wretched 'bright young chappie'?

I was out of the Labour Party by that stage, aeolium, having left in '84, but by then it seems the main damage had already been done.

[Serial_Apologist]

the left in the labour party and unions was a truly awful bunch of people in my experience S_A ... dogmatic aggressive ranting and unelectable ... except by block votes and uncomradely stitch ups inside its own organisations

From where I was - though I didn't get a different picture from get-togethers from around the country - this was an exaggerated tabloid representation of the state of things in the party of the time. The ranters and sloganisers were largely confined to the smaller Trot organisations who would rather have murdered their grandmother than have anything to do with the reformist LP. If the party had been full of such people I would have been out in a flash, no question

i suspect but do not know that the lab party was losing members in the 70s [i left in 64]

Actually, while the fight was on to make the party leadership more answerable membership growing, people were finding attraction in a party where they had more say, whether of the right or the left

...when the SDP started i jumped at membership of a progressive and open party and then there was that Owen creep ... and the merger and here we are ... we need something a lot better than the Labour or Lib Dem parties and we do not have it .... it is not going to come from PPE Oxbridge Spaddies playing brand games with politics ...

The intelligent, tolerant left (including the reformist Tribunites who weren't just exiled Stalinists) in the party, numerically vastly outnumbering the sectarians, would have seen off Militant by means of debate, had not Kinnock intervened. IMV the defection of the SDP-to-be was a far worse betrayal of the working class than the belated debate about policy and principles taking place in the party in the late 70s/early '80s. As has been pointed out, the really sad thing (that some of us had started to realise: Geoff Hodgson's "Socialism and Parliamentary Democracy" changed my thinking) was all the separate decisions taken by the Communist Party and post-1968 New (far) Left to ignore the institutional ideological importance of the Labour Party, and the fact that the "bourgeois state" Lenin and Trotsky had written of in 1917 was now a very different animal from the one once rightly seen as to be smashed. That, and other transitional matters and questions too lengthy to digress into here...

the parties are not just bereft of ideas and values that you could go for, they are also socially bankrupt as well ... dead organisations ...

in the few years as a school governor that i undertook, every vacancy which should be an elected appointment was a dragooned volunteer .... parents were not engaged with the school as a community institution ... in some ways the great briit public gets the politicians of its choosing not just its voting or abstentions, if you follow my drift .... i should imagine the real audience for serious politics in this country is about the same size as R3's ...

The Greens still have much going for them. As the essential resources deplete and/or go outside most people's affordability, alternatives will once more come to the fore. By which time I'll be too old for the barricades. Can't even do one press-up now, if anybody out there's reading this!!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

in a phrase

Sam Zell @MilkenInstitute #2012GC "there is no 'effing' demand" in Europe. #FBomb

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-z...#ixzz1tXpPqESh

and krugman has a low opinion of ideas favoured at No 11

[amateur51]

By which time I'll be too old for the barricades. Can't even do one press-up now, if anybody out there's reading this!!

These days if I want any press-ups doing, I get a little man in

[jean]

Well. Militant didn't eactly help...

Tony Mulhearn from the Liverpool Militant council of the 1980s is standing here as candiidate for Mayor, promising to defy the Government over the cuts just as they defied Thatcher back then.

What a great success that was!

I have no idea how much support he has, but I've seen a couple of posters...

[teamsaint]

S_A, don't you think the two really disastrous events in turning the Labour party into one that largely borrowed Tory party policy were first the 1992 election defeat which (in my view falsely) associated a progressive tax policy with unelectability in the minds of some senior Labour politicians, and secondly the death of John Smith, which brought to the fore that wretched 'bright young chappie'?

A bad moment. I sometimes wonder what really happened to John Smith.

[Resurrection Man]

...
Have young people had this sort of experience in the years since, I wonder? I ask in all sincerity, not being a parent.

Coming to this late and apologies if this has already been answered.

You're going to hate this but the answer is 'Yes' but predominantly in Public Schools

[teamsaint]

Coming to this late and apologies if this has already been answered.

You're going to hate this but the answer is 'Yes' but predominantly in Public Schools

or in the very healthy debating scene that exists outside of the public schools. (I know that this exists from personal experience).

The public schools always want the great unwashed to think that they are the only ones who can educate properly, but of course this is just a big lie.

The public school/oxbridge /city types are the ones who got us in this mess (and mess it is out here in the real world). As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it.

Noy a bigotted view, by the way, just logical. Some of my best friends are ex public school !!