Militant students at Warwick

[Richard Barrett]

You like straw men, now?

I don't really know what you mean. I don't particularly have time for Billy Bragg if that's what it is. It's quite difficult to have a discussion with you when you're so often either making cryptic comments like this, or not believing me when I say I hadn't previously come across the term "faux-left" except in your posts. I guess that must be your purpose, but it's a bit odd.

What I'm trying to get at is exactly who these highly influential "faux-left" people are and why they deserve that adjective. So far there's Diane Abbott, not a very impressive showing for such a supposedly consequential tendency.

[P. G. Tipps]

Wenger's a fine socialist (no such thing as faux, y'see).

http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/2896/premier-league/2013/01/10/3661169/the-hypocrisy-of-wengers-socialist-arsenal-wage-structure

Sir Alex Ferguson is another real socialist, we're told ... :-)

[Beef Oven!]

I don't really know what you mean. I don't particularly have time for Billy Bragg if that's what it is. It's quite difficult to have a discussion with you when you're so often either making cryptic comments like this, or not believing me when I say I hadn't previously come across the term "faux-left" except in your posts. I guess that must be your purpose, but it's a bit odd.

What I'm trying to get at is exactly who these highly influential "faux-left" people are and why they deserve that adjective. So far there's Diane Abbott, not a very impressive showing for such a supposedly consequential tendency.

Then you haven't been paying attention.

[Beef Oven!]

Wenger's a fine socialist (no such thing as faux, y'see).

http://www.goal.com/en-gb/news/2896/premier-league/2013/01/10/3661169/the-hypocrisy-of-wengers-socialist-arsenal-wage-structure

Sir Alex Ferguson is another real socialist, we're told ... :-)

Wenger is Herbert von Karajan and both were created by Thatcher. And there's the whole forum's belief system in one!

[aeolium]

The obsession with hypocrisy, which is surely what this "faux" language is all about, is imv intended to distract from the real issue of policies and their actual effects on people. What does it really matter about the personal life of a politician if the actual policies s/he supports result in significant improvements to the lives of millions - or, conversely, if they result in the immiseration of millions?

Most of Attlee's cabinet, and Attlee himself, came from well-off middle class or even upper middle-class backgrounds, yet that cabinet promoted policies that had enormously beneficial effects on most of the population of the country as well as creating institutions like the NHS that are valued by virtually everyone to this day. By contrast the deregulation of private finance by the Tories in the 1980s laid the basis for the credit bubble and casino banking that has damaged the economic and social fabric of the country. Who on earth - except tabloid journalists - cares about the private lives of individual politicians compared with the policies they support? We are now threatened, if the electorate vote back the callous and obnoxious people who currently dominate the cabinet, with public spending cuts taking us back to levels not seen since before the war. That's what matters, not faux this or faux that.

[teamsaint]

We are now threatened, if the electorate vote back the callous and obnoxious people who currently dominate the cabinet, with public spending cuts taking us back to levels not seen since before the war. That's what matters, not faux this or faux that.

raw statistics are useful and important, in assessing the size of the public sector, but what the money is spent on is critical, and even harder to pin down.

The myth that labour tends to outspend the tories has yet to be nailed, so I fear it will be the devil's own job to make clear, as I believe, that the tories tend to spend money on stuff, (produced by their industrialist supporters) whereas labour tend to spend on (poorer) peoples' direct needs.

[Richard Barrett]

Then you haven't been paying attention.

An excellent and potentially highly fruitful contribution, thank you.

[jean]

Most of Attlee's cabinet, and Attlee himself, came from well-off middle class or even upper middle-class backgrounds, yet that cabinet promoted policies that had enormously beneficial effects on most of the population of the country as well as creating institutions like the NHS that are valued by virtually everyone to this day.

Where you come from is not something you can do anything about - it's what you do yourself that counts.

Who on earth - except tabloid journalists - cares about the private lives of individual politicians compared with the policies they support?

But I care very much whether the people I rely on to support and fund properly the state education system don't send their children to state schools.

Is it any wonder no Labour government has ever got anywhere near abolishing private education?

[Beef Oven!]

An excellent and potentially highly fruitful contribution, thank you.

I know you don't mean that.

But just in case you do, thanks.

[aeolium]

But I care very much whether the people I rely on to support and fund properly the state education system don't send their children to state schools.

Is it any wonder no Labour government has ever got anywhere near abolishing private education?

But it's not even Green party policy to abolish private education - and I doubt it ever will be.

Quite a few of the people in the 1945 cabinet (e.g. the chancellor from 1947, Stafford Cripps) sent their children to be privately educated but it did not prevent them from putting a lot of money into the state system.

The educational policy of a party is more important than the actions of an individual MP.

[MrGongGong]

But it's not even Green party policy to abolish private education - and I doubt it ever will be.

Quite a few of the people in the 1945 cabinet (e.g. the chancellor from 1947, Stafford Cripps) sent their children to be privately educated but it did not prevent them from putting a lot of money into the state system.

The educational policy of a party is more important than the actions of an individual MP.

Actually Gove did send his children to a "state" (nominally) school

BUT surely the point is more would you eat in a restaurant where all the staff go to the caff on the corner to have a coffee?

Allowing private businesses the tax loophole of charitable status while they run private schools really needs to stop.

[Serial_Apologist]

But it's not even Green party policy to abolish private education - and I doubt it ever will be.

Quite a few of the people in the 1945 cabinet (e.g. the chancellor from 1947, Stafford Cripps) sent their children to be privately educated but it did not prevent them from putting a lot of money into the state system.

The educational policy of a party is more important than the actions of an individual MP.

.

I remember Tony Benn being faced with answering this question. I think it was on Any Questions. The questioner asked how government ministers whose background and education deprived them of the necessary knowledge and experience of most ordinary people's lives could deliver geniuine labour-supportive policies - to which Benn answered along the lines that no individual was capable of being in full possession of all facts about people's lives; that party policy was ideally to be arrived at through the input of members from all walks of life, fed into the knowledge pool from which to devise the programme; and that he would be as much subject to any progressive wealth distributing policies thereby arrived at as any other person of wealth and privilege.

I'm not sure if that defined Benn as a faux leftist.

[P. G. Tipps]

I'm due an apology to D. Abbott and forum members for inadvertently providing some very likely false information.

It suddenly dawned this morning (logical, if nothing else) that, when I claimed that poor Ms Abbott owned three houses, my mind was fixed firmly (for some quite inexplicable reason) on Ms Emily Thornberry.

So again apologies to all. For all I know, Ms Abbott might own one property or six. She appears to be uncharacteristically shy about revealing the current material side of her circumstances, compared to the widely-known 'challenges' in her life.

I suppose the silver-lining in my small cloud of misinformation is that I've unintentionally highlighted yet another prominent member of the Faux-Left, which is now at least six to date, and not just the solitary Ms Abbott that Richard Barrett keeps insisting has only been mentioned, which quite clearly contradicts all the easily-available forum evidence.

The claim by another member that hypocrisy regarding public preaching and private behaviour doesn't really matter, presumably when prominent characters on the Political Left are involved, is something some of us have long suspected.

It appears one doesn't have to look even as far as Ms Abbott or Ms Thornberry for a "working definition" of the Faux-Left!

[ahinton]

The claim by another member that hypocrisy regarding public preaching and private behaviour doesn't really matter, presumably when prominent characters on the Political Left are involved, is something some of us have long suspected.

But surely that kind of hypocrisy can be found in all walks of political life!

It appears one doesn't have to look even as far as Ms Abbott or Ms Thornberry for a "working definition" of the Faux-Left!

Looking for one in any direction is not synonymous with finding one! Were such a definition to be predicated upon the hypocritical conduct of those to whom it supposedly applies, most politicians would arguably be describable as "faux" something and it doesn't take much to realise that qualifications such as "left" and "right" here fade into insignificance leaving the sheer "faux"ness as all that really counts!

You are now proudly claiming to have identified a half dozen alleged "faux left" candidates; well, who's a clever boy, then?! Even were that definition to carry any kind of meaning that matters, six of the best hardly confers validity or viability upon the term itself, does it?

"Faux" suggests pretence and dishonesty; which of your six claims to be a true socialist while actually being something quite other than that? - and how many other people claim to be true socialists when in truth their utterances and conduct demonsrate that they're nothing of the kind?

It's clearly high time to consign this useless term to the dustbin of history, although unless the right kind of bin is used and the term placed in the right kind of black bag it probably won't get collected on the next fortnight's garbage run...

[Richard Barrett]

I know you don't mean that.

That's right, I didn't, I don't see your point in posting haughtily empty non-contributions like that.

Scotty has now proudly announced that he's mentioned a total of six members of this "faux-left" conspiracy that's supposed to be foisting political-correctness-gone-mad on the rest of us. I hadn't even heard of Thornberry before the white van photo episode - again I ask how so few mostly rather obscure people can be brainwashing the rest of us so thoroughly, and how any of them apart from Diane Abbott have even paid lip service to being "of the left." But I suspect no answer will be forthcoming apart perhaps from my being told I'm not paying attention.

Anyway: the case of Tony Benn as mentioned by S_A shows that not all people born with a silver spoon in their mouth spend the rest of their lives supporting the class they were born into. At the same time, the present conflicted and directionless state of the Labour Party no doubt has a connection to the fact that so few of its prominent members have any connection at all with ordinary working people, as opposed to the "members from all walks of life" mentioned by Benn. Plenty of socialist thinkers and activists have come from privileged backgrounds; but it's a basic principle of socialism that the socialist transformation of society can only succeed if it's driven from below rather than directed or imposed from above, and this was something Tony Benn no doubt understood well.