Although today's front page of the Financial Times attributes a "great leap backwards" to his Labour shadow, in fact this potentially disastrous economic manoeuvre has been led by Chancellor George Osborne, and John McDonnell's "coup de theatre" has only served to draw attention to it.
Like Mr McDonnell, I keep a copy of "Quotations from Chairman Mao-Tse Tung" (see above) at home for reference. However, it was former UK Coalition government Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, who in 2010 started the Maoist discourse in contemporary British politics: "There is a kind of Maoist revolution happening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control" (1). This "revolution" is clearly still underway and the Labour Shadow Chancellor decided to highlight the ongoing "great leap backwards" yesterday.
It was the UK government's sale not just of the family silver but also of the furniture - "this government is selling off to a Maoist regime British assets" - that Mr McDonnell emphasised in a humorous reference not just to Chairman Mao but also to former "One Nation" Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan, who upbraided the Thatcher government for public asset stripping (2,3). Unfortunately, such allusions proved too much for the intellectual capacities of most of his colleagues and the media: something which is just as worrying as the fact that the UK is increasingly run like a combination of real estate and asset disposal agency.
However, the news is not all bad. Recent reports by the Conservative Bow Group on the need to restrict foreign acquisitions of property in Britain and ditch the High Speed 2 Rail project suggest there may still be a revival of common sense politics amongst the Tories as well as Labour (4,5).
Postscript: Journalists on the Financial Times recently voted for strike action in a pensions dispute. Therefore, they must be old-fashioned political left wingers (6). Spot the irony!
References
1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/23/vince-cable-mao-coalition-marxist-capitalism
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34931047
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1ssGrq5S3w
4. http://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2015/nov/21/foreign-buyers-british-property
5. http://www.bowgroup.org/policy/revive-britains-railways-improve-capacity-says-bow-group
6. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/19/financial-times-journalists-vote-to-strike-over-pensions
No comments:
Post a Comment