This, from John Gray, makes you wonder why he was so determinedly opposed to Corbyn, who may have offered at least a partial solution to the economic, if not social crises we face. He does address this in the article, but unconvincingly.
An unreal consensus grips our politics – and Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak offer only technocratic fixes for a Britain that no longer exists.
www.newstatesman.com
'A meme has it that the Labour leader has revealed himself to be exceptionally ruthless. A truly ruthless leader would take care to conceal their lack of scruples, but let that pass. If Starmer fails to inspire trust among voters – as is plainly the case – it is because he is unable to explain what he believes... He has denied ever having supported nationalising utilities, a claim that is hard to take seriously, since bringing Royal Mail and parts of the energy and water sectors into public ownership was included in the manifesto he defended in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
'A reassertion of the primacy of the state over the market is a precondition of any socially tolerable future for Britain. Public utilities ought to be taken into public ownership and cease being instruments for racking up the profits of private companies, often foreign-owned. No mainstream party offers voters that option.
Since the Cameron-Clegg coalition came to power in 2010, a progressivist fusion of economic and social liberalism with technocratic management has come to define the centre ground. William Hague and Tony Blair’s
A New National Purpose: Innovation Can Power the Future of Britain, published in February by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, is a manifesto for this consensus. It is not one that has ever reflected the values of the British majority.
Today’s progressivist ideology – a farrago of critical race and gender theories imported from America – is a legitimating formula for a system in which institutions that once protected workers from markets have been dismantled. When social divisions are framed in terms of ethnic and gender identities, class hierarchies can be disregarded. Despairing working-class communities in post-industrial wastelands can be demonised as retrograde and deplorable, while would-be elites overproduced by a bloated higher-education system scramble for a foothold on crumbling career ladders. With class warfare masquerading as social justice, progressivism is the ruling version of bourgeois ideology. Somewhere, Marx’s shade must be laughing.'
www.theguardian.com
