A bit of balance...

Okay, one or maybe two of you noticed I'm sometimes a little hard on the Lefties. I think I've always acknowledged that they don't necessarily mean harm, to themselves or others, but harm arises from their misunderstanding of what sort of an animal your actual 'yooman bean' is. Give a man a benefit and he’ll take it as a right; give a man a welfare state and he’ll soon be a slave to it. 

So, I thought I should maybe restore the balance and have a go at the right for once. Before I begin I should explain that the right wing, if indeed there actually is one, is a tiny minority in Britain, which is why it is so hard finding one to point at. To most ‘the right wing’ is represented – courtesy of the old National Front - by a tattooed skinhead restraining a slavering attack dog. To my knowledge the only place you find anybody that far right is in Labour’s heartland sink estates. 

There’s no point in having a pop at them – they are caricatures of a certain type of über-scum (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms) for which contempt is too kindly a disposition. They represent nobody with a brain cell and would be happily expunged from existence without disturbing the conscience of anybody with one.

So, who are this Right, that The Left are so readily enraged about? I think they mean people who vote Conservative, in fact I don’t believe any other group of people exist who fit the bill. We have no extreme parties of any significance in the UK, so let’s have a pop at the Nazis Conservatives instead. Here goes.

Boo, nasty! The Tories want to tax you less, spend less of your money on NHS consultants, get better value for money from infrastructure spending and get everybody back to work. They want the country to prosper and live within its means so that everybody can earn an economically viable living wage, the bastards! Nope, that just doesn’t cut it. I’ll try again. 

The vicious right-wing thugs of the Nasty Party want to tear your babies from you and grind them up to make porridge to feed the slaves of the factory owners who will work you until you are dead then take all their money and give it to rich bankers who will destroy the economy and starve your mother out of her care home. Then, when you are all dead they will… they will… Nope. That’s just silly. Now I sound like the worst kind of rabid Marxist Union dinosaur. 

Maybe capitalism is the monster under the bed? But capitalism isn’t really an ideology, it’s just the normal way humans interact. In fact it’s the only way that any system can successfully grow an economy. Unless that economy is going to rely entirely on turnips and tractors and newspeak. Oh. 

Back then, to Conservatism; it’s the way the majority of decent people think, it's just not the way they vote. The definitions or the divisions between right and left (or right and just wrong) are continually shifting and a Conservative of today would be seen as a wet by Maggie and an outright pinko socialist by Harold MacMillan. Today’s Tories have as much distance between them and fat cat industrialists as Labour have between them and tax payers. 

On Friday, Ed Miliband said he was putting Labour where it had always been – on the side of the working man. But I think you'll find it is Conservative social views that have always been modelled on those of the actual working man while the Labour Party, having once been a potent and relevant force for good has been responsible for stifling real aspiration ever since the seventies. 

The smoke and mirrors of New Labour were used to disguise a deep distrust of ordinary British people (bigots, said Gordon Brown) selling us all into a dumbed-down, depressed, compliant European satellite and calling us racist, homophobic, xenophobic Little Englanders if we dared to speak out. If you try to find the right wing, you inevitably end up on the left.

So it was not without a little ironic chuckle to learn that John O’Farrell, Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election once wished Mrs Thatcher dead and hoped for a British defeat in the Falklands. Despite protestations of youthful indiscretion there, laid bare, is the real nasty party.