Policy Jam

You research and consult, you debate and you put to the vote your latest plan to meddle in the order of things and then, eventually, the creaking mechanisms of state grind along and half-way through your term in office the new policy comes into being. Most people have forgotten about it, those who voted for it have moved on to shinier, newer toys and those who are directly affected often don’t notice. A law you have never broken makes minor headlines as the first prosecution is brought. Your subsidy continues under another name. You take the number 12 bus to the health centre when you used to take the 105.

Humans adapt. That’s pretty much how we got this far. Put obstacles in our way and we’ll find a way over, under or around them. Curb our spending power by pricing or taxation and we’ll either alter our choices or avoid your grasping hands. We up sticks and move, we change careers, we form or end relationships and alliances; we change our own lives far more drastically than government ever does. Whatever state mechanisms are in place, humans will forever be divided into winners and losers – are you above or below that statistical line beloved of economists and social reformers? And do you care?

More particularly, are you really affected by policies abandoned long ago? And will any of the tinkering changes brought in by current government really change your lives for better or for worse? The right-hand side of political thought in the UK believes – when it remembers that it is the right-hand side - that people should have the freedom to make their own way, but there should be a safety net for when it goes badly wrong. Small state, lower tax, low national debt (if we ever manage to pay off what was inherited) and maximum autonomy within the law to do the best we can.

But the recent shenanigans of the Labour Party and some of their more hysterical flag-wavers shows just how far they have yet to evolve before they begin to trust the people they want to represent. In an article today in the Guardian Deborrah Orr still blames Thatcher. Oh, she makes some good points about Labour throwing out the baby with Tony Blair’s bath water, but still, at the heart of it is the belief that humans are helpless without the ever-present and disconcertingly visible hand of state to guide them.

Socialism sounds so good, doesn’t it? It sounds like we should all be happy and work together to make a wonderful world. But we’d all be dirt poor without capitalism, so we’re stuck in this cycle of boom and bust; and which party produces which effect is often a matter of faith. There’s a lag and there are also external influences, so a genius idea to redistribute wealth, or promote business, or improve education, or healthcare, transport, energy or other infrastructure gets lost along the way.

So yeah, okay Deborrah, it was Fatcha’s fault, if you like, if you must. But where does that get us? A lot of ex-Labour supporters, while never intending to vote for their hated enemy, are nevertheless singing from the Conservative hymnal. What has all this to do with the price of fish? It’s that same old thing, really; if you are waiting for the welfare bus to get you to your life destination you’ll have a long wait ahead of you. And when that bus is in the gridlocked traffic jam of policy inertia, you may as well get off and walk.

Policy Jam

You research and consult, you debate and you put to the vote your latest plan to meddle in the order of things and then, eventually, the creaking mechanisms of state grind along and half-way through your term in office the new policy comes into being. Most people have forgotten about it, those who voted for it have moved on to shinier, newer toys and those who are directly affected often don’t notice. A law you have never broken makes minor headlines as the first prosecution is brought. Your subsidy continues under another name. You take the number 12 bus to the health centre when you used to take the 105.

Humans adapt. That’s pretty much how we got this far. Put obstacles in our way and we’ll find a way over, under or around them. Curb our spending power by pricing or taxation and we’ll either alter our choices or avoid your grasping hands. We up sticks and move, we change careers, we form or end relationships and alliances; we change our own lives far more drastically than government ever does. Whatever state mechanisms are in place, humans will forever be divided into winners and losers – are you above or below that statistical line beloved of economists and social reformers? And do you care?

More particularly, are you really affected by policies abandoned long ago? And will any of the tinkering changes brought in by current government really change your lives for better or for worse? The right-hand side of political thought in the UK believes – when it remembers that it is the right-hand side - that people should have the freedom to make their own way, but there should be a safety net for when it goes badly wrong. Small state, lower tax, low national debt (if we ever manage to pay off what was inherited) and maximum autonomy within the law to do the best we can.

But the recent shenanigans of the Labour Party and some of their more hysterical flag-wavers shows just how far they have yet to evolve before they begin to trust the people they want to represent. In an article today in the Guardian Deborrah Orr still blames Thatcher. Oh, she makes some good points about Labour throwing out the baby with Tony Blair’s bath water, but still, at the heart of it is the belief that humans are helpless without the ever-present and disconcertingly visible hand of state to guide them.

Socialism sounds so good, doesn’t it? It sounds like we should all be happy and work together to make a wonderful world. But we’d all be dirt poor without capitalism, so we’re stuck in this cycle of boom and bust; and which party produces which effect is often a matter of faith. There’s a lag and there are also external influences, so a genius idea to redistribute wealth, or promote business, or improve education, or healthcare, transport, energy or other infrastructure gets lost along the way.

So yeah, okay Deborrah, it was Fatcha’s fault, if you like, if you must. But where does that get us? A lot of ex-Labour supporters, while never intending to vote for their hated enemy, are nevertheless singing from the Conservative hymnal. What has all this to do with the price of fish? It’s that same old thing, really; if you are waiting for the welfare bus to get you to your life destination you’ll have a long wait ahead of you. And when that bus is in the gridlocked traffic jam of policy inertia, you may as well get off and walk.

Myths and Legends

Folklore. We’re brought up on it. The Big Bad Wolf terrorises the Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel are lured to their doom by a cannibal witch and an evil troll waits to devour the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Even religion is packaged and sold the same way but with all the fun taken out; the pro-actively wicked Satan figure forever trying to persuade the passively righteous to stray from the true way. In Star Wars Lucas even calls the ‘wrong’ path The Dark Side. It’s there throughout history, in paintings, books… movies. Deep in our psyche we are predisposed to believe a lie rather than face the truth.

To explain why good people do bad things we perpetuate the myth of raw evil. Stick a ‘D’ in front of it and concoct a world view far removed from pragmatic reality and you have your bogeyman. Dark, malevolent, unwholesome, dirty, the Devil makes unsavoury work for idle or unwary hands to do. And we lap it up. Just as everybody nowadays has a concocted diagnosis to excuse their shortcomings, it means it’s not always your fault if you do bad things. You don’t need to try quite so hard; the odds were stacked against you. But if you stay here in the light all will be well.

But, you say, they don’t seem such bad people and they do seem to be having a good time and anyway, don’t we eat pigs and goats as well? Hush they say, don’t you know the devil has all the best tunes to tempt you? Just because somebody seems to cause no harm, that is merely the devil’s disguise – a shiny clean coat of niceness to trap the naïve. Stay with us, they tell you, keep the faith and we will guide you; we will tell you who to love and who to hate.

And it’s exactly the same in politics and therefore on Twitter. Left and right are so firmly equated, respectively, with good and bad that all you need to be deemed evil is to have the label ‘right wing’ attached to your back: “Kick me, I’m Evil!” it says. And for all the misery religion has caused and the millions of deaths attributed to various forms of collectivist societies, the label still sticks. Anybody not subscribing to the basic doctrines of ‘the left’ must therefore be the exact opposite. And if you earnestly believe you are the only people capable of caring, your opposites must be… evil. It’s childishly simplistic, yet it works.

Media portrays conformist left-wingers as normal and sane and ‘just like us’ even as – in its impartial, caring compassion – it introduces those outside the thrall of socialism as different and dangerous. So while calls to increase taxes and enact more laws governing behaviour and campaigns to modify even the way people think are promulgated as rational and sane, anything straying from the path is referred to in more critical terms. Thus Ed Balls can introduce impractical schemes to further punish the industrious, yet more pragmatic and workable ideas are dismissed as the output of ‘far right’ think tanks, or ‘far right’ parties or ‘far right’ ogres who will eat your children.

So it’s okay for lefties to refer to ‘cruel Tories’ and ‘evil right wingers’ but it’s verboten for righties to mention ‘deluded lefties’ and ‘fruit loops’ without censure. They’ve even coined a phrase to apply to anybody who disagrees with their ideologically filled platitudes, so while anybody who shares their simplistic world view is clearly intelligent and kind, dissenters indulge in ‘hate-reading’ of their crazy pronouncements and any attempt to present an opposing view is called trolling.

Express the simple and harmless opinion that people should look to themselves first and foremost for their living and their wellbeing and you are at best an oddball and at the hysterical left’s worst a pariah who would bring down all society. No my friend, I am somebody you need not unduly concern yourself with. While your lot are busy in your futile attempts to change the whole world, I will be getting on with my entirely plausible endeavour to mould just the tiny bit I can directly influence to better serve my own needs without imposing on others. It’s neither evil nor even particularly selfish; I ask nothing but to be left to get on with it.

The evil troll slays the harmless People's Dragon!

So while the extreme left are just as ridiculous as the extreme right, most people are neither. And neither are most people pre-disposed to hate and vitriol, yet the left-right, good-bad thing persists despite all the evidence that it’s just bullshit. The bizarre refusal to face the simple truth that evil is an invented construct that cannot so unevenly be distributed between left and right can be neatly summed up by a tweet I saw last night:

“The Tony Benn hashtag is full of people on the right wishing him a recovery. If he was right-wing, it would be full of lefties wishing death.”