UK Politics Thread

Even if we take the conservative way of thinking at face value and assume it's implemented correctly, it's still bad. What would be the yardstick here. David Cameron's government? Theresa May's? Margaret Thatcher's? Winston Churchill's?

The big issue with any right wing government (and I say this as living in the Netherlands, a country that has defaulted to centre-right to right-wing liberal governments since the second world war with a few rare exceptions) is that giving people the reign to do their own thing isn't actually giving people freedom. It just shifts the balance of power around: Personal responsibility means fuck all if wages have been stagnating for the past decades, if the housing prices have inflated and various other basic costs of living for the general population have increased whilst their ways to make income have not (also thanks to the rise of stuf like zero hour contracts and companies finding clever ways to bypass basic worker protections). This isn't necisarrely the result of government policy, it's the result of an absence of government policy. A power vacuum allows people with the most power to accrue more power whilst people with little power will often see it taken away (see also: The rise of wealth inequality since the 80s, a problem that plays out both on a world scale as well as a national scale in the countries we all live in). After the fall of the roman empire and before the rise of the nation state we didn't have some anarchist paradise. We had serfdom and feudalism. The goal of a government should be to act as a shield to ensure that everyone still has basic freedoms.\

That's what you get when you let "Private organisations/people run things" - The people with the most power (in our society, wealth) set the rules, and unlike a democracy those people aren't actually accountable to anyone else. Freedom of choice actually just means that a few powerful people get to control the amount of choices that less powerful people have.

So stuff like cutting benefits for the unemployed? That doesn't actually encourage people to work more, it just means that they no longer have the freedom to refuse to work for a shithead. Leaving the housing market to the free market simply means that people amass houses and anyone entering the market at the ripe age of 25 and the fallow bank account of massive student debt (which we have been told is a necessity!) has to choose between giving their money to a shithead or face homelessness. In countries that don't have a system that's similar to the NHS (which I remind you is a Labour-founded institution), you have the choice between getting into huge medical debts or die - or let someone else die. That's not personal responsibility: That's not having any responsibility, because you don't have any power. There's simply nothing there to be responsible over. You have to do the shitty thing or die, becuase that's the options given to you by people whose responsibility it should've been to give you something more to choose between then that.

The lovely phrase "with great power comes great responsibility" should be the watchword. But that's not what we get if we encourage "personal responsibility": We just encourage everyone to look out for themselves in a society where there's a massive disparity between who has power over just themselves and who has power over a great amount of people.

That's why the welfare state is the great liberator, no matter what the conservatives would say: You atleast get some more options if you're at the bottom of the ladder, you can afford to quit a job to look for a better one, you can unionize and demand better conditions and even if your company decides to punish you all for it, you atleast have a way to feed your family even if you have reduced income now. Sure, you do pay more taxes if you have more income! But the ability for the people at the top to extract the surplus value of your labour for themselves is significantly reduced.

And the Capital-C Conservatives dislike that becuase really, they don't really give a fig about personal responsibility or reduced government power or what have you: Throughout the century the conservative governments in the UK have been very eager to crack the whip if it suited them - that's not just Boris Johnson's government, that's a thing throughout time. The conservatism has never been about "be careful about the actions the government should take", it's always been about preserving a strongly hierarchical and heriditary society with certain rules about how people should behave (ie "Personal responsibility"). This hierarchy has shifted from nobility to the wealthy over time, but it has never actually changed in spirit, and any changes you see are always to preserve a certain hierarchy or shift those who are at the top, but never to reduce its power or abolish it entirely. The only real difference this cabinet is that Boris Johnson is a little bit more open about it, just like Trump was only really exposing what had been the goal for decades.