You might not know it, but we have just 50 months to pull the Earth back from an
irreversible tipping-point that will likely lead to ‘climate disaster’. You might
not know it, but the Conservative Party’s desire to repatriate some of the
European Union’s criminal justice powers from Brussels to Westminster must beg the question: ‘Why are the Tories so keen
to make it easier for gangsters, paedophiles, rapists and murderers to escape
British justice by hiding abroad?’ Equally, you might have missed the point
that Conservative plans for the National Health
Service mean that diabetics ‘risk amputated feet if inexperienced high street
commercial clinics treat them, with no knowledge of their history and give no
feedback to their doctors [sic]’. And woe betide you if you fail to appreciate that ‘neo-fascist racism’ –
that’s the British National Party and the English Defence League – is ‘getting
more brazen and popular’, is ‘tolerated by liberals’, and is ‘encouraged by the
right-wing political classes and the media’.
Are these the ravings of some
far-left group? No. They are recent statements, respectively, by Andrew Simms,
leader of the New Economics Foundation, a prestigious green think-tank with
charitable status; by Fiona Hall, leader of the Liberal Democrat MEPs in
Strasbourg; by Polly Toynbee, chief columnist for the Guardian; and by Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown, a top columnist for the Independent.
These four opinion-formers
believe that we are headed, fast, for just about every kind of apocalypse –
environmental, criminal, medical and political. And the four all represent
mainstream, middle-of-the-road opinion. Yet if they are right, and Conservatism
is really bent on sending us all to Hell with great despatch, what are their
counter-proposals?
That’s when things grow still
more bizarre.
Back in the 1970s, the British
far left would ridicule promulgators of this kind of End-of-the-World-is-Nigh
stuff as guilty of ‘catastrophism’. But what is interesting about today’s
millennarians is that they are not of the far left at all. That species died more
than 25 years ago. Instead, our pessimists combine their forebodings of doom
with the most abject reformism. And this New Reformism is not the classic,
social-democratic reformism of patriotic Old Labour, which hoped that the slow
accretion of reforms would one day lead to a New Jerusalem of socialism. No,
this New Reformism is satisfied with the teeniest, most incremental tweaks to a
system which – to calibrate its misdeeds properly – has brought us serious
recession, war after war, and major restrictions on democracy. Socialism is not
even the New Reformism’s maximum programme, let alone its minimum one.
So Andrew Simms wants people to drop work for one day a week and
take up gardening, so society can ‘reap a wide range of economic, social and
environmental benefits’, including ‘refamiliarising people with food through
growing their own’, fighting ‘depression, dementia, cardiovascular complaints and
a huge range of other medical conditions’, restoring attention spans and
reducing ‘our carbon footprint’. Helpfully, he adds: ‘If you’re an employer,
and think you can do this, get in touch’. Fiona Hall has teamed up with Queen
guitarist Brian May to urge an alternative to culling Britain’s badger population ‘in
the fight to suppress the spread of fatal disease among cattle’: she wants cows
vaccinated. In an article that’s opaque even by her standards, Polly
Toynbee advises the Liberal Democrats not to do a ‘double backflip’ and agree
to changes in England’s electoral constituency boundaries that would favour the
Tories. For her, that’s a red-hot issue, and on a par with what she castigates
as ‘lack of rebellion’ from Liberal Democrat leaders Nick Clegg and Vince Cable
against the Conservatives. Meanwhile, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offers a radical posture
against racism: nationalism. We should recognise, she writes, that
Britain is ‘a good country to be black or Asian in, better than all of the rest
of Europe’.
Just like shadow chancellor Ed
Balls, who argues for £1 billion less in cuts in state expenditure than the
Lib-Con coalition government, the New Reformism believes that a truly
microscopic bit of fine-tuning is all that’s required to revitalise British
society. Subconsciously, too, the New Reformism believes that everyone has
forgotten about what New Labour did when in office. It believes, too, that
nobody outside the Westminster village needs persuading that Ed Miliband – or a
coalition between him and St Vincent Cable of the Lib Dems – is a shining
alternative to David Cameron.
The catastrophist reformists
love to stigmatise football supporters and the white working class as ‘tribal’
in their culture and their uncouth habits. They likewise condemn those who defended their communities
during the summer 2011 riots as guilty of a vigilantism that was ‘tribal’. Yet
if anyone is tribal, they are. They live in a dream world of
self-congratulation, in which all clear-thinking, rational people will never
notice the contradiction between their dark mood and their Sunlight Soap
prescriptions. In their world, all men and women of good faith can and must
only vote for a party whose membership has fallen from more than 400,000, after New Labour
came into power in 1997, to 193,000, at the end of 2010.
Whether it’s a future in which British schoolchildren
turn to fascism, or the need to stave off Armageddon through Vince
Cable’s ‘mansion tax’ on homes worth more than £2 million, our friends believe
that everyone who does not share their assumptions is – how did Gordon Brown
describe it? – a ‘bigot’, or part of the ‘forces of Conservatism’. Hinting that
a Nazi era is round the corner, they imagine that all sensible (middle-class)
People Like Us will rally round against the common enemy, just like they did in
the Second World War. Or, they unmask Tory chancellor George Osborne as a rich
man who sits in a first-class train seat while holding just a second-class ticket,
and imagine that this is a breakthrough for the left.
Their contortions would be
tragic if they were not so funny.
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