Government intervention an inevitability in British Politics -- regardless of General Election outcome!

Less than a week till the British general election takes place and my suspicions on the polling data so far remain the same. However there are many things we can still gather from this election regardless of the result, and this is another post on that.

The big one for me is this. Right now a lot of people on the left are no doubt feeling despondent. They shouldn't. If you look at the manifestos and even more at the suggestions that BOTH major parties have floated during the campaign something should should become clear. I think we have come to the end of a historical period in which free market ideas were, if not dominant, setting the agenda. We are going into an era where the orientation is going to be towards government intervention and a larger and more active role for politics. Those of us on the individualist and free market side have to realise that the other team have the ball and our task now is to force them to punt and hope we can return the occasional punt for a touchdown. (If you prefer a cricketing analogy, the other side are batting, we have to restrict their scoring and get as many wickets as possible).

This is true, regardless of who wins the biggest number of seats, because of the rapidly progressing transformation of the right. People who think Brexit and the Tory programme are all a cunning plan by 'dark money' to impose a radical free market revolution are going to be surprised, I predict. If the Conservatives win, what we will see is a much more active and interventionist state. A couple of weeks ago the PM proposed that after Brexit the government's commissioning and purchasing should be deliberately used to assist British firms (this is not allowed under EU rules). Jeremy Corbyn suggested exactly this about a year ago and the Tories rubbished him. How things change.

Something similar is happening on the left. What we are starting to see there is a rediscovery of the basic underlying moral principle of collectivism. This is finding expression in ideas like that of 'universal basic services'. I was delighted to read an article today by Rachel Shabi - (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/07/labour-free-basic-services-free-stuff-society) pointing out that this is a revival of Sidney Webb's idea of a 'national minimum' - I have been wondering when somebody was going to realise this and give Sidney his due.

The way forward for the Labour Party, if it can do it, is to revive the ideas of cultural collectivism and small conservatism combined with economic collectivism. That would be, I fear, a winning combination. It would require dumping the kind of radical left-liberal ideas and performative radicalism that have come to dominate left wing politics though. Collectivism though is reemerging on both left and right.

Finally I think we are going to see a revival of something else, which is the grass roots political party. One of the things to take away from this campaign is the diminished importance of television for campaigns and the much greater importance of not just social media but also old fashioned 'ground game' campaigning. (This is the Conservatives' big weakness btw). Associated with that will be, I predict, a shift in the common political rhetoric. Since the 1960s, British politics has been dominated by a series of modernisation projects. (Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron). The common theme is that Britain needs to be radically changed and 'brought up to date'. The kind of rhetoric that will be effective going forward for both sides will be 'restoration' and 'refurbishment'.

Time now, no matter who wins, for liberals and individualists to go back to basics and rethink how to advocate our case and stop the other two teams getting the first downs.