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British Politics: Things Are Getting Weird
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I used to be a passionate socialist, wanting to nationalize everything. While I still sympathize with the socialist position I no longer think it makes economic sense. But even when I was a socialist I never liked the Labour party very much. As a kid my mother used to go on to me about the good old days when Labour were genuinely socialist, and about how fake and irritating Tony Blair was.
When the war in Iraq was building up my father was in favor of it and my mother was dead against. At the time I was stupid enough to lean to my father's side. After the 9/11 attacks it seemed as though we needed to do something about the threat of terrorism. The threat of weapons of mass destruction gave the United States and Britain the excuse. Obviously as time went on it became painfully obvious that the war was a really bad idea and so my dislike for Tony Blair grew stronger. He had misled us.
By the 2010 election my political views had shifted. I saw that up to a point free market economics could maximize the utility of everyone, while socialism tended to make everyone poorer by comparison. I had looked into Keynesian economics too and found that to be a total sham.
It's interesting though that both left wing and right wing economists accuse each other of not conducting research into how things are in the real world. The truth is that actually there is some good research on both sides. When it comes to maximizing utility free market economics wins, but it's important to moderate things in order to preserve the gentle, caring nature of people that makes our society function well. The Ayn Rand types scoff at the idea of using 'force' to moderate behavior, but it's a very indirect force. Most of them admit that some taxes must be paid anyway, so why not make people pay a bit more tax if it helps to make our society function a bit better?
In deciding who to vote for in the 2010 election I decided against voting for Labour. The Labour party was a chaotic mess, so despite the Liberal Democrat stance on Europe I decided to vote for them. It was partly because they opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but mainly because they weren't Labour. Gorden Brown had sold off the gold just before the price skyrocketed and with the massive budget deficit it was obvious some difficult decisions needed to be made. Labour was not the party to make those decisions.
Now we're getting closer the 2015 general election and it looks like Labour has a reasonably good chance of winning this time. I'm a little concerned that the new leader, Ed Miliband, is not really fit to run the country. I'm kind of a weird guy, which is why I would never try to get into politics. I would be concerned that people would be constantly making fun of my weirdness. In a recent poll four in ten voters thought Ed Miliband was 'weird' [*], and I agree. 34 per cent of the public thought Nick Clegg was weird and 27 per cent thought the same of David Cameron. Why are these weird people becoming so successful in British politics? I really don't understand it.
What's concerning is that these people went into politics despite their weirdness. Do they have no sense of self awareness? Does their drive for success surpass their fear that people will notice their weirdness? What's also concerning is that our politicians seem to be spending a lot of time trying to mind control the public with meaningless buzz words and catch phrases. In PMQs the engagements seem to be more of a battle to blurt out subliminal messages in an attempt to score political points than a real debate. I question the integrity of the people who lead us.
UKIP, the anti European Union party, is actually starting to look attractive right now. Many people are concerned that by being a part of the European Union we have opened ourselves up to mass immigration at levels which cannot be sustained. I'm generally not against immigration, but I can understand why people are concerned. What troubles me more is that the European Union is very wasteful, corrupt, anti-democratic, and is becoming too powerful. The Conservatives are mildly anti-EU but I don't like them because they tend to be pro-war. UKIP, by contrast, is anti-war [+]. And they want to scrap HS2, which is definitely a good idea in my opinion. That money, £43 billion [x], could be put to far better use. People on the left would like to paint them as right wing fanatics but that's simply not the case. There are radical right wing parties in Britain but UKIP is not one of them.
I have come to the conclusion that UKIP is the party of the future, but sadly the party most likely to win is Labour. People get the impression that our political leaders are weird. This is leading people to become disillusioned with politics. As people become more disillusioned with politics our democracy is likely to suffer.
* www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/another-poll-shocker-for-ed-miliband-and-labour-as-41-of-voters-say-hes-weird-9214770.html
+ [link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk]
x [link to en.wikipedia.org]
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