Stranded on the left as parties move to the right
The writer Julian Barnes has been delivering the nightly essays this week on BBC Radio 3. His Wednesday essay was about his voting patterns over the course of his adult life. In tandem with this was a questioning of how people change their politics as they grow older.
That latter question is something that has always interested me, too. I’ve often wondered how people justify the shelving of idealism and a sense of injustice when their lives become more centred on themselves. Perhaps it is only to be expected that as you come to possess more and you want to provide the best for your family now and after you die that you choose to become more conservative — both with a small ‘c’ and, sometimes, a large ‘C’. Voting for a party who appears to be predicated on legislating for selfishness is a way to offload any personal guilt for your own self-centredness. “I’m just doing what the government tells me is right.”
Barnes, like me, believes his views haven’t changed over the years. I have never voted Tory, for instance, and can categorically state that it will never happen, either. My personal circumstances and the town in which I live would seem to make me prime Tory fodder but I have resisted the siren call of the right so far.
Barnes has voted for the Tories. And for the Liberals. And for Labour. The point he made in his essay was that his politics have remained constant but the parties have moved position. He listed the main planks of his political platform. They included all the standard items that would have been accepted as normal in the social contract that powered British politics from the end of World War Two through the start of the neoliberal pillaging and plundering of the state under Thatcher. Those items included:
Progressive taxation of the rich to support the poor
How society treats its weakest members is a chief indicator of its moral worth
Utilities, mass transport, postal services, and health should be run by the state
Faith schools should be banned
The free market needs firm regulation by the state
In other words, Barnes is an old fashioned liberal — and sometimes with a capital ‘L’. But now his politics appear to be far to the left — a “Corbynista”, as he says himself. This is primarily because the corporate media and its paymasters in the corporate state have so successfully controlled the message — a euphemism for pedalling neoliberal propaganda — for the last forty years that the welfare state and the social cohesion that was created out of the suffering of the 1930s and into the 1940s is now seen as unrealistic, somehow unpatriotic, and definitely only for the crazy minds of unrepentant Marxists.
The Overton Window keeps moving to the right so quickly that the right no longer fear using the tropes of racism and class war to justify their economic policies.
The Barnes essay had the cosy atmosphere of a headmaster looking back on dealing with troublesome pupils who nevertheless went on to great things. He was ironic where he should have been angry, I feel. He was amusing where he should have wielded a stiletto. That, I suppose, is his traditional liberal tolerance. Like his belief that capitalism can still work if only the markets could be regulated better, it relies on the enemy playing to the same rules.
The forty years of neoliberal drawing down of our heritage and our inheritance and the ceaseless attack on the very environment that sustains us shows that the enemy don’t play by rules of tolerance and fairness and justice. Their rules are selfishness, greed, and continual acquisition.
Time is running out.
