"Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357
Blaming capitalism for the results of democratic corporatism. Very original!
Also:
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster, headquartered at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London.[1] It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff.[2][3][4] Its main responsibility is to provide public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. The BBC is an autonomous public service broadcaster[5] that operates under a Royal Charter[6] and a Licence and Agreement from the Home Secretary.[7] Within the United Kingdom its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee,[8] which is charged to all United Kingdom households, companies and organisations using any type of equipment to record and/or receive live television broadcasts;[9] the level of the fee is set annually by the British Government and agreed by Parliament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc
Hah! Knew my chart was right on the money!
If this mouthpiece of the left wing of social democracy (as opposed to it's centre in The Economist, or it's right in NSRO) is supposed to represent the views of the British public, what are we to draw from this? I've seen reports of complaints from country folk and non-Londoners who feel their perspectives marginalized from the highly paid archdhimmis and Gramscians in Al-Beebeecera (not unlike how the average "flyover" countryman feels slighted by MSNBCNN and so on), but since you live in the UK, China (I'd love to hear the story behind the name, and I'd recognize that avatar any day of the week), I'd like to hear a more firsthand perspective. Is there actually a resurgent movement to nationalize the means of production in Jolly Old England, or is this just another example of how out of touch metro/cosmopolitan elites are with reality?
Ha ha, China Diapers is an anagram of my actual name, and the Space Coyote, yes best episode ever.
If the most popular comments on that article are anything to go by I might as well be living in Cuba next election.
I was just saying to a visiting buddy the other day that I feel there is a definite dislike of the asset holding classes developing. I live in London and I in my experience there has been a lurch to left. Just going on conversations I have with people, people who I never would have thought cared about politics or economics are talking about how capitalism is immoral, albeit probably without any understanding of what they are actually saying.
Recent news of train fare increases resulted in demonstrations and calls for privatisation, whether it was more than just the usual suspects I can’t really say. Talk of the housing shortage has got a lot of people talking about taxes on second homes and building more council houses. The increase in university fees seems to have converted an entire generation into socialists.
May very well be a different story in the home counties, I see the latest yougov poll puts the Tories just 1 point behind Labour which is something of a comeback, may be down to how Cameron reacted to the riots, but possibly an outlier.
One thing you can say about Marx, at least he wasn't a Keynesian. - Rothbard
I think that is what the article is trying to do. Give you a false choice between the current mess and the wrongness of Marxist communism. And, in fact, the best choice is to support whatever interventionism the author of the article wants. Making it unavoidable to choice otherwise. You don't want to be a communist, now do you?
It's a shame there isn't more of a libertarian presence in the UK the same way there is in the US. Our token libertarians don't get 1/100th the air time Ron Paul get's and our most libertarian think tanks, maybe with the exception of the Coben Centre, are all beltway types like Cato. Plus our Libertarian Party can't seem to get off the ground.
I think that's more due to size than anything else (both in terms of economy and population). That, and the UK (and to a lesser extent, Western Europe in general) is more Burkean in the sense it's political ideologies are based around stronger historical frameworks than the century-or-so most US ideologies have to draw on. It's not like the US Libertarian Party (or Green Party) isn't a joke either (Sean Gabb and Nigel Farage are 100 times the man Bob Barr is, to start with).