If the Labour Party didn't exist, would anyone today invent it?

ukcarper

westernpromise wrote: »

No it doesn't. It makes the presumption that outcomes in most areas of human activity are certain to be unequal. A tiny privileged handful get Olympic gold medals while 7 billion of the rest of us don't, but nobody suggests Olympians should have their medals confiscated. Almost nobody is able to become prima ballerina at the Royal Ballet but nobody suggests Darcey Bussell should have been festooned with dumbells and sash weights to lower her performance to that of the average Joanna. Some people are better looking than others and have better lives as a result but nobody proposes a programme of state disfigurement of good-looking people to make us all equally ugly.

The fact that people do suggest this when it comes to other people's money points unerringly to this being all about economic envy, and about greed and entitlement to what others have. Envy is a wicked and shameful motivation for any course of action and has been accurately identified as a sin for thousands of years. Therefore any party that exists to dignify, spread and perpetuate it is morally incompetent, just as a party set up to dignify, spread and perpetuate anti-Semitism is morally incompetent.

I am trying to establish if there is anything a Labour Party is needed for if it is not for the above (and so far in this thread we have seen it spades). I struggle to think of something we "need" a Labour Party for, in order for that something to come about. A Conservative-led coalition introduced gay marriage, so we don't need Labour to do that. We need a Conservative interest to speak up for taxpayers and to hold the view that the state should be accountable to them for what it takes, which should be as little as possible; nobody else will advocate that.

But I really struggle to think of anything respectable that we need a Labour Party for. You can have centre left parties, and most countries do, but they don't generally consort with the IRA, or lie to start to wars, or reintroduce filthy Dickensian workhouses, or turn a blind eye to !!!!!philia by their client groups, for example. So if not those things, what do we need Labour for? What's its job in a post-union, post-Communist, post-identity politics century, that can't be done by the Lib Dems?

You need someone to protect or improve the position of the less well off, which doesn't mean you have to hold back the more able people. Perhaps some members of the Labour Party want to hold back some people but I don't believe that is a majority view of Labour voters and I don't think the Tory party do or will protect the less well off even though they are now trying to convince us that they are, I won't believe it until I see some concrete evidence that they are.

westernpromise

ukcarper wrote: »

You need someone to protect or improve the position of the less well off, which doesn't mean you have to hold back the more able people. Perhaps some members of the Labour Party want to hold back some people but I don't believe that is a majority view of Labour voters and I don't think the Tory party do or will protect the less well off even though they are now trying to convince us that they are, I won't believe it until I see some concrete evidence that they are.

They've increased the personal allowance to £11,000, taking hundreds of thousands out of tax altogether.

I agree someone needs to protect the less well-off, but if that's your supporting demographic, you're obviously going to perpetuate poverty to stay in power. This is why Labour's goal is to get as many people onto benefits as possible.

MyOnlyPost

How does what the Labour party has done previously have any bearing on whether someone would invent it now if it didn't exist? The premise of your question is juxtaposed to your own flawed argument. Because the Labour party has done x,y,z we don't need it. But if it had never existed then it would not have done anything ever.

In reality it is individuals who are responsible for their actions and if you think of some of the Conservative politicians of the past 50 years then their party also has a shameful hiistory including an ex PM who is currently being investigated for child indecency (I make no statement as to whether I think the investigation is justified, merely point out it is happening). There is also the Conservative PM who sank a warship leaving a conflict zone killing 323 people which could be seen by some to be a war crime and a PM who had an extra marital affair whilst representing the family values party. It seems dubious morailty is not restricted to either major political party.

The current Labour [STRIKE]party[/STRIKE] leadership is as close to it's true self as it has been in over 30 years which is why it won't get elected. The only labour leader to win an election since 1979 wasn't a socialist. The original Labour manifesto does not appeal to modern voters and as such it is more suited to being a pressure group than a political party. This doesn't mean it doesn't have a place but Labour as it was before and is again now is unlikely to see power. In order to offer an alternative to a Conservative governemnt it needs to embrace the middle ground of politics with a socially responsible undercurrent.

MyOnlyPost

westernpromise wrote: »

I agree someone needs to protect the less well-off, but if that's your supporting demographic, you're obviously going to perpetuate poverty to stay in power. This is why Labour's goal is to get as many people onto benefits as possible.

What is the difference between your argument here and the Conservatives encouraging homeownership for 35 years (to hell with the consequences, high interest rates, unregulated lending and record re-possesions) in order to shore up it's base.

zagubov

They did a pretty good job of keeping the country immunised against communism when the rest of Europe had huge communist parties. They genuinely decentralised power across the UK, which the right-wing have no stomach for.

But more recently they mimicked the Tories sell-off -the-silverware attitude to national assets to such an extent that they're like coke and pepsi. We need more than just rival management teams to oversee our national slide into inequality and regret, they need to say the honest things we're frightened to say right now, that we can have our needs met but we'll have to pay for them probably via taxes.

BobQ

westernpromise wrote: »

AFAICT all Labour is for now is to provide a pretext for envy, by making out that resenting someone else's harder work and greater success is a respectable moral position, rather than a shameful personality flaw.

But to put it another way, what does anyone want done that they need the Labour Party to exist to get done?

Whereas all the Conservatives are for is to protect the interests of the affluent few.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

But to put it another way, what does anyone want done that needs the Conservative Party to exist to get done?

ukcarper

westernpromise wrote: »

They've increased the personal allowance to £11,000, taking hundreds of thousands out of tax altogether.

I agree someone needs to protect the less well-off, but if that's your supporting demographic, you're obviously going to perpetuate poverty to stay in power. This is why Labour's goal is to get as many people onto benefits as possible.

I don't think that proves anything, I don't think it is Labour's goal to get as many people on benefits as possible.

kabayiri

BobQ wrote: »

Whereas all the Conservatives are for is to protect the interests of the affluent few.
...

The Conservatives know their target market, and they probably havent changed that much.

But what of the target Labour voter?

Unions are a shadow of what they once were. The idea of a job for life seems increasingly remote for the young now.

The nature of labour and the role of people in work itself could come under threat.

What does Labour have to sell to these future voters?

zagubov

MyOnlyPost wrote: »

What is the difference between your argument here and the Conservatives encouraging homeownership for 35 years (to hell with the consequences, high interest rates, unregulated lending and record re-possesions) in order to shore up it's base.

It was only partially to shore up its own base. It was more to undermine Labour's voter base by loading workers with such crippling mortgage debt they couldn't afford to strike against whatever their bosses decided to impose on them, and provide a compliant workforce who would be unable to use the benefits of unionisation.

BobQ

kabayiri wrote: »

.

What does Labour have to sell to these future voters?

Corbyn and the modern militants that support him have nothing to offer.

Under the right leader, Labour could remind people that values of fairness, integrity and working for the common good have a place in a future Uk alongside the values of individual achievement. May talks the talk on this but rarely walks anywhere.

Thatcher made selfishness fashionable, but her real achievement was to expose the way society is also divided into givers and takers. Cameron used the austerity agenda as a way of taking on the selfishness inherent in some of those that strive to rely on benefits. But Compassionate Conservatism rarely endures before a Keith Joseph or Ian Duncan Smith pops up to sharpen the knife. Labour could enable a more moral approach to society, but that does not remove the need to have clear policies on defence, the relationship with the EU etc.