Nick Cohen - Why I blame the left for Britain's financial ruin

[Albus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/25/creditcrunch

Excerpt

...the paradox of the 1997 Labour government was that it was at once a left- and a right-wing administration. It wanted a huge public works programme. It aimed to redistribute enormous amounts of wealth. To achieve both these desirable goals, it made a bargain with the markets. All right, the political left said, we will accept extremes of wealth we once denounced as obscene. With the City accounting for a fifth of the British economy, we will embrace your speculators and not drive them overseas with tough regulation. If the authorities overseeing the Wall Street markets or the Frankfurt bourse become too inquisitive, capital will always be able to find a sanctuary from scrutiny here. Nor will we restrict the operations of financial services even though they are entrapping our supporters in levels of debt that the puritan in us finds frightening. We will concede all this if in return you will give us the tax revenues that will allow us to build the new schools and hospitals, and increase the incomes of our struggling constituents. For all its virtuous intentions, the political left was living off the proceeds of loose financial morals. Prostituting itself, to be blunt.

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Anyone who actually thinks that New Labour = 'the left' in any meaningful sense...

can't be taken seriously.

New Labour's economic policies have been decidedly neoliberal and essentially Thatcherite; somewhat more to the point, I find it hard to believe that the Tories would really have done anything much differently had they been in Government over the past decade. Blaming 'the Left' is just a bit absurd.

[T_i_B]

2. Sigh

What could have been a good article has been ruined yet again by Cohen's personal vendetta's against anyone who has ever disagreed with him. It's also very lazy indeed to try and say that nobody on the left saw this coming.

Maybe the left has been distracted from fighting for social justice, but not in the way that Cohen imagines.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

3. He calls New Labour "centre-left"

I never realised anyone still believed that. The article has too much hyperbole for my tastes.

[T_i_B]

4. Cohen himself didn't believe it until the Iraq war

where he somehow convinced himself that invading Iraq was some sort of great progressive cause.

And now, still clearly bitter about how his arguments about Iraq were rejected he's trying to blame the left for something that has happened while the left has been out of power and out of any sort of influence on economic matters. Compare the role of the right wing in all this to the role of the left and Cohen's decision to attack the left looks very misguided.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

5. Good analysis n/t