Godfrey Bloom's performance on the Today programme was just breathtaking. Peter Hitchens has a post about how it exposed the amateurish nature of UKIP, and that party's status as nothing more than Thatcherism in exile, with little or no moral, social or cultural conservatism.
However, he is wrong about public spending per se, without which the wider civic life that he favours would be, and increasingly is, impossible, but which properly confers moral responsibilities (enforceable, if necessary) on everyone who benefits from it, which is everyone.
Bloom is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber. After this morning, one really does have to wonder quite how much longer he can remain so. If UKIP really is becoming a Northern party, then that will change it, and in ways far from acceptable to its ageing New Right cheerleaders in the London media. Who tend to be rather fond of Godfrey Bloom.
Oh he's right about public spending.
ReplyDeleteThe sort of free society he is talking about is impossible with high taxes.
Hitchens is talking about an ideal world where the state doesnt bury its hand in our pocket and seize large sums of our own earnings from us by force to bribe us with at Election times.
Obviously, as a socialist, you can't conceive of such a place. But, funnily enough, it once existed here.
When, exactly?
ReplyDeleteThroughout much of the Victorian era and the early part of the 20th century.
ReplyDeleteIf it wasn't for the Boer War we wouldn't have had mass welfarism, and if it wasn't for World War 2 we wouldn't have mass female labour and state-controlled (and therefore politicised) healthcare.
Simply not true at all.
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