Normalisation

The campus-based sectarian Left of the 1970s, now called New Labour and the moderate-sounding "Centre Left", agreed about a great many things with the 1980s Radical Right, now firmly exconsed in government and calling itself the moderate-sounding "Centre Right". They have long since overcome their main differences, which were about foreign policy.

After all, being an unrepentant old Stalinist, Maoist, or adherent to the Trotskyist distinction without a difference, makes it easy to support the no less evil agenda of neoconservatives or "liberal interventionists" (there's that distinction without a difference thing again). As does being an unrepentant old supporter of apartheid South Africa, of the Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America, and of many another such regime from Marcos to Mobutu, from Suharto to the Duvaliers.

In domestic policy, meanwhile, there has not even been the need for any such convergence. Both sides were always in favour of legalising and normalising drug use, just as both sides were always in favour of abolishing the age of consent and of normalising sex with children. Neither side ever confined itself to the verbal expression of its principles on these matters.

No wonder that in May 2010, any two or all three of the parties were found to be capable of coalition with each other without the slightest loss of principle. Look what those principles were and are.

It is quite clear from the official news media that we are being railroaded into the legalisation of drugs, based on the wholly false premise that social and cultural normalisation has already taken place. If we allow this to happen, then next up with be the abolition of the age of consent, on exactly the same false basis, which, as with drugs, the mass entertainment media now presuppose to be the case.

Roll on electoral reform. Provided that we are prepared to make proper use of it.