How the Political Pendulum Swings

I find this interesting. Here is a right wing journalist deciding that his views on the left were wrong and he now sides with the left. He doesn't say it, but what I get out of this is "a plague on both your houses" because he points out excesses of the political left in the 1970s and now excesses of the political right over the last 30 years.

From the UK's The Telegraph newspaper:

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. The most visible form of worker oppression was picketing. The most important thing about Arthur Scargill’s disastrous miners’ strike was that he always refused to hold a ballot on it.

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes.

There is more. Go read the whole article.

The article goes on to look in detail at the perversions of the political process at the hands of right wing ideologue and billionaire press lord Rupert Murdoch.

He ends on a note of hoping the political right makes a comeback. I hope note. What I want is neither right now left but pragmatism, a government based on sound moral principles, uses democracy for it navigator, and uses science for its technical proficiency.