In a clear hint about how future election battle lines might be drawn, Reform's Richard Tice has called for Thames Water to be nationalised as the financiers are just trying to 'rip off consumers even more' with their rescue plans....
Which doesn't mean he's wrong, just that one can see how a populist right economic nationalisation strategy might be very appealing to some voters perhaps less enamoured by the rest of the Reform programme.
h/t FT
This is the UK right learning from the European. The Tory Party is still dominated by the neoliberal 'free-market' right, but this is not true of the European right, which in many cases combines relatively left-wing economic ideas with more right-wing social attitudes.
In France, for example, LePen voted FOR Hollande's wealth tax, which was opposed by the old Repubicain party (the Tory equivalents) and which Macron watered down - and LePen also aligns with the left on many technical financial issues (such as the dollar's reserve currency status). But this mixture is perhaps best exemplified by Law & Justice in Poland. It does NOT believe in a 'small state' - it's much closer to the 'corporatism' - and the racism - of 1930s fascism.
Make no mistake, this is a much more powerful right wing sell than neoliberalism - it will eat traditional English conservatism for breakfast. Maybe it already has.
Worth recalling that earlier #english #conservatives could be quite #left wing economically - #haroldmacmillan and #stanleybaldwin being the prime examples - much the same would apply to #gaullists in #france .
True - but that was in the context of the post-war consensus - discussed recently in another thread here - https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/113627735614682651
I tend to see the current left-economics-right-social/political phenomenon more in terms of a visceral rejection of neoliberalism and especially its globalisation aspect.
@[email protected] @[email protected] It's interesting to view it also in the context of what was happening across Europe, and to some extent in the US, etc (including the Keynesian 'Bretton Woods' international settlement). A good example is the French Programme d'action de la Résistance - actually a more radical plan than the UK's, including the nationalisation not only of physical infrastructure and utilities, but also of banks, etc - "l'instauration d'une véritable démocratie économique et sociale, impliquant l'éviction des grandes féodalités économiques et financières de la direction de l'économie" - as well as building a welfare state, protecting trade unions, human rights, democracy, etc, etc... A key insight is that because the left had played a leading role in fighting fascism, and in the French Resistance, centrists had no choice but to recognise that the left had been right in both its analysis and stand against fascism - and of course the right, which had collaborated with the Nazis, was now discredited and silent. This was the basis of the consensus 1945-75 - until the neoliberals were able to forge an alternative centre-and-right consensus around all that small-state-free-market nonsense - because the centrists had by then forgotten the left's analysis (that unregulated capitalism leads to unsustainable inequality, social breakdown, war, fascism. holocaust). However, a possible reading of this history is that the centre will only get the message, and join with the left/green, once that social breakdown has actually consumed society.
True of #haroldmacmillan perhaps - although arguably many of his ideas were formed in the 1930s - but surely not of #stanleybaldwin .
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
GeofCox
Donald Roy