______________________________
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was a fierce critic of Mrs Thatcher when she was in power. The British media gave him the moniker “Red Ken” for his socialist beliefs during her tenure. Thatcher viewed the Greater London Council, of which Livingstone was leader, as a political threat and a waste of money. In 1986, Thatcher’s government abolished the GLC, putting Livingstone out of a job.
******
There are two things to say about Mrs Thatcher. Unlike most politicians, who’re spineless, who never want to actually lead, and who wait to see where public opinion’s going, she had beliefs that almost no one in her cabinet actually shared at the time she became the leader of the Tory Conservative Party. However, she ignored them, she drove ahead, and she made the changes that she believed that Britain needed… you have to respect that. I can’t think of any other modern Prime Minister with that degree of self-confidence and courage in their beliefs.
The tragedy for Britain is that almost everything she believed in was wrong, and almost all the problems that assail us today are the legacy of her neoliberal economics… the high unemployment, the collapse of our manufacturing industry. She inherited a nation that had some problems, but she made them infinitely worse… she deregulated the banking industry, she decided to write off our industry, she wouldn’t build good homes for ordinary people to rent, and she’s left a terrible legacy that’ll take a generation to clear up.
She did terrible things, such as abolishing the Greater London Council because she didn’t agree with it; it was the first real rolling back of democracy in a hundred years of British history. It’s very hard to think of anyone in a modern democracy who’d do something like that. The US President always has state governors and mayors critical of their policy, it’d never occur to them to do away with them. That meant terrible problems for London; we had a decade-and-a-half with no leadership. We actually proposed that we should stop discriminating against black people and against homosexuals; we recognised that women had equal rights… hardly insane, but just a bit ahead of its time.
Clearly, [the state funeral] isn’t right. The only politician of my lifetime that had a state funeral was Winston Churchill, who was a decisive force in the defeat of Adolf Hitler. If we’re to think about anyone today, it should be those whose lives she destroyed. We used to have a sound manufacturing industry; she wiped it out. Look at people’s lives… our suicide rates have gone up since the financial crisis; the bankers abused all the freedom that she gave them. We had a country used to virtually full employment before she got in… ever since, we’ve had people and whole communities just written off.
Overwhelmingly, it’s a tragedy Mrs Thatcher ever came to power. I respect the courage of her convictions and the way she led; the tragedy is she led us in the wrong direction.
9 April 2013
Ken Livingstone
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_09/Its-a-tragedy-Mrs-Thatcher-ever-came-to-power-Ken-Livingstone-211/
The Role of Traditional Values in Contemporary Society
Tags: Classical Liberalism, Family, family life, Free market, George Orwell, laissez faire capitalism, Liberal, liberal economic policies, Liberalism, Libertarian, Libertarianism, moral, moral stance, morality, morals, Neoliberal, Neoliberalism, Nihilism, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Russian culture, Soviet Union, Traditional values, United States, USA, USSR, Vladimir Putin
Families, then (Tsar Aleksandr Aleksandrovich loved his wife and kids, never cheated on her, routinely commuted virtually all death sentences to life imprisonment, and hid a bottle of brandy in his boot… what’s not to like?)…
******
families, now…
______________________________
Recently, the role of moral values in society has taken centre-stage in public and political discourse. Increasingly, their status as “universal” is under question, and core fundamental concepts receive new, sometimes contradictory interpretations. We must draw a clear distinction between those indisputable values that guided mankind for centuries over its journey of self-development, and the ultraliberal {“liberal” in the European sense, that is, Anglosphere “conservatism”: editor} trends that flourished in the early 21st century.
The collapse of the USSR and the socialist bloc in the late 1980s took Western academe by surprise. It also led to the disappearance of the bipolar political and ideological structures that stabilised international relations throughout the 20th century, paving the way for the triumph of neoliberalism. This latter was the only game in town for some time, much as the “unipolar moment” had been. Some more idealistic researchers even started to talk about the “end of history,” meaning the end of the historic creativity of man and nations. In this regard, I can’t help but refer to the interpretation of the “end of history” by the Most Rev Rowan Williams in his book Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination). The euphoria in international relations was short-lived, because of the experience of the first decade of this century, and, then, the global financial and economic crisis. This suggests that talk of the “end of history” usually heralds serious upheavals.
Neoliberalism prompted a number of profound shifts in social development, largely endorsing principles such as political correctness, and the dictatorship of the minority. The “permissiveness” inherent in this trend led to some traditional values shared by an often acquiescent majority being squeezed out of public discourse. It’s worth noting that distinctive features of this particular “take” on liberalism included zero tolerance of dissent and radical approaches to imposing this view, often with the government’s active support. One can’t help but recall how nihilism, as it’s materialism taken to its absurd conclusion locks human nature within a consumerist framework. George Orwell gave a convincing description of where this kind of social engineering can potentially lead.
I’d like to quote President Vladimir Putin’s address to the RF Federal Assembly. He said, “Attempts by the government to encroach on people’s beliefs and views are a manifestation of totalitarianism” and “law can’t instil morality“. Nevertheless, this is exactly what’s happening now, even though those involved formally deny it. As a result, the erosion of the cultural and moral social environment began with the replacement of its fundamental concepts. Moreover, all this is happening at a time when the role of religion has been on the rise world-wide, including in Islamic countries. At the heart of the issue lies a search for a common denominator between cultures and civilisations. This is essential for better mutual understanding in the modern world. As Madeleine Albright wrote in her book The Mighty and the Almighty (2006), all “should equally refer to such transcendental issues like history, identity, and faith”. Especially, this is so as “the three monotheistic religions provide a rich tradition of overlapping principles, ethics, and beliefs”. I believe that if we perceive society as a purely socio-mechanistic construct, if we ignore its more subtle moral and spiritual nature, it can have fatal consequences for that very society’s life, and, indeed, its future.
2 April 2013
Aleksandr Yakovenko
RIA-Novosti
http://en.ria.ru/alexander_yakovenko_blog/20130402/180394557/Ambassadors-Notebook-The-Role-of-Traditional-Values-in.html
Editor’s Note:
Many Americans, in particular, are “thrown” by the fact that Russians use English differently than Americans do. For Russians, “liberal” retains its original meaning… “the absence of state controls on private affairs”. That’s to say, the Free Market Nihilism of Anglosphere “conservatives”. The US Republican Party, the Canadian and British Conservative Parties, and the Australian Liberal Party all share this adoration of the Free Market and the concomitant worship of wealth and greed.
“Liberal” in Russia (and on the Continent, as well) does NOT mean “leftist” or “social democratic”. It means a soulless and corrosive nihilistic scrapping of all constructive government regulation, and the trashing of the rights of the non-wealthy. The political parties mentioned above DO believe in the “dictatorship of the minority”… they bow down before oligarchs, gun nutters, religious kooks, economic tinkerers, stock market manipulators, and media moguls. If “law can’t instil morality” (President Putin is right, here), then, we shouldn’t be waving placards in anti-abortion marches; we should be helping unwed mothers, seeing to it that larger families have the wherewithal to raise their kids (including help from the state, of course), and opposing oligarch-inspired cuts to social benefits and wages.
When viewed sanely, with a proper viewpoint, things aren’t quite what Fox News, Pat BuKKKanan, and Rod Dreher propagate. Anyone who opposes sane government regulation and intervention is a godless nihilist… never forget that (the worst of the lot are the Evangelical poseurs, with their smarmy pseudo-religion). Also, remember that “libertarian” is nothing but a euphemism for “wilful, spoilt childishness”. We have a job to do…
BMD