Reasons (not) To Be Cheerful

A Blockhead’s Essays: Here’s to new ideas

This is a rare vacuum in politics. It is not often that a movement has the chance to exhaust its own programme, to push its beliefs as far as it can, and for everyone to see the result. The neo-conservative movement in the States had an unusually free hand to try its great experiment, and as it failed, it destroyed the power of its own ideas. What amounts to an ideology for new Labour – throw money and confiscate power – has been running for a decade. We know the results. Would you pay three times as much for the health service of 2007 than for the service of 1997? Tough. You are. Have schools been transformed? Nope. Do people have more disposable income? Do we feel freer? More fulfilled? Happier? More secure? More content? There is no possibility that the government can blame anyone else for its failures. It has had whopping majorities, gushing streams of our cash, a benign global economy, and lots of goodwill. For most of its time it barely had an opposition. Its failure is entirely due to the bankruptcy of its own ideas.

Don’t think much of his blogroll :) and I don’t agree with all his analysis but it’s a compelling read, a good essay and if more of the right-leaning blogworld produced this sort of stuff the left would have reason to worry…or be grateful perhaps?…mmmmm.

Via Tim Worstall