A personal view

After all the publicity over MP's allowances, it is all too easy to see politicians as only greedy, point scoring, over media-savvy, self interested & partisan.  I think this is to do them a disservice, both Labour & Conservative.  No sane person can go into politics for the money or for fame, neither at council nor parliamentary level.  No, people (Labour & Conservative), go into politics because they want to make their country, their constituency or perhaps just their town, a better place as they see it.

All political positions have merits, but they also ALL have disadvantages. I think modern liberal conservatism, as exemplified by David Cameron, has easily the best combination of all the important merits, and very few significant problems. Nevertheless I have great respect for anyone who has come to any other considered position. What is less easy to respect are people who complain but don't vote, or those who choose extremist or curb-side parties without any consideration of what would happen if such people ever did win power.

So here is my attempt at a neutral view of the two main principled stances in England today.

Labour thinking people believe passionately in fairness.  They measure fairness as the ratio of the lowest incomes to the highest incomes in society.  Fairness is achieved through re-distributive taxation, taking from the rich to give to the poor.  The down side of this is that average earnings of everyone are lower, since people are disincentivised from striving for higher rewards.

Labour people also have the honourable aim of wanting to make people’s lives better in all sorts of other ways.  To achieve this they pass vast numbers of laws and regulations.  Some people are thus protected from various economic & other perils (exploitative loan sharks etc).  The down side is called the “nanny state”, telling people what to do and treating adults as children.

Conservative thinking people believe passionately in a liberal society and freedom of the individual. Whilst naturally wanting everyone to prosper, they believe it is up to every individual to make the correct choices for themselves.  History has proven this model to produce the highest average incomes for the whole society. However these freedoms go well beyond economic matters (fundamental differences from socialism here) when increased power-of-the-State is at the cost of individual self-determination. There is nevertheless a downside of a free and liberal democracy for some, it is that these few people will actually make badly wrong decisions, and thus they live poorer lives than the alternate, socialist, perspective would provide.

Conservative also believe in enterprise & self reliance.  They measure this by the absolute level of prosperity of the nation.  To achieve it, barriers to enterprise are removed.  Thus the prosperity of the nation (& hence average incomes) is maximised.  The down side of course is resentment & envy from higher ratios of top to bottom.

Between & beyond these two are various other parties, some principled, some not. Ironically at the May 09 European elections the two main parties, plus the Lib Dems, all lost votes to an extremist version of themselves. Extremist Lib Dems voted Green, extremist Labour voted BNP & extremist Conservatives voted UKIP. 

We in Stockport have a majority of councillors not subscribing to either of the main principled views.  Although they no doubt regard themselves as adopting an honourable centrist position, others think they are just opportunistic, being neo-socialists in Labour areas but crypto-Tories in Conservative areas.  Nevertheless, to return to my main point, they too originally no doubt entered politics with good motives in mind.

Brian Dougal - July 09