UK Elections
May 5, 2005 - A Dark Day For the UK
I've been somewhat remiss in commenting on the UK elections, so I'd better post now I guess!
At this stage, all the opinion polls point to the Labour government being returned, albeit with a reduced majority.
What would a "Socionomic" analysis have suggested? Well, pretty much that the incumbents would be returned. Looking at the main indicators of social mood, the FTSE has been rallying since early 2003 (as a counter-trend rally in a larger bear market). The housing market has been strong although has now probably peaked. However, there's been no serious price declines so no great pain (yet) amongst the mortgage bearing classes (pretty much everyone, these days!).
So, the situation is pretty similar to that in the Australian election last year. The conclusion would be that the Labour government is going to be returned.
The Conservatives in the UK seem to have pulled themselves together after the debacle of the previous two elections, but not enough to make them electable this time. They are also struggling against a bias towards Labour in the electoral system.
It's a sad day indeed when "The Economist" endorses the re-election of Labour with the comment
Tony Blair, for all his flaws, remains the best centre-right option there is.
Now, of course, my heart and my head cries out for a different result. The Labour government is on the verge of reversing the progress made in the Thatcher years. Under Labour, the UK has made a vast lurch towards collectivism. Individual liberty and future prosperity have both been compromised under Labour, although the full consequences have yet to be seen.
Two much better writers than I spell out the situation. In today's UK "Daily Telegraph" Stephen Robinson recalls the era of the 1970s, before the Thatcher reforms and where the UK is headed Back in the Conservative fold - because I recall the 1970s.
A friend mused over lunch the other day that she was voting Labour because she wanted to go back to an era when the trains ran properly and post offices were not shutting down. But that is not my memory of the 1970s. My childhood recollections are of my English teacher - admittedly a BMW-driving bachelor with a private income - urging us all to emigrate before it was too late. My teenage years coincided with miners' strikes and three-day weeks, sugar shortages and power cuts, visits to my father's bank to get my passport stamped so I could take my measly £20 of foreign exchange on a school trip to France, and broken-down Jaguars on the hard shoulder of the M1. To those who recall the golden age of pre-privatised rail travel, I offer memories of unspeakable objects slopping around in British Rail lavatories, which I never flushed while the train was in the station, but others clearly did judging by the stink as I waited forlornly on Platform 3.
This was an age when it was assumed that governments knew best how to order our lives, an age of industrial policy, of one nationalised airline fixing exorbitant fares with another, of waiting three months for a telephone to be installed, and then being grateful.
I remember the 1970s only too well. They were the years when I was a teenager and young adult. I remember doing homework by candlelight in the depths of winter because of power cuts during one of the miners strikes. Seems almost unbelievable now, but that's where decades of collectivism and socialism had taken the UK.
The 1970s was also the last major bear market in the western world and from a Socionomics perspective it's interesting because it gives some clues as to the nature of the larger degree bear market that is developing.
My good friend Dan Denning, editor of "Strategic Investment" has this to say...
There’s a general election here in Britain on Thursday. I can confidently predict that the British people have already lost. Of the three major parties, two (Labour and the so-called Liberal Democrats) will do nothing to reduce the fact that government taxes are now 40% of GDP. The Tories, who ought to be Britain’s conservatives, promise to reduce the rate of growth in government from 5% under Labour to 4% under them.
What a sham, and what a shame. The Nanny State is slowly infantilizing (or Europeanizing) the British people. Gerard Baker refers to it in a recent piece from The Times of London, which I’ve quoted above. And recently, Theodore Dalrymple wrote on the same collectivist phenomenon in an article in the City Journal. Dalrymple writes:
Collectivist thinking arose…from impatience, a lack of historical perspective, and an arrogant belief that, because we have made so much technological progress, everything must be susceptible to human control. While we take material advance for granted as soon as it occurs, we consider remaining social problems as unprecedented and anomalous, and we propose solutions that actually make more difficult further progress of the very kind that we have forgotten ever happened. While everyone saw the misery the Great Depression caused, for example, few realized that, even so, living standards actually continued to rise for the majority. If we live entirely in the moment, as if the world were created exactly as we now find it, we are almost bound to propose solutions that bring even worse problems in their wake.
The Gerald Baker comment referred to is...
The British people are steadily being reduced to a state of cringing dependence on an ever more voracious and aggrandizing government and a political establishment of almost unconquerable scale that supports and sustains it.
I've commented about Dalrymple previously. He worked as a doctor in inner city areas in the UK and saw first hand the consequences of decades of welfare policies.
I've been watching too much of "Lord of The Rings" lately (!!) but I can't help being reminded of the comment from Theoden, King of Rohan, under siege in Helm's Deep...
"How did it come to this?"
The answer? Decades of collectivism and quasi-socialism have corrupted the will and the spirit of the people.
I've been somewhat remiss in commenting on the UK elections, so I'd better post now I guess!
At this stage, all the opinion polls point to the Labour government being returned, albeit with a reduced majority.
What would a "Socionomic" analysis have suggested? Well, pretty much that the incumbents would be returned. Looking at the main indicators of social mood, the FTSE has been rallying since early 2003 (as a counter-trend rally in a larger bear market). The housing market has been strong although has now probably peaked. However, there's been no serious price declines so no great pain (yet) amongst the mortgage bearing classes (pretty much everyone, these days!).
So, the situation is pretty similar to that in the Australian election last year. The conclusion would be that the Labour government is going to be returned.
The Conservatives in the UK seem to have pulled themselves together after the debacle of the previous two elections, but not enough to make them electable this time. They are also struggling against a bias towards Labour in the electoral system.
It's a sad day indeed when "The Economist" endorses the re-election of Labour with the comment
Tony Blair, for all his flaws, remains the best centre-right option there is.
Now, of course, my heart and my head cries out for a different result. The Labour government is on the verge of reversing the progress made in the Thatcher years. Under Labour, the UK has made a vast lurch towards collectivism. Individual liberty and future prosperity have both been compromised under Labour, although the full consequences have yet to be seen.
Two much better writers than I spell out the situation. In today's UK "Daily Telegraph" Stephen Robinson recalls the era of the 1970s, before the Thatcher reforms and where the UK is headed Back in the Conservative fold - because I recall the 1970s.
A friend mused over lunch the other day that she was voting Labour because she wanted to go back to an era when the trains ran properly and post offices were not shutting down. But that is not my memory of the 1970s. My childhood recollections are of my English teacher - admittedly a BMW-driving bachelor with a private income - urging us all to emigrate before it was too late. My teenage years coincided with miners' strikes and three-day weeks, sugar shortages and power cuts, visits to my father's bank to get my passport stamped so I could take my measly £20 of foreign exchange on a school trip to France, and broken-down Jaguars on the hard shoulder of the M1. To those who recall the golden age of pre-privatised rail travel, I offer memories of unspeakable objects slopping around in British Rail lavatories, which I never flushed while the train was in the station, but others clearly did judging by the stink as I waited forlornly on Platform 3.
This was an age when it was assumed that governments knew best how to order our lives, an age of industrial policy, of one nationalised airline fixing exorbitant fares with another, of waiting three months for a telephone to be installed, and then being grateful.
I remember the 1970s only too well. They were the years when I was a teenager and young adult. I remember doing homework by candlelight in the depths of winter because of power cuts during one of the miners strikes. Seems almost unbelievable now, but that's where decades of collectivism and socialism had taken the UK.
The 1970s was also the last major bear market in the western world and from a Socionomics perspective it's interesting because it gives some clues as to the nature of the larger degree bear market that is developing.
My good friend Dan Denning, editor of "Strategic Investment" has this to say...
There’s a general election here in Britain on Thursday. I can confidently predict that the British people have already lost. Of the three major parties, two (Labour and the so-called Liberal Democrats) will do nothing to reduce the fact that government taxes are now 40% of GDP. The Tories, who ought to be Britain’s conservatives, promise to reduce the rate of growth in government from 5% under Labour to 4% under them.
What a sham, and what a shame. The Nanny State is slowly infantilizing (or Europeanizing) the British people. Gerard Baker refers to it in a recent piece from The Times of London, which I’ve quoted above. And recently, Theodore Dalrymple wrote on the same collectivist phenomenon in an article in the City Journal. Dalrymple writes:
Collectivist thinking arose…from impatience, a lack of historical perspective, and an arrogant belief that, because we have made so much technological progress, everything must be susceptible to human control. While we take material advance for granted as soon as it occurs, we consider remaining social problems as unprecedented and anomalous, and we propose solutions that actually make more difficult further progress of the very kind that we have forgotten ever happened. While everyone saw the misery the Great Depression caused, for example, few realized that, even so, living standards actually continued to rise for the majority. If we live entirely in the moment, as if the world were created exactly as we now find it, we are almost bound to propose solutions that bring even worse problems in their wake.
The Gerald Baker comment referred to is...
The British people are steadily being reduced to a state of cringing dependence on an ever more voracious and aggrandizing government and a political establishment of almost unconquerable scale that supports and sustains it.
I've commented about Dalrymple previously. He worked as a doctor in inner city areas in the UK and saw first hand the consequences of decades of welfare policies.
I've been watching too much of "Lord of The Rings" lately (!!) but I can't help being reminded of the comment from Theoden, King of Rohan, under siege in Helm's Deep...
"How did it come to this?"
The answer? Decades of collectivism and quasi-socialism have corrupted the will and the spirit of the people.
posted by Kevin Francis at
5:35 pm
