February: 'a detestable month with no virtue except shortness.' (George Orwell)

 

UK recession over: rejoice, rejoice...

Every time I look 45 degrees to my right I see a pile of books on my table that are demanding to be read. I may have to take the blogging easy for a short while, but before then I have a few links you may want to peruse.

At AngloNoel Towers I have vaguely being following the opinion polls. It appears the Cons are a bit ahead of NuLab but the lead appears to be falling. Then again it may not be. No-one really knows and I doubt anyone really cares that much out there in 'the real world' which bunch of professional shyters in suits (almost typed 'suites' then...Freudian slip) get the keys to Number 10 in a few months time. I think any time the public looks at one of the main parties for any considerable period of time, they are generally revulsed. Then they look at the other lot, and the polls start going in the other direction...It reminds me of being a neutral sports fan and seeing two teams playing who are full of individuals who, whatever their talents as sportspeople, are pretty obnoxious as human beings. Who do you cheer on? Those who are sick of politics being treated as mere showbiz or sport may like to read some Marina Hyde.

Whether or not the Conservative poll lead is falling- if it is I blame MyDavidCameron.com myself!- it appears people are more 'conservative' politically after 13 years of New Labour telling everybody that, yes, the Conservatives were right after all. Comment on thse survey findings can be found here and here. Frankly, to try and rally extremely disllusioned Labour support for the General Election on the grounds by saying  how bad and nasty the Conservatives will be in Government comes across as extremely shallow and pathetic politicking by New Labour. Moreover, those who have a longer memory than a proverbial goldfish know that New Labour will probably implement most of the policies they say the Conservatives plan to bring in after the next General Election. Cuts are cuts, whether they are implemented by 'Nasty' Tories or "Nice' Labour.

 

Is British Politics now all about a bunch of cuts?

Those of you who wonder whether social democracy is dead or not (or just stunned as it was waking up, to quote the Monty Python Parrot sketch) may be interested in reading Larry Gambone. The other Larry, Mr. Elliott, looks at how far New Labour, despite its pre-General Election rhetoric, is away from economic policies which can even be considered to be post-social democratic.

On of the benefits of the Net is the help it gives you in tracking down the origins of great quotes that you heard years back. Hence I was able to nail this one a few days back, which I heard back in 1990:

‘In early 1919 Max Weber wrote a letter of doom to his younger colleague and friend Georg Lukacs, who had by then become a Communist and whom he regarded as the great promise of German theoretical culture. In this letter Weber
warned Lukacs that the audacious Russian experiment would bereave socialism
of its reputation and authority for a hundred years. Let us conclude with
the most optimistic sentence of this book: of these hundred, sixty years
have already elapsed.’

Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over
Needs: An analysis of Soviet Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p.299

November 2018, here we come...

Finally, if you want to get away from 'conventional' politics (and who does not want to do that?) you may want to look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now back to scaling Book Mountain...