That’s quite right.
All these hard left protesters, young communists glorifying mass murderers, extinction rebellion and dickheads with Palestinian flags - like that’s got anything to do with this - all over Manchester.
Will take a lot of cleaning up after this.
Does anyone know how I can join them?
After reading about Truss's renewed popularity but knowing that the 'trickle-down' version of economics that she favours has never, ever produced the anticipated 'growth', as noted by economists like Krugman, Chang, and the author of the book depicted below, I can only imagine that many modern Tories are infected with the ideological equivalent of Cordyceps. Given also that Starmer - in his bid to get back the Red Wall vote - only seems capable of neoliberalism-lite, am certainly in possession of some economic reasons for being more curious about the 'hard Left'.
Do not sympathise with ER's methods, but after having read Lovelock, Scruton (yes,
that Scruton) and Roy Scranton on climate change, I certainly share some of their concerns. In particular, Scranton is ex-military and saw service in Iraq, so his views cannot be dismissed as those of a naive, Trust Fund-holding Tarquin.
Unlike Hamas, I would prefer not to see the destruction of the state of Israel. But, given that the Tories tend to be supportive of politicians like Netanyahu, those Palestinian flags
are relevant. It is also surely not without significance that even dispassionate authors like Martin Brunton seem broadly aligned with the Palestinian cause, as well as on-the-ground journalists like Amira Hass and the late Robert Fisk.
Like many people, am concerned about immigration, but when I discover that most of the tropes about asylum seekers promoted by the Right in an attempt to provoke an animus against them are actually false, and that Rwanda is a police state that produces its own refugees, I find myself turning even further to the Left.
Moving on, the blurb on the back of this award-winning book (which I have acquired but not read yet) says this: 'Many of the scenes I saw were horrifying, and in some parts of the city I was confronted by levels of deprivation that are unbelievable in the 21st Century.’
So when I hear that the Tories once again wish to target the 'work-shy', it does make me wonder if they are, in fact, morally despicable, beyond the pale, far more of a threat than those marchers, and perhaps entirely worthy of being ejected from Manchester pubs.
Will finish with this: the philosopher Anthony Kenny once commented as follows on the issue of a faulty conscience in relation to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas:
‘One important issue which he often discusses is the role of conscience, and the question of whether you should always obey your conscience. A lot of people have thought that, as long as you were obeying your conscience, everything was all right.
Aquinas rejects this. Your conscience may well be ill-informed, and you have a duty to better inform it. If you disobey your conscience, he says, you’re doing something wrong. But the mere fact that you are obeying your conscience doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’re doing is right.'
Seems to me that most Tories are either entirely bereft of a conscience, or certainly need to do more than base their ethical decision-making on pre-rational, tribalistic gut feelings, as many seem to. Certainly, they might do well to heed the words of the great moralist Adam Smith, who once said that, 'No society can be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable'
But anyway, am now off to find out more about this 'Marxism' business.
