Katie Hopkins Gone

[SpringTime]

BlahBlah do you think that the centre has failed? If the mainstream parties were so good then why do we have so much venom (or zest) from the left and right? It can't just be solely due to the rise of social media. Populism exists for a reason and I think the mainstream parties have failed to engage and serve. There's no single party for people like me. I get shouted down all the time by right and left for having angles from both right and left, and struggle to vote for anyone!

[JohnL]

SpringTime Wrote:

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> BlahBlah do you think that the centre has failed?

> If the mainstream parties were so good then why do

> we have so much venom (or zest) from the left and

> right? It can't just be solely due to the rise of

> social media. Populism exists for a reason and I

> think the mainstream parties have failed to engage

> and serve. There's no single party for people like

> me. I get shouted down all the time by right and

> left for having angles from both right and left,

> and struggle to vote for anyone!

Yet Blair's big failure was nothing to do with politics and all to do with war (and he came across as enjoying it to some). Cameron's failure was Brexit (oh yes and austerity which we now seem to all agree was not needed).

[JohnL]

Ahh b****r it - Cameron's failures are too numerous to be documented but he still was a better PM than the current one.

[Blah Blah]

I don't think the center failed Springtime, I think this is always the pattern after a global financial crash. Even localised recessions open the door to the fringes of the political spectrum, where ideas that belong to the edges begin to seep into the mainstream. These are always crucial times, which at their most anarchic, lead to revolutions, or war.

And the pattern is always the same. As economies struggle, migrants become the first scapegoats. Then comes the attack on foreign trade and a return to protectionism. We are already seeing that. Resurgence of nationalism then comes too which draws out polarised battles between political extremes. It happened in 1906. It happened in 1929. And it has happened in 2008. Take a look at the decade that followed all of those major economic contractions, and the same pattern emerges.

And the Pandemic is about to sink the entire world into a recession. Have a think about what that means. Major unemployment. More refugees and economic migrants desperate to find a better existence, at the very time countries are lifting their drawbridges. Will nations work together to get economies going again, or will it be every nation for herself?

The thing that caused the 2008 crisis is the very same thing that led to the 1929 crisis. It was not the center ground that took us there, but the greed of the libertarian free market. The removal of all the regulations put in place after 1929, in the mad belief that speculators and city traders wouldn't make the same mistakes again! The removal of the Glass Steagall Act by Clinton being the biggest mistake of all. There is a lot wrong with our financial systems. But there is even more wrong with our aversion to regulation.

[pk]

Blah Blah Wrote:

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>

> you do have a genuine hard left who are equally

> intolerant to any criticism of their views

i'm genuinely curious about who you're talking about here

[Blah Blah]

The genuine hard left would be those to subscribe to the ideas around revolutionary communism PK. Anarchists who want to smash the capitalist system and install pure socialism for example, and think achieving that by force if necessary, is a valid position to take. What typifies those on both ends of the political spectrum is the rejection of consensus. Ideologues have no place for that usually.

[Effra]

Blah Blah Wrote:

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> I don't think the center failed Springtime, I

> think this is always the pattern after a global

> financial crash. Even localised recessions open

> the door to the fringes of the political spectrum,

> where ideas that belong to the edges begin to seep

> into the mainstream. These are always crucial

> times, which at their most anarchic, lead to

> revolutions, or war.

>

Agreed. One classic example, of course, was the rise of Hitler and National Socialism. The targeted scapegoats then were the Jews.

I wouldn't agree that migrants are the current scapegoats as the current Liberal/Left axis is too influential/vocal in the media - particularly the BBC.

[Blah Blah]

But migrants ARE the scapegoat. Brexit was entirely fought on that basis. You can see the same backlash across Europe, in countries like Poland and Hungary, exacerbated by the Syrian War and the refugee crisis born from that. And just as with the rise of Hitler, the collapse of economies raises the notion of anyone considered an outsider, being pushed out of the system.