Tony Klinger
Lurching to the Left
Created on 14/1/2009
For reasons that don’t make much sense we are lurching to the political left, when perhaps we need to be holding hard to the centre. This goes for both the UK and the US, but it infects most of the industrialized world.
It is the knee jerk reaction of the population to look for answers to our political leaders, and I think they don’t actually have any answers other than to posture, smile and wave as if they do.
The questions to which they don’t have coherent responses are just too complex and intractable for them to provide easy solutions. Of course they would like to leap with a single bound to our rescue to earn our undying adoration, but it isn’t going to happen unless one or more of them is a whole lot greater than they initially seem.
That’s the reason they look to the old wisdoms for solutions and most of these are to be found in the wisdom handed down by the liberal, so called intelligentsia. Sadly this is a group whose ideas have been previously totally discredited, in fact they got everything wrong first time around so why should we trust them with anything now?
The economical collapse in slow motion is only being delayed by all the global bailouts that have served to provide a breathing space, so far nothing more has been achieved. Don’t get me wrong our leaders didn’t have much of a choice in order to avoid what would have been a totally catastrophic meltdown and an immediate Depression but now we need wit and far sightedness and instead we are getting the impression our leaders don’t have anything but the wrong history books.
Add to this the unresolved War on Terror and the ongoing hot actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and you have a recipe for disaster that would tax the greatest brains in history, let alone the pygmies of power who presently represent us.
There is the potential of President Elect Obama, but if ever someone had to hit the ground running it is Barack Obama. He will have no time to think when he shortly assumes office and we all pray and hope that he is as good as he and his legions of supporters believe him to be.
However he does suffer from the strictures of conventional left leaning liberals in that they now are more doctrinaire and inflexible than any other major political group in the world. Even the Communists running the People’s Republic of China appear more open to new economic solutions.
In the UK we have had an economically right wing New Labour government for more than a decade but in this crisis their left wing credentials are appearing with depressing regularity and speed as the country marches into the world of Big Brother as the government tries to micro manage everything in our lives from cradle to grave.
This will also be the fate of the USA unless the idea that our governments know what’s best for us is fought and halted. This crisis has proved that governments, just before bankers, should not be allowed free rein to manage us.