Originally Posted by kernow:
Who me?!:-)
The late Charlton Heston said, " liberals are Conservatives who haven't been burgled". He'd be echoing my sentiments!
Well, speaking from a country where there is a murder every two hours and a burglary every two minutes I naturally agree that any liberals of such idealistic proportions are conservatives who have not yet been woken up to the reality of everyday life. That is why I believe the Lib Dems will change through greater experience of the situation unfolding in Britain.
The reason why they will exist on the centre left is because if they don't the centre right will have no balance. But the two spaces on the political continuum may be occupied by different kinds of proponent in the future and the future ideologies, worldwide, really, will come to reflect changing social and economic conditions.
Many people, and the Conservatives of the old school are as vulnerable as those of Labour's old guard in this respect, will be left adrift in the new millennium. Some of their ideas just don't match life today and they will become political dinosaurs. This translates itself into so-called "nationalism" as well. It cannot function in its present often somewhat neo nazi or fascist format in this evolving political climate. And if one observes this particular ideology one can see, and experience too if one has been involved, the changes being wrought and the responses of the various proponents of the nationalist or patriotic view. That is why these early prototypical parties and groups are splitting, sometimes more than once at a time. It's the spirit of the times calling with different voices to various kinds of folk.
The Liberals and Liberal Democrats and the old guard Socialists will be hearing and feeling these voices and changes too. There will have to be this awkward period where adjustments are made. Sometimes people hop out of one pool into another and find they did so without forethought and hop out once again into yet another until they either find their home or create a new political home for others who are also leaping out of older less flexible political abodes.
This is also why the critics of these movements are being cut adrift from what they have been accustomed to. One can notice their smears and insults and fabrications often missing the mark or describing what is not. They are fighting a new war with old weapons and it is inevitable that the ray gun of the new age will overwhelm the crossbow of the old. Barbs will lose their sting and miss their targets because bowmen are presently firing at moving targets. This will continue till all the old critics and their outdated arsenal fade from significance because no one is listening and the funding dries up.
The bigshots who used to provide this financial tributary to the mainstream umbilical cord are rapidly departing the stage and so there will be broken pipelines leaking useless information all over the place and many ships waiting at anchor in the bay of early retirements and desperate prospects in the EU, so all that vitriol will just naturally dry up and blow away on the winds of change.
It's a good thing to let the dead stay that way and not to keep digging them up in case they may be revived. They may have some iconic value and a few fans but there are new young ideologies and renewed forgotten ones crowding the stage door for an audition. The crowds will soon forget the corpses and run to the living icons.
Transition periods are always rather sad times when balloons pop and bouquets wither.
The Lib Dem butterfly isn't going to die, it is just emerging from its chrysalis. Nationalism in its fascist form is changing its skin and will appear as the adult specimen, replete with bright armour and a fiery gaze, a rather splendid new age green warrior of the order of folk and honour, not in the old neo-nazi conception, but in the new dawn of heritage and horizons that will be emblazoned on nationalism's banners the world over. Nazism was a great false eagle that crashed to earth, built on a dream that could never come true. The new nation states will be built on different foundations and from bricks that do not contain the ground bones of their imagined enemies.
Nothing is forever unless it can be reborn. The jackboot is dead, long live the shield.
Or the butterfly, in the case of liberal democracy, as it dries out its wings in the sun and prepares to fly into battle alongside the shield bearing green warriors. They are no longer enemies but comrades and one will complement the other in the mutual struggle to bring earth back to life.
This won't impress anyone living in a ghetto or some terrible estate patrolled by feral yobs. It won't smash the bottles or break the needles and it won't start any fires in minds too long accustomed to socialism and the dreary grind of dependency politics.
But the lifting of the lid of the dustbin may stir a few souls to follow the scent of change on the wind and those who could be bothered to escape the garbage of an old decayed system will find either the wings or the shield and renew themselves in a positive quest to restore what has been lost and build new worlds on the ashes and debris of the old.
This is happening in the east and is well underway. They live now among the dreaming spires and in the cities that are fabled to be paved with gold. They are the Londons and the New Yorks of the new age. Now young men will be told "Go east" and not west.
Unless people in the west realise this change and accept it and start building their own renewed world they will be left behind and degrade into poverty. This is already happening in many British cities and has been ongoing for decades now. And Labour has created a new problem in its immigration project to falsely create multiculturalism in a country that could ill afford it. Now the British must fall over themselves pleasing their immigrants to get elected whilst their own children stand empty handed at the door and wait for the leftovers. It is a folly that has the seeds of revolution in it and to prevent such a debacle change must happen across the political spectrum.
This intermediary period where one thing dies and another is nascent is that moment when a revolt can be turned into a successful rebirth. But the situation has been allowed to go so far that unless the people actively do something about all those children standing waiting at the homeland door the opportunity will be lost and then a quite different scenario will develop.
It's up to all of us to make the sun come up and not to allow this to be a false dawn. Stop fighting each other, stop worrying about finding evil and working for gangs of politically correct henchmen of the old order and reach for the handle on the door where the children of the future are waiting. It's the only door that holds the key to survival.
And there will be two breeds of warrior, one with the butterfly on its banner and the other with the sun on its shield. Two aspects of the same aspiration, two ideological siblings, the twins of the new millennium.
[Rep]
Originally Posted by kernow:
Just out of interest Frith, do you write novels? If not you ought to!
Yes, I do. It's hard to get them published these days as I write long sagas about knighthoods and chivalric codes, heroes and cultures and religions that do battle against evil, etc. And my knights are tall and handsome and strong and my ladies are lovely and intelligent and good. My common people are shrewd and multifarious and open to offers of the chance to be great. There are orders of every kind and relationships of masters and hunter companions, of secret military police and soldiers. There are deserts and mountains and lands beyond the cartographers maps where my knights go questing for the honour that will bring them the right to wear the icons of their orders as graduates and to further their quests and achievement by this time honoured method. Their sagas lead to the reader's discovery of their world and all its folk and cultures, struggles and victories and to a storyline about one special knight and his companions whose tale begins with a gesture of defence and ends with a gift of eternity.
I'm waiting for the world to want heroes again, before I send my latest sagas off. One has to battle the political correctness brigade and fight off extremist feminists, who have become something of a curse to humankind.
:-)
[Rep]
Originally Posted by BonnieDundee:
Well logically they would have won had they been allowed a run off.
Not necessarily. They (the europhile Liberal 'Democrats') failed to make the second round of voting (in this month's London Mayoral Election) because they didn't get enough votes in the first round for their candidate to be one of the two in the second (final) round (i.e. the second-preference vote).
Every time there is a Mayoral Election in the capital the Liberal 'Democrats' say after their deserved defeat at the polls "We would have won if our candidate had got into the second round of voting." Which would be rather like former Labour Labour leader and Prime Minister Harold Wilson saying "I would have won the 1970 General Election had I not lost it."
He never said such a thing of course - because he did not whine in defeat like the europhile Liberal 'Democrats' tend to do.
The Liberal 'Democrats' do not deserve to win and a large number of people only vote for them as a protest vote against one or both of the two big parties - not because they actually agree with all or anything they stand for.
[Rep]
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