tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2440117683736860632.post1895550728090375312..comments2023-08-31T15:14:58.287-07:00Comments on London Green Left Blog: The Play ‘Limehouse’ and the Parallels for the Labour Party TodayMike Shaughnessyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16796480031110991460noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2440117683736860632.post-38773522527727187492017-03-29T13:46:27.883-07:002017-03-29T13:46:27.883-07:00Thanks for the interesting comment. Yes, the centr...Thanks for the interesting comment. Yes, the centre ground has shifted so far to the right these days, and seems to be getting even worse lately. There is Corbyn/Sanders but they haven't won, and won't. The only hope is that the right really fuck up, opening up space for the radical left, which is not the same thing as Corbyn. Mike Shaughnessyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16796480031110991460noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2440117683736860632.post-88178815698201364332017-03-29T13:19:02.662-07:002017-03-29T13:19:02.662-07:00Thanks. Very interesting and I've been conside...Thanks. Very interesting and I've been considering going to see the play. Back then, I was an a local candidate and parliamentary agent for the SDP, and similarly I've wondered on the parallels between then and now. <br /><br />Just as my own worldview and mindset is now very different to what it was then, the political situation is too - your note on Bill Rodgers being more left wing than you recall in the 80s is striking, but makes sense. Because Corbyn is castigated by many as an unrealistic, wild-eyed revolutionary when his leadership manifesto and economic policy by one analysis is in fact to the right of the SDP's 1983 manifesto. The whole political pendulum has moved so far right that by default someone like Rodgers is relatively further left - I'm not so sure about Shirley Williams though after her willing sacrifice of the NHS in the 2012 Act, while David Owen remains the smug dilettante he always was: I recall being very impressed, aged 17, by the hard-back edition of his book, Face The Future, which repeatedly proclaimed the need for a socialist tomorrow. By the time the paperback edition came out, socialism had been replaced with social democracy. Little wonder he went on to endorse the Tories in 1992, and then Labour, and then Brexit.<br /><br />But then the SDP came along as the welfare state and the whole post-war consensus (of a sort) was coming under assault from Thatcher. The dynamics of a social democratic party opposing Foot's Labour while also opposing Thatcherite cuts and privatisation, was very different territory to neoliberal rightists in Labour flogging off state assets and denouncing calls for bank regulation as communist. Roy Jenkins, whom I knew and worked for in Glasgow, and who, while liking his clarets, was a somewhat more radical soul than the likes of Owen Smith could ever even imagine becoming. Similarly, Corbyn is in a very different place to Foot - he hasn't got the MPs, but he has got a mass party behind him and it is neoliberalism that is now under growing pressure, from left and right. Socialism in a broad sense at least seems to be moving back into the political debate and pubic psyche in a reverse trajectory to the 1980s.<br /><br />I've no idea where this goes over the next few years, but it might make a good play one day too. And maybe a half-decent society too.Viridis Lumenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com