People who promoted Keir Starmer’s leadership apparently think he is doing a ‘good job’. The Z-Gen language he and his Cabinet use has been generally a resurrection of the false hopes of Harold Wilson’s ‘the white heat of technology’, another attempt to make the politics that examines the interests actually served by power irrelevant. Both rhetorics, for they are no more than that, pretend that there is an absolute value to economic growth and denegrate any state redistribution and regulation as interfering with the ‘free’ market’s tendency to growth of both the economy and of wealth trickled down to the most vulnerable.
This time, there is a difference. Labour is letting go of all and every belief in the state as a mechanism of applied fairness, justice, and planning for goals outside those merely of wealth creation, such as the preservation of a supportive environment in which the vulnerable have a role too. Ben has learning disabilities. Any job he will be given in our social order will necessarily be one that AI attached to a degree of robotic implementation could do more efficiently. Any dignity in his work will be stripped form him and perhaps even that of a working opportunity.
The Starmerites point to education about which indirect plans can only lead to very marginal improvement, if any. For Ben, the hopes are less. We will do this when we can afford it with the benefits of growth, they say, whilst dismantling the mechanisms that could do anything that might help Ben in the distant future if he survives.
To denigrate the state and reduce it to functions only of national and internal security is thd first sign that a government no longer has a value system that starts with people, whether from the pointof view of their needs, desires and wants or of delivering them in collaboration with their capacities. AI can only be delivered top-down, and it will change the view of need to one that one based on what can be delivered, not what might be needed to meet the needs we express and our willingness to contribute from the bottom-up.
All of this was the obvious drift of Labour from before the election. Now that the enemy is Reform, not the Tories, they will drift further into that domain once incompetently proposed by their fourth-rate, or less, leaders. The danger to us will not he the incompetence, say, of a Liz Truss, but the success of a government whose ways and means owe more to Machiavelli than Marx and whose only constant goal is permanent power. Of course, when that is the case, there is no reason why a nation whose values are still those of colonial times won’t turn to Reform, as 1930s Germany turned to Nazism and is doing so again, to do the permanent power thing more efficiently and stull prate about the dignity of labour if not of the Labour Party.
I have to say this blog derives from significant depression but I do not really know if the depression is the chicken or the egg.
With love
Steven xxxx
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