It's not a question of left and right, I find the whole definition and positioning tiresome. It's a question of accountability, corruption and the level of actual democracy that we have.
You always seem to think my anger at what we have is to do with my political positioning, it really isn't. I think as individuals and collectively we need as much autonomy as possible and with every year that passes I think we have less and less. I don't have a problem with Capitalism as such but I do with abuses of power. Is an abuse of power worse if it's by a Communist or a Capitalist? I don't see any difference.
These are conspiracy theories, Charlie. What you think of as abuses of power are almost always at very worst good old fashioned incompetence mixed with a healthy dose of greed, and as both of those traits are intrinsic to the human psyche we are stuck with them.
Take the markets for example. Brown's much vaunted end to boom and bust was arrant nonsense not because he may have failed. It was nonsense because for all the highly paid city experts the truth is nobody really knows how the markets work. If they did it would always work perfectly. What is known is that for the most part it does trundle along quite nicely before readjusting itself, occasionally with disastrous results.
It is a matter of left and right partly because that is the vernacular we use. Brand, that smack addled chancer, and his recently converted acolyte Morrissey are advocating essentially a hippy leftist claptrap. They have not espoused anything that has not been discussed from ancient Athens to Haight-Ashbury. In Morrissey's case it is additionally bizarre because of his previously revealed beliefs.
Morrissey makes the mistake of watching the news more than he looks out of his window. Just because there is death and destruction piped live into our living rooms does not mean the world today is more dangerous or unequal. In fact the reverse is true. The world is becoming less violent and slowly more prosperous.
It doesn't help that Morrissey's penchant for bullshit hyperbole permeates his recent communications in both word and music. Quotes such as "If you are seen on the streets in England you must always account for why you are outside – I don’t mean politically, I just mean generally. In America, anyone walking along the street is thought to be up to no good." is simply nonsense and not the day to day experience of the general populace. (It is interesting how he talks of England and not Britain. A very deliberate choice of words it seems to me, and very typical of his continued loathing of the country which allowed him to live in peace and relative comfort.) To put the cherry on the cake he tells this to someone from Turkey, a nation still redecorating after the recent political unrest.
He talks of Assad. We made the same mistake with Assad as we did with Saddam and Gaddafi. We should have let them continue to repress their people, who broadly speaking appear so utterly ignorant it was the only way to contain them. Now we have picked the scab off the real problem in the Middle East and Islam, and it isn't Israel or Palestine. It is that the Sunni and Shia have unfinished business from thirteen centuries ago. The solution is for them to kill each other until they grow tired of it or one side emerges triumphant.
Morrissey believes all the world's ills originate on desks in Whitehall or Washington. He is an absolute imbecile.
