In this dirty old part of the city, where the sun refuse to shine...

[cybermule]

...people tell me there ain't no use in trying.

Now little girl you're so young and pretty
And one thing I know is true
You'll be dead before your time is through.

Comments

[quercus]

Sometimes I want to club Tony Blair with my dog-eared copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

WTF happened to socialism and the labour party? When did 1997's pissed-up, loved-up hangover wake up and realise that people had voted Tory, not because Cameron had undergone some sort of Road to Portillo conversion, but because what the Labour Party were offering had become worse than the Tories.

How did a decade of Es over the dinner table and Nigella playing Blue Monday on Desert Island Discs turn into the revenge of the small-minded? Who picked a zeitgeist straight out of the Daily Mail?

[cybermule]

Yeah, they did kind of lose the basic point of socialism. Partly because they were so busy wringing their bleeding hearts over all and sundry that they kind of lost track of boring gritty problems on their doorstep. Guatamalen moonbeam farmers are just *so* more attractive than sink estates in the Rhondda valley. And partly because they just surround themselves by embodiments of their own ideals - their aspirations weren't always founded in the gritty reality of the lowest fifth of the population's lives. Those people got resentful and turned to petty right wing grumbling, the aspirational middle classes got resentful of pretty much everyone else, and.before you knew it, there was a critical mass of Tory.voters.

[hirez]

I can't get behind that LibCon thing. A mob of smug townie sods bagging on The Farmers. Again.

[cybermule]

Heh. To be fair, I think they like the idea of having a go at power. Although there has always been an element of over-optimistic "civilising the peasant / brutal rulers" thing to them. Although how they were hoping to do the latter, other than soaking the right wing-ness up in a lake of bland, I don't know.

[hirez]

.. Apart from that - yes. (Obviously).