Ned ‘Jonathan’ Schofield
@urlyman@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

My thanks to Sven – mathstodon.xyz/@SvenGeier/1148 – for reconnecting me with this which I saw a while ago but had been unable to rediscover.

I now know, courtesy of a post on @RichardJMurphy’s blog – taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/0 – that it was a letter to The New Statesman in 2023

“In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.” Dr Stephen Watkins, Oldham, Lancashire.
“In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.” Dr Stephen Watkins, Oldham, Lancashire.
“In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions.” Dr Stephen Watkins, Oldham, Lancashire.
contrasocial
@contrasocial@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@urlyman @RichardJMurphy

Those aren't leftwing ideas, let alone hard left. It's the kind of neoliberal brainrot that got us here. Fuck idiots who still think this shit is viable and that they can escape culpability for the part they played in putting us here simply by changing a label.

So tired of this intellectual cowardice. Neoliberalism is dead, we need to abandon its corpse and move on.
Ned ‘Jonathan’ Schofield
@urlyman@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last week

@contrasocial having someone express how far the Overton window has moved in their lifetime is useful and clearly resonates with lots of people here, including me.

What we do with that awareness is another matter.

We need to go much much further and appeals to ideas conceived for another time and another climate won’t wash

@RichardJMurphy
GeofCox
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social  ·  activity timestamp last week
@DanadasGrau @urlyman @RichardJMurphy

This was my reply on Richard's blog at the time:

Me too, in a way. I was active in the UK Labour Party in the 90s and very involved personally in the ‘New Labour’ project – actively opposing ‘Militant’ – and in many ways I haven’t changed – still believe in a mixed economy, etc…

But I too have found myself on the left – partly because the political centre has moved right, but also I have to admit that I have moved, principally because emerging awareness of climate-ecological breakdown has to my mind made it simply rational to advocate more fundamental. and faster change.

Political feelings in the 90s were dominated by the collapse of the planned economy models in Eastern Europe. For most of us, New Labour was not primarily about moving to the right – it was about moving away from Morrisonian nationalisation towards anti-capitalist but market-oriented solutions like social enterprise: if market economies really out-performed planned economies, then make the market work ‘for the many, not the few’ (as the New Labour Clause 4 revision actually said – a revision, I argued, and would still argue, that moved it not so much rightwards, but away from the old statism).

But the political context is now very different. Events like the 2008 crash have shown that capitalism doesn’t work any better than planned economies; the rise of China (by conventional economic standards) and analyses like those of Ha-Joon Chang have shown that radical government intervention actually works rather better than ‘free markets’, and moreover, our increasing understanding of impending climate-ecological breakdown makes controlling capitalism and rethinking economic growth essential.