A Free Left Blog

This is the second set of notes and fragments I have collated in the hope that there may be some value in my random scribblings on scraps of paper, Post-It notes and paper pads. The first set of these notes, principally on the environment and politics , has been notable only for the lack of page views it has attracted – a measly 27 at the time of writing. I think there’s some value both in them and in these, but I guess you can’t argue with the readers... The left’s rationalism The left’s rationalism excludes or delegitimizes feeling by re-categorising it along the same lines as knowing, thereby judging feelings on the same terms as knowledge – as right and wrong . By doing this, it enables you, as a person, to be wrong in your whole being – in the way you feel and experience the world. There is no escape. [ N.B. Of course this isn't a lefty preserve. It is shared across the liberal spectrum by what we might call 'neo-liberals', who treat human beings rather...

Margaret Thatcher’s comment that ‘ there is no such thing as society ’ has a totemic significance on the left. It serves as the trademark of an uncaring, right-wing ideologue who believed in selfishness as opposed to solidarity and community, to the extent that she didn’t even recognise the ties that bind us in society. The thing is – and this is coming from a lefty – she was actually right. The infamous phrase was uttered in an interview for Woman’s Own in 1987, in which she said : “ Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first .” She said it in full a little later: “ There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us...

The word identity entails a mathematical formula of one thing being identical to another, as in x = y . Jump over to the conception of human identity and you have something different though. In describing our ‘personal identity’, we might come up with any number of things that define ourselves: from our basic physical characteristics to social identifiers like the religious and political groups we belong to, class (middle class/working class?), ethnicity, maybe profession... Hence I may say I ‘am’ a middle class, white, male, agnostic journalist, a member of the Labour Party, with a critical view of mainstream liberal-left politics. This probably does about as good a job at describing me as you can do in a sentence, but of course it misses out so much that it is nowhere near reaching ‘identity’ with me. That sentence and me are nowhere near that x and y relationship which an actual identity would entail. But then I could go on for years detailing different aspects of myse...

On Thursday 2 nd May, The Spectator published a fascinating interview conducted by Isabel Hardman with Frank Field in which Field ranged freely and controversially across subjects including welfare, immigration and the EU, the ‘Living Wage’, his role advising the current Government – and unions (“We won’t win the election because of the unions, we’ll win it in spite of them”). Field talked of personalities, including Gordon Brown (who “never really understood anything, let alone the economy”), Ed Miliband (“should just take a few more risks”) and Jon Cruddas (who “has got the job of saving us”). He also made some barbed comments about Labour’s loss of working class women voters, linking it explicitly to the “equalities agenda” pursued by the party under the aegis of deputy leader Harriet Harman – something which I have been critical about here and elsewhere. Field said: “Why has our vote collapsed amongst working class women? Because they do not relate to the equ...