Cassilis

Regular readers will now I'm not easily riled or provoked. A commenter once described me as 'irritatingly centrist' and while I'm sure it wasn't intended as a compliment I happily took it as such. Indeed the only thing that does really anger me is blatantly tribal and partisan politics that ignores the issues in favour of baiting and abusing your opponents.

There's a perfect example of that silly adolescent approach to politics over on LC today - Dave Osler takes exception to the news that the left-leaning Smith Institute and the IDS-linked Centre for Social Justice are to publish a joint strategy on how to get children out of poverty. Dave thinks this is evidence of a political 'cartel' and 'further ideological capitulation' on the part of Labour. He seems outraged that anyone might want to address the issue rather than play politics and then gives a wonderful example of insight & wisdom he might bring were he to be invited to the table:

"After all, it is not as if the Tories – who throughout their history have upheld but one unrelenting purpose, namely to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society - have become converted to anything even vaguely resembling social democracy"

Perhaps because I am on the centre-right my frustrations with partisanship are usually with exaggerated Tory claims about the evils of the Blair / Brown years. But my hatred for it cuts both ways and Dave's attack on the Tories is so laughably over the top that I don't know where to begin. I could trot out all the stuff about Tories legislating for trade unions and public health and education projects a generation before the Labour party was formed, I could point out the massive increases in standards of living over the last century during which Tory administration were in office more than 70% of the time. In short I could throw a tonne of statistics his way but there isn't any evidence that Dave is sufficiently open-minded to pay any heed. Red badge good, blue badge bad. He does concede that it's 'legitimate to argue about the relative merits of different anti-poverty approaches' but his ignorance of the fact that free-markets and centre-right politics have made massive in-roads on global poverty over the last 100 years is astonishing. Crucially of course those 100 years have also seen massive improvements in social provision and employement protections etc. and it's the political left we have to thank for that - and yes, often the right were on the wrong side of those arguments.

But the wider point is that economic and social progress is a function of the interaction of different political creeds, not the prediodic victories of one over the other. The irony is that the creed Dave now expounds, Social Democracy (and that's a presumption based on the quote above) is quite a distance from the one he used to favour - Trotskyism. Having been on such an ideological journey of his own you'd think he'd be more understanding of others doing the same thing.