As Betsmate has pretty well told you Martin, (and even tacitly conceeded some ground to the argument - which is unusual for him
) the Labour party is not left wing. I've even explained this in a post on this thread to Clive, but alas it appears to have sailed past you.
The political spectrum you operate within, is one that has been prescribed to you. Like a lot of people who have been conditioned to thinking within the confines of instruction and conventional orthodoxy, those boundaries are largely handed down, and if you struggle to see outside of them then you're destined to take your reference point therefore within the confines of a right wing straight jacket.
The British establishment has always operated under this guise, as it suits them since it gives the illusion of choice. It is a smart way of doing things, as there's no real revolutionary zeal in this country any longer (you need to go back centuries to find it) but that involves bringing in 'the levellers' and 'diggers' arguabley the 'new model army', the birth of trade unions (revisionist concessions as things would turn out) the co-operative movement and common ownership, the birth and acceptance into the mainstream of the Labour party etc the list is endless, you might even throw Watt Tyler in there along with Tolpuddle and Peterloo.
Social reform has been called for going back to the days of Magna Carta, history suggests we reach a critical threshold every now and then when it becomes necessary for the establishment to throw out a concession (usually something dispendable) in order to satisfy the fervour of any mass movement, and in order to help define these boundaries for fear that without giving a concession, people will push the limits ever further. By doing this, the established order defines the boundaries and the meek minded accept them within these boxes. Things such as the acceptance of trade unions, giving working people a vote, extending the same offer to women, and the acceptance into the mainstream of a labour party are all such examples. In the fullness of time, proper reform of the House of Lords, or the monarchy would be other such candidates. By making these concessions though, the establishment is in effect drawing a line in the sand (to coin a Texan image) and pretty well imposing a clever restriction on you by effectively saying these are the confines of your right and left demarcations, and you operate within these acceptable boundaries. In essence your freedom of speech is little more than a de facto freedom to conform and approve, as either the conservative or the labour party are acceptable.
In essence these measures are classic revisionist in nature, and act as a convenient synthesis of counter measures that allow the establishment to define the political landscape, and to then ascribe an incorrect appelation to the bottle that gives the impression of choice, when all your actually doing is little more than rotating, rather than changing.
Now if you break away from these restricted vistas and look at a global picture, and set your pendulum with a much wider swing that embraces many more influences and philosophies rather than one that is defined by right wing parliamentary democracy, you'll quickly realise that there is little left wing about the Labour party. If you were looking for a paralell, the nearest would be the right of centre American Democrat party. Even the more left of centre nationalist parties (that's a left of British centre) of Plaid Cymru and the SNP are part of the EU 'green group' rather than the truer socialist one, as they find the left wing parties of Italy, France and Spain, too left wing for them to align with.
Returning to Britain and the notion that the right wing Conservatives would have done things differently to the right wing Labour party?
Frankly that is just wishful thinking bordering on blind allegiance. In the first case you need to reconcile why messers Cameron and Osbourne, and their immediate predecessors come to think of it, spent years telling the whole electorate that Labour had been pinching their ideas and following their policies. Now why aren't they saying that any more?
As regards the idea that they wouldn't have followed the same path; well I'm afraid they did. They took many of the same decisions that labour have between 1986 and 1992 with the so called 'Lawson boom' which started with an unprecedented 2p tax cut. This ultimately resulted in another credit explosion, and an unsustainbale property price bubble that fuelled consumers spending and a debt crisis. They too engineered a recession, albeit that theirs resulted in higher unemployment (so far to date) a sterling crisis, and much higher interest rates. During the same period they also prescided over a deregulation of the city of London, and the demutualisation of quite a few building socities, who wanted to take advantage of this 'opportunity'. Allow me to remind you who some of these were?
- Halifax (the H of HBOS - who would have take Lloyds TSB down were it not for intervention)
- Northern Rock
- Bradford & Bingley
- Alliance & Leicester (balied out by Santander)
Labour's period of boom lasted much longer than Lawson's and one suspects the bump will be all the harder for it, but ultimately they've followed pretty much the same route as 'high Thatcherism' and what was briefly known as 'Majorism' (it did enter the OED as an ism - though I don't know if its still there). The bottom line is that right wing Labour followed the same model as the right wing Tories, and with pretty much the same ultimate result.
I could return to your list (the one which suggest could only be the work of extreme right or left wing governments) and pretty well dismantle it with example after example.
If you honestly believe that the policy measures you describe couldn't have been implemented "in a democracy as established as this" (presumebly ours?) then you clearly have much more faith in the parliamentary process to act as the guardian for the country then a vast majority of us. Of course all those measures you describe can be enacted by right of centre capitalist parties, and further more, they have been.
We've flogged the wars to death on these various pages, but lets not forget one thing before people try to re-write history. The anti-war movement were in the minority at the time. Before a shot was fired, the opinion polls were running at 33%/ 30% to 66%/ 70%. The number of people who are now seemingly claiming to have foreseen the moral issue, the tactical stupidity, and the hidden agenda, frankly smacks of selective memory and darn right hypocracy. I can at least hold my head high on this one, as I was one of the million plus people who did the round trip to London in February on a shitey over-priced train to march (well shuffle would be better description such was the size of the crowd) in protest against this clearly criminal act that was being played out in our names. Remind me how many Conservative's voted gainst the government will you?
Finally, (for the time being at least) any analysis in this latest capitalist crisis could not possibly divorce the role of the banks from it and then hope to retain any sense of credibility. I believe the causes are more than one incidentally, and operate at different levels of intervention. As such it isn't a hierarchy of fault, but might be better viewed as a circle with the banks at the centre of it, and all the other influences inputting and outputting as and when.
No one in their right mind (that's a sane right, not a political one) would seek to describe the banks as bastions of a left wing socialist hegenomy. Indeed, they are the very symbolic pillar of right wing capitalism. To somehow try and suggest therefore that the;
"left wing" have fucked the country, fucked the books, cooked the books, defrauded the books, caused mass social disillusionment in there pursuit of "fairness and equality",
is one of the more remarkable pieces of historical re-writes I've ever seen (even some of the more rabid right wingers on this site might blanche at this one). Indeed, it's the kind of stuff you'd associate with the 1930's. The Bank of England, the Boards of the big Commerical lenders, the hedge fund managers, the FSA has as I'm sure you're well aware been a breeding ground for Marxists for years :lol:
