The New Advocates of Inequality want to take us back to the middle of the 19th century
Make no mistake: what we are witnessing here is an attempt to undo all the progress of the 20th century - the century where for the first time in history ordinary people were given equal political, social and economic rights - and where, after World War II, countries were given equal rights too. The New Advocates of Inequality want to take us back to the middle of the 19th century and accept a world where a small number of countries - and a tiny, fabulously wealthy elite within those countries, have all the power.
It’s an incredibly reactionary and undemocratic project, yet it poses as a modern, democratic one. We can’t say we weren’t warned. At the 1975 Labour Party conference, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson remarked on the extremist policies the Conservative Party under their new leader Margaret Thatcher, were adopting.
At the time, Britain was enjoying the lowest levels of inequality in its history.
Internationally, things were positive too, with the Helsinki Accords signed that year between the USSR and other communist countries and the west, marking the high-water mark of détente. It was the Age of Equality between nations and within nations, but some wanted to change it.
“The political philosophy of a once great Party has now been asserted,” Wilson said of Thatcher’s Conservatives. “Not a claim to unite the nation, but a policy to divide it. We have been told, on impeccable and undeniable authority, that the pursuit of inequality for its own sake is now to become an end in itself. It is now to become the altar, the deity, before which they seek to prostrate themselves - and the country.”
Alas ‘the pursuit of inequality for its own sake’ hasn’t just affected Britain, but many other countries in the world too.
For the sake of the future progress of mankind, we urgently need to return to the democratic, egalitarian and genuinely progressive path we were travelling down before those elitist, reactionary ideologies - neoliberalism and neo-conservatism - took over...
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