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Index: Notes & Comment

Notes & comment: The uses for populism.

Thursday, 20 May 2010

Denis Boyles: In the Euro-zone, populism is kept in place by encouraging dependence on the state. That dependence is so deeply entrenched now that not even the French health-care disaster of 2003 could disturb it. When 15,000 mostly elderly citizens perished in a three-week heat wave after government services collapsed, it left utterly unaffected both the political establishment and the journalists who cover and largely support it.

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Britain’s Balanced Politics.

Friday, 30 April 2010

Anthony O’Hear: The main objection to a hung parliament is that it will involve horse-trading, ‘messy’ compromises and sordid lobbying for power, as if such behaviour was not already the norm within political parties, and as if political parties ever did anything other than seek their own power and growth.

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Me, Gordon Brown and Equality of Opportunity.

Tuesday, 6 April 2010

Anthony O’Hear: Equality of opportunity is only equality of outcome one stage further back….Equality of opportunity is the politically acceptable face of egalitarianism, which pretends to allow us to enjoy equality in a social and political sense, while keeping the rewards we may get from any work, luck or talent we may do or have. Not surprisingly such a confused and confusing vision is at the heart of the ‘new’ Labour project, but what had come to irk me was that post-1997 (and possibly earlier) ‘equality of opportunity’ has come to be a central plank of nice (or ‘compassionate’) conservatism.

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Original Sin and Our Choice.

Monday, 22 March 2010

Anthony O’Hear: There is no voice offering an alternative to the soft totalitarianism we have become so used to, or proposing any dismantling of the great leviathan bearing down on individual souls. That leviathan gained ground because people believed that it could remedy weaknesses inherent in the human condition, which in another age might have been seen as the inevitable outcome of original sin.

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