To be fair, the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ suggestion was yours, CD – I don’t think anyone else was using those terms – except where I said they weren’t helpful to me in answering my OP.

What is socialism in 2015 Britain? The same as it always was anywhere – just an ‘ism’, like Conservatism. The circumstances change, but the ‘ism’ does not.

Whether the ‘radical idea of sharing’ is appropriate to the nation is indeed a question for the electorate. My question was why people are second guessing the electorate so far ahead by calling a candidate unelectable.

🙂 Nah, it’s just that I see no reason for me in the position I am now in to sh*t on people in the position I was in then.. if that makes sense?

Pretty much. My trajectory was a bit different from most of my peers, going into studenthood as a tory Thatcher apologist and having drunken arguments with socialist ‘revolutionary’ accountancy students about the ‘real world’ – about which none of us knew anything. Funnily enough life after graduation on the dole, and then as a postman, in a Northern city actually shifted my thinking leftwards through bitter experience. Now I am comfortable, and paying a LOT of tax, but that experience hasn’t left me and I can’t imagine myself voting Conservative, even though I stand to lose financially from any alternative.

I went to college with hundreds of the blighters in the late eighties. Funnily enough few seem to remember that now they/we have mortgages and pay tax. Make of that observation what you will, it works both ways!

Haha..I knew that last one would be an issue. Now that one IS a can of worms. I know staunch socialists who jealously guard the free capital they stand to accrue through the ‘supply and demand’ equation of this particular free market.

Agreed. Those are two nettles to be grasped right there.. which is why I like the odd radical to pop up now and then. Let’s consider REDUCING the numbers going to University, down to those likely to benefit themselves and the economy from doing it. Let’s consider raising retirement age. Let’s consider means-tested compulsory health insurance. Let’s consider double council tax on second homes, triple on third (actually proposed by a Telegraph columnist). Lets consider a ‘free money’ tax on house price rises beyond inflation…. OK, I have made myself ‘unelectable’ right there..

True. I guess I’ll go back to muttering into my Michael Foot duffle-coat.

The UK is in an odd position really. We did put the effort and money into doing just that in 1945 – exactly when ‘modern’ thinking would say we could least afford such idealism.