Not sure that all of that follows logically. I get your point about checks and balances, but the truth is that getting the less well off to pay for the help they got previously plus a bit more is Wonga economics and not an inevitability at all, however necessary it might have been or may not have been in this case. If you recall the conservative govermnent that followed the post-war labour one, they didn’t bang on about having to ‘balance the books’ and make everyone suffer to pay for the NHS. That this Government is doing just that, rightly or wrongly doesn’t, by itself, invalidate any investment in society made by the state.

In our traditionally two-party democracy the left fail as often as the right. It is a Green-ism to point to the end of every labour government as a series of failures of socialism – just heading that one off, as I sensed it coming. It is the work of someone a little smarter than Green to get away with a claim that some very right-wing policy making now is only happening out of necessity due to someone else’s non-right wing behaviour many years ago.

Incidentally coming back to the thread topic, it’s possibly only the Brexit vote that is now keeping austerity as a necessity for the forseable- not the actions of the government-before-last.

Yeah – fair enough all of that! I’d go for the glassed in reps as opposed to smoke-filled rooms behind closed doors. Many people now would go for no rep at all after all the seventies cr*p (that backlash was ridden by Mrs T) and that’s what I’d personally have a problem with. And no, they might have thought they were being ‘socialist’ while sitting on their arses.. but not only were they not, they were screwing it up for millions.

I was referring to the association of professional state benefit system-players with socialists – this is the last thing a socialist would do. It is possible in the minds of some to scrounge from a ‘capitalist employer’ and call it socialism, but not the state. To suggest it shows a misunderstanding of the basics, but conservatives do it all the time.

At which point a devil’s advocate would say that this works both ways. If no-one can say what anyone deserves, why not redistribute it according to the socialist principle of ‘to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability’?

Any differential in earnings is either due entirely to difference in effort – which we know isn’t true – or through an application of a principle of ‘deserving’, which is arbitrary and meaningless, or through the current situation of personal wealth meaning more personal wealth and less meaning less regardless of effort or virtue, or finally through the socialist needs/ability equation above.

Devil’s advocate, not me.

Listening to a BBC vox pop from Clacton yesterday, the problem is a lack of even the political sophistication that our generation had at twenty. “All politicians are in it for themselves, especially socialists like Tony Blair, Corbyn looks scruffy on TV, and I’m not racist but if they get rid of the foreigners it would be good”.
Maybe an encounter with a party that doesn’t pander to this might be useful to the country – ideals are good, they ‘lift up our eyes’ – no-one, I think, is unaware of human nature, for me it’s about sometimes appealing to the nicer parts of it. Agree that when the debate about what to do as a party of government leaves the real world it immediately loses much of it’s ability to do that, and that is why I am not a ‘Corbynite’. I do not, however, see a move to the left in the traditional party of opposition as a bad thing, or even bad for the party in the long term.

..and using your dictionary that meaning could be anything from ‘fish’ to ‘screwdriver’.

I was aware of the British story which uses a white dragon to represent the Saxon invaders. Dragons were used everywhere in art and storytelling, as you know. If there was ever a single ‘variety’ that might have represented a unified Saxon ‘England’ in some heraldic sense it would surely have been one associated with Alfred and Wessex – which I understood to be gold, and probably closer to a Wyvern than a dragon?

Your arrogance is astounding. You make up something that suits, no matter how opposite to the facts it might be – something like ‘Napoleon devised the metric system’. Then you lecture the world on it, with confidence because John Green is familiar with the thing John Green just made up – no need to check anything.

Mangled syntax? Oh dear, you are scraping the barrel now. Do you know what syntax means, or is ‘mangled syntax’ just something you heard once that sounds like an intellectual put-down?