Are you a radical-left extremist?
Anyone who dares express views that even vaguely differ from the hard-right neoliberal orthodoxy these days gets pilloried as some kind of dangerously radical left-wing extremist.
Over the years I've been repeatedly portrayed as some kind of dangerously radical hard-left extremist for expressing views that defy the Westminster/capitalist media consensus, so here are ten of these apparently ultra-radical things I believe in:
⚪ Core economic sectors like energy, water, health, and public transport are far too important to be run for capitalist profit extraction purposes. They should be nationalised and run for the benefit of the British people, and for the long-term good of the British economy (as is the case in many other countries across the developed world).
⚪ Anyone who works a full-time job should earn enough to pay for fundamentals like their housing costs, their utility bills, a decent healthy diet, and an Internet connection, and also have a good bit left over too, to pay for nice things, and to work towards starting a family or setting up their own businesses. People who believe that full-time workers don't deserve these things are the real extremists.
⚪ As a society we have a moral obligation to care for the vulnerable. Disabled people and the elderly should be treated with a lot more dignity than they have been for the last decade+.
⚪ Water company bosses should be jailed if they pollute our rivers and coastal waters with raw sewage. They certainly shouldn't have been given the green light to keep on paying themselves obscenely bloated six and seven figure salaries as they've been doing it.
⚪ More needs to be done to punish political liars. Whether it's Boris Johnson's repeated lies to parliament and the British public, or Keir Starmer brazenly lying his way into the Labour leadership, this kind of rampant dishonesty is absolutely disastrous for standards in public life.
⚪ Education should be a universal right, and it should be considered an economic benefit to all of society, not just the individual who received it. Student loans should be abolished, student debt should be cancelled, and there should be a National Education Service to provide free education and training to whoever needs it, whatever their age or circumstances.
⚪ Standards of economic and political understanding in Britain are shockingly low, and it's basically impossible for people to actually vote in their own economic interests if they've been indoctrinated into believing in a load of idiotic economic baby talk ("no such thing as magic money trees", "there's no money left", "we can't afford it", absurd comparisons between public borrowing and a "maxed-out credit card" …). Kids should be taught basic economic and political literacy in schools, as well as critical thinking skills.
⚪ Civilised countries should welcome refugees rather than making their lives living nightmares, especially when these poor people are fleeing from places that have been catastrophically destabilised by that country's previous foreign policy errors (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya ...).
⚪ Austerity is economic insanity. It's simply impossible for a national economy to cut its way to prosperity. Any nation that cared about its future would strategically invest in the drivers of future economic prosperity like education, infrastructure projects, quality public services, public health, core industries, technologies of the future … It's horrifying and infuriating to think about the long-term damage to Britain's economic potential that's been caused by doing the exact opposite for 13 ruinous years.
⚪ Something really needs to be done about tax-dodging corporations and mega-rich individuals. Britain should be leading the fight against this kind of greedy economic parasitism, but instead the City of London is the global capital of it.
All of these positions would be considered absolutely normal, sensible, centre-left politics across most of the developed world, but British political discourse has become so corrupted, and has been driven so far to the hard-right, that you're apparently a "radical-left extremist" too if you agree with me on literally any of this stuff!
Coo, I’m a radical left extremist!! How ridiculous. I started life as a Liberal, became a socialist card carrying Labour member in my early twenties and in my old(ish) age I’m a radical extremist...when most folk my age are categorised as Conservative right wingers. It makes me proud!
This is down to two related things. Firstly the surrender of the Overton Window by the Labour Party, and the rise of what I call the "extremist moderates".
In the mid 80s I went through the Labour Party election agent training run by Philip Gould and Peter Mandelson. They posited a static Overton Window. An immutable set of ideas that were and would always be unacceptable to the bulk of the electorate. I was ridiculed for suggesting that it was even possible to move the window. The Labour Party as a whole bought into that view whilst the political right continued to push at it as hard as they could. That has meant that political ideas that were totally acceptable in the 1970s are now seen as absurdly extreme.
The other factor, which is associated in a chicken and egg fashion, is an increasing number of people in politics who self define as "moderate" because they try to align themselves in the middle of the now rightwards moving Overton Window. Because they are "moderate" they then define everybody who disagrees with them as "extremist".
Overall that means that all of us who have held on to principles and ideals that were normal in the 60s and 70s, and which over most of the world are seen as moderate centrism, are seen by the extremist moderates who dominate the media and political establishment as being dangerously radical leftists. It is basically a combination of defeatism, inability to reason logically, and an almost insane degree of conformism.