Pre-judice. Judging in advance.
I was at an early Christmas dinner last weekend, and since most of the people at it voted Lib Dem in May, being of generic left wing principals (apart from the Marxist come real-estate management lecturer, who is of extreme left wing principals, and who probably didn’t vote Lib Dem!) I was cross examined over the coalition.
It seems the only thing that the people at such gatherings want to hear is that you are thinking of leaving the yellows and joining the reds (or greens); no other answer is really acceptable.
After denouncing the MPs who broke their pledge by abstaining or voting for the fee rise (not for voting that way, mind, but for signing the pledge when they didn’t mean it) I tried to explain why the policy is, actually, an improvement on the current system. They were having none of it; it was marketisation, no poor family would ever send a child to uni again, etc.
The details of the policy didn’t seem to matter; conversation turned to my character and how could I abandon my opposition to Toryism so easily to defend everything “they” do.
Never mind that it’s also us doing it; that Vince wrote that incrementally better Fee repayment system, such that only 40% of the new higher fees will ever be payed back (and allowed part time students to obtain subsidised loan funding too,) or that it’s Nick guaranteeing that we will end Child detention by May 2011 (a year too late, but better than the red blue, blue red never).
Following all that, the conversation turned to that heartless alien species, the Conservative MP. The discourse was something like this (I am recalling several hours later, so I am only giving the gist):
Why do they wreck all our public services every time they win power? Is it (as we all secretly suspect) because they will gain personally when the contracts are handed out?
No, of course not. The idea that markets improve things inherently is their ideology; they are genuinely trying to improve things. They’re only wrong, not evil.
This argument; that tories are more likely to be sparing for personal gain than Labour, is incredibly prejudiced. The intolerance for people who hold different political ideals struck me hard, and I had to leave the room.
I don’t object to people holding political opinions of any stripe, nor to them arguing and debating. But saying that, in general, your political opponents are more likely to break the political covenant between electors and the elected, which is sometimes called public service, is ridiculous. The expenses scandal was an example of personal greed and MPs from every party were hit by their wrongdoing.
Conservatives think that the Market can make people more prosperous in more areas than Labour. The Lib Dems don’t take sides and judge each situation by the yardstick of freedom, rather than an economic dogma. Now that’s a little partial, but it does roughly spell out the positions of the parties fairly.
We are all centrists these days, no matter how hard whoever is in opposition tries to deny it. The differences between the major parties are small. Labour introduced tuition fees, the Tories finished them off. The three largest agree on multilateral, rather than unilateral, nuclear disarmament (we only fight over the types and numbers of warheads). None of the major parties is currently proposing privatisation of health, nor the renationalisation of rail.
We are all centrists now, and if you voted for one of the big three the difference between them is economic implementation fiddlyness. Pretending otherwise is nonsense, and being snooty about toryism is just…well, it’s turning the tables, that’s for sure.
