this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
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Curiously, successive governments in the UK (where The Guardian is based) have been slowly destroying the National Health Service.
The same thing has been happening in some Canadian provinces where there are conservative governments.
Isn't it ironic to call them conservative as they are trying to up-end the status quo?
Comically enough, it is they who are trying to force through more liberal laws for companies which will ultimately cost the common person more.
Not sure I followed your entire meaning, but your comment is funny, because when I wrote "conservative" it left a sour taste in my mouth.
I think modern conservatives are regressive, liberals are conservative and progressives or leftists are progressive.
So yes, "conservative" parties in Canada are trying to dismantle our health care system (i.e., regress).
And the "liberal" parties aren't doing much to save it. It's hard to justify spending money on it when those same funds could go to private interests instead.
And the actual progressive parties don't get elected unless you're in BC and incompetence still fucks things up anyway.
I know what you mean, I was just discussing the variance within the terminology.
It's strange that conservatives call progressives progressive in the first place, because a true conservative would be trying to conserve what was there, and a progressive would be trying to create progress. Thus it is open admittance for them to call the other party progressive and be against it... Yet not think they are standing in the way of betterment. If they believed moving left was wrong they would call it regressive as well. But what hits as well is what you acknowledge as regressive, which is why I don't call MAGA conservatives, because they aren't. They are farther right than our country has ever been. They are trying to ratchet our country further right... Towards what? A kingdom/dictatorship is the only thing right of our past time. Makes me think they confused their red hats for coats, and want the British Empire. Maybe that's why Trump made the dumb joke about Canada becoming a state.
After all, nothing says let's conserve what we have, than saying we should get rid of 75% of government agencies.
The MAGA slogan itself tells you that they are regressive. They want to go back to something else (that was great).
And by shifting the Overton Window hard the the right, they are turning "progressive" into a slur. Helping them with that is attacking social issues like LGBTQ+, because simple people with simple lives don't give a fuck about social issues and REGRESSIVES weaponize that and turn it into a culture war (while somehow saying PROGRESSIVEs created the culture war?). Supporting human rights has become a poison pill placed BY REGRESSIVES for anyone who has some human decency.
I wish we could just call the apple an apple and say fascists, liberals, and progressives. But nobody knows what political words mean anymore, and this is the fault of the political class watering down or outright misnaming things. The regressives want to go back to a time where things were better. This time is a fucking fiction. I want to go to where a single income could buy a house and a car, with much less racism and sexism, but that's not what they want.
Oh, I see the same think in my native Portugal.
As I see it (having left it a year or so before Brexit came into effect) Britain is maybe 10 years ahead of the rest of Europe on the path towards Neoliberal Dystopia (you see it too in other things like Press capture, surveillance society and even the house price inflation.), so some of the social, economic and political problems I see now unfolding in Portugal, I saw in Britain years ago when I lived there.
Britain seem to be trying hard to converge with the US, but only on the bad things rather than the good ones.
UK government is speed running the country into the gutter on behalf of their globalist ruling elites.
But British are more reserved, they can take more abuse apparently
There's quite a lot of "know your place" in English culture, tough for some decades (in the post War period) that was somewhat suspended and the country had a lot of social mobility and a lot less of "looking up to posh wankers".
You can see it very clearly in things like just how hard the Press promotes the Royals (including The Guardian, who are Liberals rather than leftwing) and the lack of criticism of the System itself (quite the contrary even, and coverage of internation affairs is very heavilly Nationalistic).
What that means in practice is that people tend to worry a lot more about keeping those "below them in the ladder" in their place than they do in climbing the ladder themselves, and the Working Class (who are naturally the ones who get squeezed the most) fighting amongst themselves but not actually against the elites, whilst the Middle Class will do some mild and easilly suppressed demonstrations when they get a bit more squeezed.
Yes, the Tory plan for the NHS is a sibling of the American "starve the beast" model where you make it hard for a public service to function effectively then go "see it doesn't work, it needs to be got rid of" when it inevitably has issues.
The end game is to privatise it, making money for tory mates in the process and removing yet another social benefit paid out of tax revenue.
The problem for the Tories is that even Tory voters love the NHS, so they can't just privatise straight out it like they did everything else. They need to make a case for why, they need to break the British attachment, or at least get people to care less.
Be aware, if you're not, that stealth privatisation has already been done through outsourcing mandates. This increases costs (because the outsourcer wants to make profits) rather than saving it, helping accelerate their case.