Luke, I reject this - labelling? accusation? diagnosis? - of me as "conservative", unless the meaning of words like "conservative" and "liberal" has changed drastically in the last few years. Let's go back to the riots for a moment. A lot of people lost their livelihoods, a fair few lost their homes and more than one lost their lives. It would be one thing if these people were all MPs, bankers, Russian billionaires or others who you might say had it coming in some way, but most were themselves just ordinary working-class people. And I was pretty grossed out, to be honest, by some of what I read on the internet, here and elsewhere, by people who were just unashamedly excited about all this, like it a was a brilliant thing in and of itself. There was much talk of this terrible scourge of middle-class smugness, but the smugness I saw came from people who were sneering at victims of this violence, saying in effect "Ha, that'll teach you to OWN A HOUSE like some kind of UTTER CUNT!".
And I was like, is this what it means to be "left-wing" - let alone "liberal" - in 2011? Blaming people who have a little bit, that they've worked for, for being attacked by people who have less? It sounded like the ideology of dekulakization. And it completely ignored the actual cunts who are victimizing pretty much everyone else.
So while I may not be as "radical" (again, whatever that actually means these days, or ever) as a lysergic warrior-poet-mystic or however you wish to style yourself, I don't think "conservative" is fair either. I really do think extreme concentrations of wealth are a terrible thing, that society is grossly devalued compared to the cult of personal gain, that there should be the bare minimum of authority to prevent people inflicting violence on each other (be it physical or economic) and that other than that, people should be left to pretty much do their own thing. Is that really a "conservative" creed I've just outlined?
