The ratchet effect

An article by Ed West in the Telegraph reveals how socialist terminology pollutes political discourse in Britain. For a start the article is stupidly titled "Can Right-wingers win the argument over inequality?" The equality agenda is communism, pure and simple, opposition to which cannot be described as "right wing" by anyone with the slightest knowledge of political philosophy.

On the equality issue the Left [1] has two massive Achilles’ heels, for they will never achieve any measure of equality so long as they continue to espouse radical ethnic diversity or the social liberalism of the 1960s, both ideas that accentuate class differences. This is where conservatives have a better chance of narrowing inequality levels.[2]

New Labour spent record amounts on redistribution and keeping millions of (mostly Labour-voting) people on welfare, and yet inequality got worse. The failure is not just [3] down to the excessive [3] wealth of bankers (who, after all, helped to fund the whole thing) but the social policies that have helped to keep the poor in their place for so long – child-centred education and tax breaks for broken families being two good examples.

And while poor Brits rotted on welfare, Labour found it economically beneficial, ideologically correct and politically expedient to find new workers elsewhere. . . Now even Polly Toynbee [4] admits that Labour’s immigration policy drove down the level of wages, an economic reality that the Left ignored for a decade.

1. Why the capital letter for "left" and "right"?
2. This assumes that narrowing inequality levels is both practicable and desirable.
3. "Just"? "Excessive?" Why accept, even in part, the Labour party's excuse for the miserable result of 13 years in power? The financial sector grew fat and careless because it was over-indulged by a regime that needed its revenues to underwrite an attempt to buy a majority of the electorate.
4. Even Polly Toynbee, eh? The tiresome voice of champagne socialism, utterly predictable and ephemeral. Her opinion is valueless - what are the facts about wages? Most of the jobs created under the Labour regime were in the state apparat, where wages outstripped those of the productive sector.

Words have meaning, and which words you employ condition the message your writing conveys. West's article, while seeming to criticise Labour's dreary legacy, in fact concedes that it managed very successfully to move the centre of gravity of political discourse ever further in its favour.

The Americans call it the "ratchet effect", whereby politics and society only move towards greater bureaucratic statism at the expense of individual enterprise. And a key component of the ratchet effect is that the employment of socialistic terminology concedes the argument ab initio to the statists.