British Politics

A normal right-wing party would consider the NHS an horrifying nightmare and never defend it's existence, the fact itself they don't is proof enough they are actually leftwing variants.

Socialized healthcare is fully incompatible with any notion of right-wing-ness.

Especially if the healthcare providers are public as well, a double socialist horror, inimical to anything that ever was right-wing.

If you don't consider the NHS a disgusting aborted fetus of the left, completely incompatible with every value you deem worthy in society, you aren't even close to be right-wing.

There should be 0 healthcare public workers as a constitutional mandate. The idea itself of the government owning an hospital is absurd, for anyone who isn't a leftist. The government is never in the business of providing any good or service the market can provide, full stop.

Aside from that my take was about "green" monstrosities.

A normal right-wing party would simply abolish the totality of the net 0 non sense and declare it is not the government business to in any form regulate CO2 emissions at all.

That would be right-wing. Stepping aside , letting private individuals decide everything that happens in society. Never a player in any societal dynamic.

if you start with the principle that lack of funds doesn't mean you will die in the streets - and most western countries do - then healthcare is socialised

whether you as a society want to admit that and act accordingly, or instead want to insert a bunch of insurance companies and actuaries and co-pays and deductibles and medical lawyers and thus pretend that it isnt, doesn't change the socialised nature of the service

You can socialize emergency care (which is a small fraction of healthcare costs).

Or you can still charge for it and just cover poor people for free which is what most countries did before the inane NHS model got copied in Europe.

Healthcare isn't socialized if yes, I cover you being close to death in the rare car accident no matter your insurance, but your cancer is your problem as is your diabetes, and everything else.

And the concept of insuring about something that will almost certainly happen (incurring in healthcare costs) is absurd. Insurance is about paying a small premium, to cover some eventuality that normally won't ever happen in your whole life. If it does it is catastrophic and you will be covered for that, because it's very rare. That's insurance.

Insuring long term health care and everything that is very normal among old people I'd just a fraud. That's not insurance. That's subsidizing consumption.

If you can't afford to stay healthy till old you die sooner, good riddance, for a right-wing person. No one owes you absolutely anything.

does this involve socialising the £125,000 of emergency care needed to deal with someone experiencing acute kidney failure while at the same time withholding the £2 of insulin that would've prevented it

if you want to let the kidney failure guy to die if he is poor I would agree, deal?

because this preventive bull **** is what makes people like till they are zombies then we get to pay for them to live in zombie land for years so.. it would be better if they died far sooner for everyone else.

OR, they have financial resources to pay for the whole thing

btw if it's so cheap you can set up a charity and you and everyone who agrees with you can save lives for 2 quids each, isn't that awesome? it's so cheap you can do without other people money.

the **** you want from us exactly? if lives are cheap to save you can do with private charity.

if it's expensive, let them die more room for others.

The environment and climate change, like covid, aren't left or right wing.

sure lol, tradeoffs never exist and we all value all things the same (=no)

How can trade offs not exist?

Yes, but people on the left and right (particularly at the extremes) try to make them so to suit their on ends, and it subsequently makes it harder to get agreement on basic issues.

Sure and polarisation makes them disagree just for the sake of it. As with pretty much everyhting, letting the more nutty tail wag the dog is a bad idea and keeping the heat out of the debate a very good one.

This is an incredibly unpopular position in practice though (for good reason in my opinion) and no centre right political party is ever going to run on this.

The Conservative Party has also been a broad church anyway and doesn’t always go for right wing ideological purity (eg Heath, Johnson).

I am not talking purity, just some basic core element which is fully opposed to the platform of the left.

Can you cite something Tories credibly will always oppose with strength, that labours like, or want to push heavily, which labor structurally abhors?

I understand "abolish the NHS" is unpopular, but I cited green policies as well.

I can expand to COVID lockdown violence, where the Tories behaved like a leftist (ie state-centric, individual-crushing) government, unlike republicans.

What does someone get by voting Tories that is the polar opposite of labour? Even without ideological purity we should have a list of abyssal differences right?

If they exist, people with different values will strongly differ on COVID, the climate and so on.

Especially if the tradeoffs include foreign people.

For some people, it will be a moral duty to try to help foreigners in Pacific islands which lose from climate change.

For some other, it's a moral imperative for a country to strictly, only and always do the interest of its citizens alone.

It doesn't require any extremism, just a difference in how you value things. Which purportedly is what justifies political differences.

The climate isn't a basic issue, because climate change isn't a problem for the Uk and adaptation alone would more than suffice.

British emissions are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things worldwide, the UK going to 0 or not matters approx 0 for climate change.

If you want emissions to go to 0 is for moral, not practical reasons, in the UK.

How is that something "basic", to sacrifice a massive amount of well being with absolutely nothing in return just for moral reasons? It is predicated on very specific political values that aren't shared universally

Labour and Tories are currently very close to each other politically, there are no large fundamental differences. Labour are simply not particularly left wing (by Uk standards) currently so there is nothing for the Tories to fundamentally object too.

There were bigger disagreements when Corbyn or Truss were party leaders, but that didn’t go well for either party.

If Labour suddenly start advocating strongly left wing policies then obviously the Tories would oppose those policies.

So being on the left of socialist parties in Europe on green policies isn't being particularly on the left for British standards?

Labour are in the process of watering down their green policies, precisely because they are trying to move to the political centre under Starmer.

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The tradeoff is very exaggerated. That's why those who dont want to do anything also argue climate change is less of an issue than those who want to do more. Generally those who agree on the extent also agree pretty much on how seriosuly it needs to be taken.

Also it's not particualrly a right or left wing issue when it comes ot helping foreigners.

As an American (I assume) you've stormed into a UK politics thread keen to tell us all how the Tories and Labour having similar policies mean they're both left wing, when the reality is that Labour has abandoned all of its left wing policies to compete for centre right votes.

I already cited privatisations as core elements of right wing politics that's fully opposed to leftist ideas, yet you're still banging on about the NHS.

Why are you so interested in what happens in the UK anyway?

I am a European living in the EU with American relatives living in the US.

I am also a pragmatic libertarian.

Until recently for many Europeans the UK was a small american-dream option, easy (VISA-wise) to try, a tad more libertarian (more free speech, less taxes) than most EU jurisdiction, and it always had the historic figure of Thatcher in the background, one of the very few world leaders historically to not be ashamed to go public with fully libertarian notions ("there is no us" only individuals and families, for example).

Seeing the UK end up as yet another collectivist country where freedom dies is just sad, especially if there is literally no foreseeable option for it to get better (IE, all parties are fully collectivist).

You mean the infamous "There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families" quote which you've rephrased so it sounds a little less ignorant of the social sciences (which Thatcher certainly was).

It's nonsense of course, as were most of her pronouncements. Populations are like light and can be seen as individual particles sometimes and as collective waves at other times, as appropriate.

Also your statement about tax might be true of income tax but there are many other types of tax that we pay.

And if we want to be more collective that's our choice not yours, so you know where you can put your advice.

Sure you have a right to self determination, although most people in this thread, if i am not mistaken, would rather delegate many of their country decisions to the EU, wouldn't you?

That's weird American crank politics, which we just don't do. Britain is different from the Continent and we don't have the strange, complacent, over-entitled 'curial class' (to borrow a Roman Empire term for multi-generational born-and-bred bureaucrats) that the Continental powers are ruled by. The economy is a bit freer and taxes are in some ways a bit lighter (though this does not always mean that the economy does any better). But Thatcher's move away from the post-war 'mixed economy' is not universally applauded, and even Thatcher deplored privatisation of the railways and the postal service, which subsequent Tories went in for. Thatcherism is widely seen as promoting the morality of the 'spivs', as flashily-dressed black-marketeers were derisively known during and just after the war, and is also seen as squandering strategic state assets to enrich those spivs. But British elections are won on the centre ground, and are not subject to American 'Citizens United' rules that favour the highest-spending TV advertiser, election broadcasts here being subject to strict and proportionate governance. Candidates in British elections really cannot pledge to destroy the NHS, the old-age pension, the entire welfare and educational systems and the public-service ethos itself, because they'd just lose.

The slight issue at the moment is that, while people are fed up with the Tories and Labour ought to walk it at the next poll, Labour are busy setting fire to their own voter base in many constituencies, particularly in Muslim areas that have always been Labour, by uncritical support of Israel and the frankly peculiar pursuit of American gender ideology which the leader's 'advisers' appear to have wished on him, despite the relentless series of defeats for that ideology in the British courts.