At Blood & Treasure they’re discussing Nadine Dorris latest attempt to force her own socalled morality on England and how the economic realities the coalition is enforcing on the country actually makes abortions more likely than less, despite Nadine’s best efforts. Justin hits the nail on the head on why this failure won’t deter people like Dorris from promoting more and more draconic measures:
From one point of view though, it’d work, because an quantifiable increase in the number of abortions would mean the policy wasn’t tough enough and would need to be toughened further. And round and round it goes.
I’m not being particularly cynical: that’s the way in which law ‘n’ order policy had been shaped over the past thirty years or so, in the US even more than the UK, and it shows no signs of failing to work (in the sense of losing votes, or discouraging its adherents) just as it shows no signs of actually working.
Now if we bear in mind that economic policy is increasingly a branch of law ‘n’ order policy – simply a matter of personal fault and personal failure – then we can see how little the question of rationality has to come into it. All you have to do is hit the bad guys. And if it doesn’t get results, then so much the better – hit them harder. Because we know who they are.
Both Labour and the Tories have always imported political ideas from America, but this wholesale adopting of hard right practises, following the GOP playbook of riling up the base and distracting the opposition with social issues while ramming through neoliberal policies is new, isn’t it?
As Justin argues, the beauty of pushing these sort of policies in the current political climate is that they can never fail, only be failed. If your hardline approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough, not because the policy itself was wrong.