Economics, not culture
Is what the real left needs to concentrate on, according to Dead
Men Left:
Without even the pretence of challenging the free market, the mainstream left, particularly in its “left-liberal” guise, has taken its arguments entirely into the sphere of culture. Brown’s greatest claim is that he has created “stability” in the British economy for the last eight years; this is self- aggrandising, of course – Black Wednesday had more to do with it – but it also ignores the underlying political question of whose stability, from which other practical questions emerge: why it is that inequalities have widened so much under New Labour, or how working hours could have increased, and so on. Political arguments over the economy are replaced by managerial decisions, buttressed on occasion by (untested) claims as to the all-conquering powers of globalisation and financial markets.