Blog 13 - Tackling Reform

The Business Class, the Business Class - exploding the insider promise.

Standard Header - In these blogs, current political events are illuminated by reference to the basic relationships explained in ‘Us, Politics and The System.’ To give readers an idea when to look for a new post, the initial plan is to do a new one at least once a week, on Fridays.

Progressives in the UK are having to tackle the support the alternative conservative party, Reform, are getting from targetting asylum seekers and migrants - outsiders. Progressives have the same problem with conservatives doing that in other countries, like in the USA.

It’s easy to tackle. Recognise that people flying the national flags and all that are right, to begin with - they aren’t getting what they need or feel entitled to. They are given a big promise from being ‘British’ or ‘American’ or whatever nativist identity, that as ‘insiders’, citizens, ‘the country’ will see them right. We need to ask them, to deal with that, to look away from the ‘outsiders’ – they are pretty weak, they don’t run the country - and ask ‘How does the insider promise stack up?’

We just need to identify and name those who do run the country and betray the promise. Give people a clear direction to who they are. It’s the business class. We need to get into the habit of recognising that, using the term, and referring to them in political debate.

To expand - we let people think political parties ‘run the country’ – they do claim to – and so people blame our progressive parties as well as outsiders. We need to point out how political parties and government don’t really run the country. But when pointing out the others who do, we don’t clearly identify and name them. We only talk, vaguely, of ‘the wealthy’, ‘the rich and powerful’, ‘capitalism’ or ‘the ruling class’ (without actually naming that class.)

It’s easy to name them properly and how they are clearly a class. Talk about not just their wealth how they get wealthy: How it’s from them owning and organising and running most of the production of goods and services: How it’s from business and work relationships with the rest of us in the everyday work process: and how that means they dominate everybody else, and get huge wealth, in that process, that they resist being taxed and used for their fellow-nationals. How they are clearly driven by self-interest - their conservative defenders declare that to be the basic human condition - not by fulfilling the promise to ‘insider’ fellow-nationals.

The business class includes together the financiers, the venture capitalists, the private equity, ‘the bond markets’, the property developers, but also all productive businesses. They are, altogether, clearly a class, the dominant class and the base for conservative parties, including Reform. They mistreat fellow-national, often fellow-white ‘insiders’, at work, and resist progressive parties who try to use government to improve things for the rest.

Having identified and named them, we need to put relationships with them, and negotiations on tax, investment, regulation, employment rights and the rest, at the centre of political debate, not asylum seekers or migrant workers.

Identifying and naming them, and referencing them in all political debate, enables us to say to people turning to nationalism and Reform - don’t think political parties are everything - see how they come from the system – and how in it you are neglected or done in by the fellow-insider, fellow-national business class, not the powerless ‘outsider’ asylum seekers and migrants. Don’t support their conservative parties (Reform is one). Support progressive parties. If they aren’t good enough, let’s deal with that, but not by turning to something worse.

Standard Footer - Comments are not being provided for in this blog right now. Reader’s reflections are best spread outwards, to somebody else the reader knows, as written about in ‘How To Talk Politics With Each Other’ at https://www.uspoliticsandthesystem.org/_files/ugd/e8d212_1f348918923e4f33bac1b09b314affbb.pdf