Maggie and her two revolutions
Tom Clougherty over at the ASI blog has a comment on Simon Jenkins’ s book ‘Thatcher and Sons’.
The key comment he makes was that there were two revolutions, the good and the bad (from a liberal view anyway).
The good is her liberalisation of the economy (I know Thatcher is public enemy number one for many LibDems, but she saved this country’s economy from the miasma of the 1970s and set the foundations for the economic well being we have today). This was something desperately needed.
The second revolution was the centralisation of power in Whitehall, which has been pursued with great vigour by Blair and now Brown. This is the illiberal revolution.
Jenkins rightly calls for a third revolution, a localism revolution. Tom Clougherty agrees, as do most LibDems. We should make it central to our party to promote localism, to create the conditions for experiments in government and services which the US States originally provided in the US.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Tristan, your new colour scheme is seriously sexy.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I totally agree - it’s the next big idea in British politics - are we going to grasp the nettle though? Less MPs and more powers for Councils and Regions.
We seem to be getting there but not there yet.
I think we have a state of society in which they are happy with the progressive centrism/leftism (Call it what you will) and the money for schools and hospitals - what we need to persuade them about is that THIS CANNOT BE DONE PROPERLY WITHOUT LOCALISM