The British Lion softened capitalism with welfare initiatives. He wasn't afraid to achieve conservative ends through progressive means.
I remember reading in the Guardian a long time ago about a leading Tory who said that the British welfare state and the National Health Service were created to ensure that Britain had men fit enough to fight in a war, especially one with Russia. I wouldn't be surprised that there was nothing compassionate about Compassionate Conservatism, but maybe I'm being a bit cynical.
Still, this article shows that there are many moderate conservatives who don't object to the welfare state and this is good news because it means that we on the left can work with them to create a better society as well as take out the military -industrial complex and their corrupt cronies, left and right.
Interestingly, the right are right now really zeroing in on Clintons, the CIA , and the military -industrial comple. Jason Goodman has them on his show, people like Charles Ortel and Kevin Shipp, and they reckon they are almost there.
What the president probably did not know was that his hero, the iconic prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, played a significant role in the expansion of the British welfare state and, in particular, in the creation of a universal healthcare system. A Burkean conservative who always sought a balance between tradition and change, Churchill understood the necessity of using state power to solve social problems. Conventional wisdom suggests—in the United States anyway—that such efforts are anathema to conservatives, whose chief aim is to cut taxes and social spending. But Churchill presents an alternative portrait of conservatism.
A nobleman by birth, Churchill was raised as a Tory. But fairly early in his parliamentarycareer he began to criticize his own party for embracing plutocracy. He feared that the Tories were becoming too much like America’s Republican Party, which supported laissez faire capitalism, giving large industries free rein in the relentless pursuit of profit, and only deviating from this ideological position in support of protective tariffs. In the spirit of his Tory predecessor, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Churchill wanted to revive the alliance between nobles and workers so as to curb the power and dominance of the bourgeoisie. Heeding the dictates of his conscience, Churchill crossed the aisle to join the Liberal Party in 1904, whereupon he worked with David Lloyd George and others to enact policies that would provide economic security and improve conditions for the working class.
Churchill began to see the advantages of the welfare state when he served as President of the Board of Trade under Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. In 1908 he studied the workings and benefits of various government programs in Germany, even spending time there to collect information and gain firsthand knowledge. The following year he published a collection of speeches, Liberalism and the Social Problem, in which he argued that state welfare was an essential corrective to the excesses of capitalism.
The American Conservative
2 comments:
“Churchill understood the necessity of using state power to solve social problems.”
Today’s neoliberals understand it too. They use state power to solve their own social problems, which is to continually widen the gap between the rich and the rest.
For today’s neoliberals, any government (no matter how tiny) that serves everyone (not only the rich) is “big and oppressive government.”
Meanwhile any government (no matter how gigantic) that serves only the rich is “small and efficient.”
Neoliberals love big government, as long as neoliberals are the government. They also love government spending, as long as the money goes only to them.
For neoliberals, helping everyone (not only the rich) is "fiscal irresponsibility." Anything that does not widen the gap between the rich and the rest is "out of control spending."
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