CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
@iwrats If more people realised they were wrong all the time about everything the world would be a better place.
I think pratchett summed it up nicely.
“Science is not about building a body of known ‘facts’. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”
I don't think the proposition "Why can't we just go back to comfortable centrism in nice suits" cuts much mustard these days. It's not the 1990s. Have you seen what's happened in the past decade? A huge economic crisis created by the very neoliberals that centrists voted for; Then the referendums for Scottish independence and leaving the EU; Then we literally left the EU; Then the global pandemic.
Even if the amiable Charles Kennedy were still alive, he wouldn't stand much of a chance in today's politics. Jack McConnell has gone down the route of lobbying for schools to be kept open - a ThemForUs agent in the Lords. Arguably the nearest we have to a centrist administration is that of Nicola Sturgeon, with her procedural gradualism and disowning of maverick Salmond.
I'm sorry, but I don't agree. I think past events show what happens when the tides of history throw up crises & people respond by thinking that only extreme solutions will work.
@stiltskin, you may want to research what happened to "reasonable" centrist politicians during those historical crises. For example, German Social Democrats and Centre Party in the 1930s; Or the Italian Liberal Party in the 1920s.
All things that have worked in the past, from liberal democracy to regicide to mobilisation of the adult population to form a mechanised army are, by definition, not considered extreme, despite the fact that they really were?
@crowriver. I’m pretty sure extreme left wingers didn’t fare too well either. Significantly it was the threat of the left wing which led to the legitimising of the extreme right. They were saving the country from the commies as I recall. The extremes are often in a symbiotic relationship where the threat posed by one side justifies the other.
“people respond by thinking that only extreme solutions will work“
Depends whether “people” is a majority or a ‘mood’ or whether it’s the current ‘leader(s)’.
History shows that (sometimes) people are led to believe there is a problem/enemy and they must do whatever is being told to them.
My view is that defining things in left/right terms may be useful shorthand but also obscures too many things and inhibits wider thought/action.
It’s like ‘private good, public bad’ (and the reverse) - ‘pick a side’.
More useful to consider the binary nature of the choices and who is promoting simple choices/certainties.
One irony of Covid is that the current UKGov has managed to find/spend ‘public money’ in quantities that few left of centre politicians would dare propose.
Suited centrism has probably had its day.
Cameron and Brown would surely agree on at least 90% of things these days.
If they (or different wearers of similar suits) are the answer, the question is wrong.
In the big scheme of things both Covid and Brexit are sideshow.
Climate, resources (especially water - not much of a concern for most people in the UK, apart from floods) and population movement are bigger issues in a world context.
A few months ago it seemed that ‘no return to normal after Covid’ was a popular idea.
Now I think people would vote for anyone who promised any normality/certainty.
@stiltskin, maybe you missed the point of my earlier post. while the Social Democrats eventually shared the fate of German communists, the Centre Party in Germany and the Liberal Party in Italy either enabled or actively participated in the fascist regimes.
So these historical examples would tend to demonstrate that when push comes to shove, centrists side with the right. We seem to be seeing a less extreme version of this with Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party.
"it was the threat of the left wing which led to the legitimising of the extreme right."
That's where the historical analogies end with C21st. The current right in the UK were/are focused on different "external enemies" - forriners basically. The EU, refugees, immigrants, etc. The media aided by some in the Labour party attempted to portray Corbyn as "extreme left" but he was, and is, a mild mannered Social Democrat. Starmer has moved beyond centrist suitism on the Blairite model to try and appeal to "Blue Wall" voters - whoever they might be.
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