Red Tory

I keep reading hysterical and dismissive spleen but , I `m not sure he does not have a contribution to make . There have been many thinkers whose positive agenda was more poetry than prose but provided a sharp critique of the status quo nonethless. Noam Chomsky ?

I think this is rather good

There is much that is right with the state and there is much that is wrong. What is right is that the state embodies in structured form a common concern – it represents the coalesced will of the people that there is a level below which you cannot fall and an undertaking that we as a body politic have a stake, a care and indeed a provision for you and every other citizen . In that sense the welfare state really does represent the best of us. In that sense the great triumph of the left is indeed the 1945 Labour government which laid the foundation of the modern welfare state. But what the working class thought would save and secure became something that gradually and over time, eventually helped to destroyed them. Why? Because the state instead of supporting society - abolished it. The welfare state nationalised society because it replaced mutual communities with passive fragmented individuals whose most sustaining relationship was not with his or her neighbor or his or her community but with a distant and determining centre. Moreover that state relationship was profoundly individuating - unilateral entitlement individuated and replaced bilateral relationship.The working class did not ask for this – they wanted something far more reciprocal, more mutual and more empowering. All existing working class welfare organisations were sidelined by a universal entitlement guaranteed by the state based upon centralised accounts of need. Local requirements, organisation or practices were simply ignored and thus rendered redundant. Thus the welfare state began the destruction of the independent life of the British working class. The populace became a supplicant citizenry dependent upon the state rather than themselves and the socialist state aborted indigenous traditions of working class self–help, reciprocality and social insurance. Rather than working with each another in order to alter their situation or change their neighbourhood or city, relying on the welfare state only to get them through a temporary rough patch, working class people increasingly became permanent passive recipients of centrally determined benefits. As such welfare ceased to function as a safety net through which people could not fall, becoming instead a ceiling through which the supplicant class – cut off from earlier working class ambition and aspiration – could not break. This ‘benefits culture’ can be tied directly to the thwarting of working class ambition by a middle class elite that formed the machinery of the welfare state yes to alleviate poverty but also to deprive the poor of their irritating habit of autonomous organisation.Interesting