I've argued for a while that we in Britain live, for all extents and purposes, in a one-party state. Evidence is the ease with which the elite can shift from one wing of the governing neoliberal, pro-capital party to the other.
On the Spectator's Coffee House blog on Saturday, Fraser Nelson informed readers:
The first serious Tory defection will be detailed in tomorrow's News of the World. David Freud, the architect of the Purnell welfare refrom that we've been admiring in Coffee House, is to become a Conservative peer and shadow welfare reform minister. So someone with genuine expertise will be in the DWP driving through a desperately-needed agenda. This is a real coup not just for David Cameron but George Osborne whom, I understand, has been working on Freud for months.
The most interesting thing of all was Fraser's reply to a reader in the comments section.
....Freud has defected party - insofar as he was a neutral adviser to Labour but will be advising the Tories. But there has been no ideological conversion - and nor should there be for Blairite voters who go Cameron at the next election. He will offer the best bits of Blairism, plus a whole lot more.
And as for the Blairites, their "choice" agenda for public services is the future for this country.
Fraser Nelson is of course right: for Freud there is no ideological conversion. How can there be when both Labour and the Conservatives espouse the same pro-capital, neoliberal ideology?
UPDATE: Some more info on the much sought after Mr David Freud (above).
In this revealing 2008 newspaper interview, were are told:
Mr Freud made a fortune working on some of the biggest and most controversial deals in the City in the 1980s and 1990s.
Banking at that time, he once said, was a "pioneering piratical industry where we made up the rules"
When asked in early 2008, whether he thought there would be a recession, Mr Freud replied "Yes, because we should have recessions every five or six years and we are due one".
One wonders if Mr Freud would think the same about the desirability of recessions if he were a factory worker and not a multi-millionaire member of Britain's ruling elite.
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