In this article in London’s Daily Telegraph the Anglican bishops attack the failure of British socialism.
New Labour was voted into power in 1997 with great promises of making Britain ‘great’ again. The usual socialist manifesto was put into place: rob from the rich and give to the poor. Taxes went up. The nanny state increased its rules and regulations strangling initiative and rewarding indigence and immorality.
Now after ten years of Labour rule there are more poor people in Britain than ever before. Furthermore, the gap between rich and poor is increasing not decreasing. In addition there is more violent crime, more public drunkenness and disorder, more teen pregnancies, more abortion. Divorce and remarriage are sky high and the family unit is broken beyond repair.
Britain is in a mess and all the great promises of Socialism have proven empty. In fact, the exact reverse of what they promised has come about.
The frightening thing is that the USA has now elected our own Tony Blair. Obama is our version of the young, attractive, intelligent, well educated and charismatic leader who promises ‘change’. Change we will definitely get, but if the British example is anything to go by it won’t be change for the better.
Lest anyone think that I am advocating the Republicans, I’m not. I think they’re just about as corrupt, greedy and manipulative as can be.
Any political system is only as good as the people in it. The real culprits are the old demons of greed, lust, ambition and lying.
What the West needs is not a change of politicians, but a change of heart. Only humility, repentance, a reliance on grace and a desire to love God and others can change our world.
Thomas a Kempis said, “Why do you wish to change the world when you cannot change yourself?”
Nearly spot on, Father, but bear in mind that the reason you should be worrying is that TB wasn’t elected in 1997 as a socialist – it was New Labour, not Labour – but as a young man with a pretty smile, a young fanmily, and an agenda for change.And he wasn’t so much elected as his opponents were voted against: if there are bells ringing, please encourage people to listen to them.
I was thinking the other day about what it is essentially that we need to return to, and the first two commandments came to mind, and what that spells for us. In order to love God right now, we need to realize how far from Him we are due to our own fault, and how much we are dependent on Him. How will this be without being cut off from something?As for love of neighbour, this will be realized through the taking away of the illusion of our autonomy. Neighbour is going to have to rely on neighbour.With the disassembling of the notion of a real God, we have disassembled any real notion of community and how dependent we are on one another. We now foist that responsibility on our governments and they gladly take it. We now look to our government for way more than simply the security of our countries and provinces.But now, with the election of Obama something else has happened on top of that. The old order of politician as politician has passed. They are now “personalities” who must not only adjust to a new globalism, but must have the kind of emptiness about them that they take chaos, both planned and unplanned, as the order of the day, as a means of bringing about their own messianic rule.”Only humility, repentance, a reliance on grace and a desire to love God and others can change our world.”Power is going to be increasingly centralized, and our path of humility, repentance and reliance on grace are going to be very, very radical.
A good friend of mine sent me your link. I am grateful for your post. My fear is that the “sheep” and the ungodly who voted in Obama did so for the same reasons that they voted in JFK. Ah, a pretty face is like a melody! No growth, but destruction and the promise of rewarded sloth. These are people who do not read and/or think much. They are impressed by the superficial, as long as their brains are not depressed and inconvenienced with weightier matters. In hindsight, I now realize that my book report several years ago on Karl Marx had its desired effect. When I heard the rhetoric and the promises of the Obama camp, I began to panic, and am still trying to slow down my heart rate, to survive the next four years. I am truly frightened. The future and freedom of my children and grandchildren is at risk. How do I stop that? It’s like trying to hold back the sea. I wish you a blessed and healthy 2009. Sincerely, Biene Vallee
Don’t know about the rest of the UK but I think Northern Ireland is better today under New Labour than prior to Mr. Blair. Unemployment is below the national rate. It is true that change must come from within us, but leadership on the ground can help to accomplish more. We have had eight years of the other way. We had leaders who believed that government’s role was based not in regulation of business, but that business could govern itself. So we got Enron, Worldcom, Phil Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps (unregulated insurance policies), a rush to housing speculation and finally financial near collapse as government idealogues waited too long to get involved in what they saw as a business problem and not a government one. What a business problem! What a government problem!We’ve had 8 years of a government that believed they could export democracy to a Muslim world, and the Muslim culture would gravitate to it. We got a stronger Iran, a stronger Hezbolah, free elections for the Palestinian people whose vote freely elected a Hamas government, and in Iraq shoes thrown at the US president! What an endorsement of American Presence in the Mid East! Enough! No more! It didn’t work! When the elephants dance, the ants take a heck of a beating. Now it’s time to focus on the ants and let the elephants lick their wounds.
I disagree, predictably, on Obama. My sense is that Obama will be relatively conservative, relative to the corrupt Republicans. I don’t see him advocating nanny statism. Remember that the rebuplicans brought us socialized presecription drug care, and many other lefty social programs. the GOP totally betrayed conservatives. It is difficult to imagine how Obama could be further left than george bush with regard to economics. And now of course, we’re socializing our banks and car companies under bush. I think Obama will be conservative, relative to Bush, which shows how much of a shambles the GOP is really in. Too bad Obama is so awful on life issues. One of the vexing things though, IMHO, is that grass roots GOP has been so abortion obsessed that they have lost sight of all other conservative values and opinions. The evangelical right is easily mislead into socialism because some of christ’s teachings can be misread as advocating socialism. So you see the grass roots GOP tolerating a socialist Bush so long as he acts pro-life now and again, makes a good executive order, whatever. Never mind that those executive orders were never made law by the GOP controlled congress. et cetera et cetera. Maybe I am just young, but has a political party betrayed its core values like the GOP has ever before in American history? It really feels like a ‘first’ to me.