1. The state is essentially beneficent – except the bits charged with protecting people from their neighbours, and the country from its external enemies.
2. The rich are so slow-witted that they won’t find ways of avoiding higher tax rates.
3. An education system that has failed despite having untold billions lavished on it will succeed if only we spend more money on it.
4. That the theory of anthropocentric climate change, which scientists have proved themselves willing to lie and cheat to defend, is nevertheless self-evidently true.
5. The best people to run our liberal democracy are foreigners whom we don’t have a say in appointing, and whom we can’t remove.
6. A criminal who reoffends after serving a prison sentence wouldn’t have reoffended if he hadn't been sent to prison.
7. The best way to improve the health-care system is to absolve nurses of the need to do any traditional nursing, while devolving that function to untrained third world immigrants.
8. The wearing of poppies to honour those who died for their country represents cultural fascism, while the wearing of burqas is an innocent expression of cultural identity.
9. Mainstream right-wing parties are sinister, anti-democratic conspiracies run by the most powerful elements in society – even though the best they can come up with are David Cameron and Mitt Romney!
10. The only mature, functioning democracy in the Middle East is self-evidently the source of all the region’s evils.
11. It’s the duty of Britain’s indigenous population to modfy its behaviour and beliefs to accommodate the alien cultures of any number of immigrant groups – rather than the other way round.
12. Competition is a very bad thing – unless, of course, you’re advancing your own career in the media or politics.
13. All businessmen are wicked – except those who espouse left-wing causes, who are saints.
14. The idea that those films and television programmes which upset traditional conservatives – full of graphic sex, bad language and attacks on the Christian religion - couldn’t possibly do any harm to anyone, whereas racist, sexist or classist epithets cause deep long-term psychological trauma.
15. Public sector workers deserve the sort of gold-plated pensions now unavailable to the private sector – despite, on average, earning more than private sector workers, and enjoying considerably greater security of tenure.
16. When it comes to higher education (as with immigration) “more” somehow must mean “better”.
17. Actors, rock stars and comedians have an important contribution to make to political discourse.
18. You can print money without causing inflation.
19. It’s perfectly acceptable to impose a poll tax on every British household to finance a media organisation which pumps out political propaganda which at least half of the British people don’t agree with.
20. When the country was brought to the brink of economic collapse by individuals, politicians and businesses behaving fecklessly, the people who need to be punished are those who were prudent enough to accumulate savings.
21. The only modern “art” worth subsidising is that which does dirt on the human spirit.
22. Most people live in a new world. They were born yesterday and know nothing. Luckily, there is a select class of Guardians – as Plato called them, the name is still in use – who know everything. Their knowledge derives from the fact that they live entirely in the future.
ReplyDelete23. Nothing is funny. Obviously, conservatives are laughable. But that's funny-peculiar, not funny-ha ha.
ReplyDelete24. We don't have to come up with evidence-based, sensible and practical policies because there isn't the remotest chance that we'll ever have to answer for them. Err...oh shit. We're in a coalition now. Let's hope no one asks difficult questions that might point out that we are no more than an agitprop student protest movement.
ReplyDeleteYour extra "beliefs" prompted me to come up with a whole host of new ones at http://scottgronmark.blogspot.com/2011/11/thirty-one-more-weird-left-liberal.html
ReplyDeleteMaybe they are all mad.