The Immoral Nu Labour

Ignore the questions around the seperation of Church and State and instead just savour the Anglican bishops who have gone on the attack and given Nu Labour a mauling:

"The government isn't telling people to stop overextending themselves, but instead is urging us to spend more... That is morally suspect and morally feeble. It is unfair and irresponisble of the government to put pressure on the public to spend in order to revive the economy."

So there we have it - Nu Labour being described by Bishops as morally suspect and feeble. What makes this even sweeter is the is a government once run by a man who has converted to Catholicism, and is currently being headed up by the son of a Scottish Church Minister. 

But it is not just in the area of morality where the Nu Labour project is both suspect and feeble. In fact, their moral failings come from a failure of ideology. Nu Labour does not, and never has, believed in anything. It is a mix of half-baked policies and dull truisms brought together to form an anodyne, electorally neutral manifesto, devoid of principle, ideological coherence and in desperate need of a moral compass. Nu Labour is immoral not because it tells people to spend when they can't spend, but rather because the whole project is fundamentally amoral. It isn't about right or wrong, but simply the pursuit of power at all costs. The reason why Nu Labour is urging people to spend right now is not down to morality, but rather a desperate (and most probably in vain) hope that such spending will reinvigorate the economy and push people towards voting for them again whenever the next election happens.

And before anyone gets all excited from the Tory camp, let me point out that the Tories are not any different. They too are a PR exercise in search of an idea. Just look at their response to the financial crisis - they are saying nothing. They are offering nothing. They are muted by their own hand, crippled by the over-riding fear that saying anything at all might have them pegged as the nasty party again, and therefore consigned to electoral oblivion once more. They lack an ideological spine, they lack a moral base. Their whole ethos is built around a desire for electoral success. Questions of right and wrong are completely secondary to that concern.

The Libertarian ideology has something to say within this debate, and offers a clear moral choice. By removing the state from people's lives to a large extent, we allow them to make the moral choice for themselves on so many different levels. The government should not tell the population to spend; equally, it should not be arrogant enough to tell them not to spend. Rather, the government should let people make their own choice, and take responsibility for themselves. People may get it right, or they may get it wrong. But at least they have made the choice themselves.