Michael Meacher asks "Why is Labour now fighting shy of nationalisation?"

Ed Balls is running out of track.

Michael Meacher asks "Why is Labour now fighting shy of nationalisation?"

The answer lies in the psychology of the beast.  People have an understandable tendency to think their conscious model of reality is governed by the same laws as the reality it models.  They consequently think that if it is blatantly obvious to them that 'x' plus 'y' equals 'z' that if they can get an accurate comprehension of 'x' and 'y' across to another 'rational' mind that the same result will emanate.  There is something missing in this understanding and the best short description may be the subconscious.

We have most of us had the experience where someone else was enthusiastically advising us to take a course of action to achieve a certain goal but we couldn't see it.  On examining this conundrum it is often clear that had we taken the action with our lack of understanding it would not have had the successful result predicted.  That is because consequential actions would not have had the philosophical foundations that gave rise to the decision to take the original action.  In other words one person may understand that jumping now is the best thing to do but they understand it is in preparation for the next jump.  Someone who jumps on someone else's advice will not be expecting to have to jump again and will fall at the first hurdle.

Ed Balls clearly does not have the same philosophical model as Michael Meacher.  I don't know enough about politics to name the various schools of thought and philosophical premises underlying various political theories but it is clear that the 'Labour Party' has shifted significantly since Blaire turned up on the scene.  Blair metaphorically sold his soul to the devil when he decided that to get Labour into power to achieve what maybe he thought was a laudable objective he would break the philosophical fundamentals of honesty and a belief in the 'will of the people'.  Like that old bloke Uncle Adolf he was so convinced this country needed to rid themselves of the Tories that he would do 'whatever it took' to get into power.  I guess he may have thought that on gaining power he could revert to his original 'honest' position but unfortunately life doesn't seem to work like that.  Blair fell down his own miserable labyrinthine pit and appears to now be utterly enveloped in some delusional world of Godliness but that is another story.

The whole Labour party was unfortunately infected with the cancerous deception and consequential doublespeak.  They lost their conviction that the people came first and that everything else would follow and believed their own myth that somehow they had to 'make it work' for people.  This is the slippery slope to domination.  Although the perceived 'objects' of their political philosophy remained largely intact they seemed to lose the underlying philosophical mode of operation.  They began to think like the Tories.  They began to fall for the matrix like illusion of money, power and influence.  They began to think they had to achieve their objectives in what is mistakenly considered 'the real world' of hardnosed financial decisions.  It is comparable with the Judas problem in Christianity - the belief that you can explain to your enemy why you are right in their terms.  They have been operating under the tragic misconception that things must make money to succeed.  It is an illusion projected by the very powerful world of finance and it is a misunderstanding of 'wealth'.  The wealth of any country is the people in it - not the money they owe or own.

Ed Balls and the majority of the rest of the Labour party still believe they are essentially 'socialist' but they are not.  They are trying to make 'socialism' work in someone else's philosophical paradigm.  Ed Balls is, unfortunately, emotionally off key (that's a polite way of putting it) and as such he cannot see how nationalising the railways could possibly work financially.  He cannot, therefore, make that decision with any conviction.  But he does partly understand and works hard at trying to figure out how it can be done.  There is no amount of 'telling' him that can possibly change his perception - that is something only Ed Balls can do - and so even if he took other people's advice and nationalised the railways he would screw it up.

What Michael Meacher has to do is realise there is a perception problem here and figure out how to address it.  I don't know, but if I get any ideas I am sure to post them on this blog.  I hope that goes some way to answering Michael's question.