Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
Let's complete discussing what you advanced. You said your key differentiating criterion in politics is based on a Yes/No answer to the question "Do you believe society should help the vulnerable?" This is not a useful differentiating criterion because everyone short of a Randian, will tell you "Yes." Fascists and communists alike agree on this within the limit of the parameters of the question. I shouldn't have to corroborate the fact to any educated person. That everyone agrees is what makes it a useless question to differentiate against! Even Margaret Thatcher said:



More famously Thatcher said



but this thinking wasn't limited to Thatcher. As you know very well, Tony Blair said:



This just goes to my point that the relevant questions in the context of "helping the vulnerable" are How and Who. How do we go about it and with what tradeoffs; Who matters, who is "deserving."

Meanwhile you said that Corbyn's Labour would answer "No" to your question. Here is Corbyn speaking when he assumed leadership of the party:
Actually, I didn't say that. I said far left groups. Not Corbyn himself, but groups that he associates with. You quote Orwell later on in the post. Read his accounts of numerous far left groups who are indeed too obsessed with doing down the establishment to answer Yes to my question. By the time I was reading the literature of these groups as current decades later, the obsessions hadn't changed much from Orwell's time.

I see myself as a socialist in the mould of Orwell; what he would call a patriotic socialist, or someone who sees values in traditional English/British culture that are fundamentally compatible with the ideals of socialism. And I share Orwell's dislike of the far left that's too embedded in its own backside to do anything good (his parable novels are famous, but his accounts and essays are more direct critiques of the English far left). Corbyn's friends are said far left. As I said, read up on his close group.