'Much more straighforward than having to know the history of how neo liberalism was derived from attempting economic freedom from the crown of England'
But see, this is where it starts - what they told you guys in school was quite wrong in a number of ways, the prime one related to political labels would be the way they presented 'the british' as some sort of monolithic entity all thinking and saying and presumably smelling the same, under 'the crown' ... in fact the crown had precious little to do with it, especially under the third George, it was actually a fellow named Lord North who was PM of the government who set 1770s policy, he was a tory [conservative], for sure ... but there were lots of whigs [liberals] in the UK at the time, in fact some had been involved with setting up the 'intolerable acts' that prohibited the thirteen colonies from persecuting the catholics of Quebec and stealing land from the indians beyond a certain line, and tried to get them to pay for some portion of the Seven Years war that had been fought for their benefit - those were whig positions ... can't recall names now, it's been years, but it's highly interesting stuff, turns out 'the british' weren't homogeneously uni-dimensional at all [who could have guessed?]
Burke was a whig, then when he didn't think much of the way the french went about the revolting business, he got labelled a tory, and is now known as 'the father of modern conservatism', funny how these things go - en.wikipedia.org |
