High Purposes:
All aboard the Orient Express boat-train because the woman with the two green and red flags is about to blow her whistle, and around these isles these days there is not much evidence of courage and sanity , a combination which was also sometimes equated with “High Purposes of Political Action” – being at least enough of these qualities to realise that poverty is an evil (a moral wrong in the “space of reason)…
…And where the idea that more equality is better than less has an ethical value – the radical tradition supported by collective democratic deliberations – at first glance something along these lines as recently written by Peter Jay :
“…a long and honourable tradition of the British left, the non-marxist egalitarians who wanted to apply intelligent economics to mitigating gross inequalities mainly through the use of public sector projects funded from progressive taxation to reduce poverty.
This was the legacy of Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Gaitskell, Crosland and Callaghan: and Brown was its heir…”
“… as Balls is now. ” Peter Jay concludes (Good grief! But – Dammit – you’re not being asked to like the man!).
But there is a hollow ring to the phrase High Purposes isn’t there? (Read on Part 3)