A Simple Ideology

'Credit on every meter and a rope for every nonce'

My political ideology is actually simple. You don’t need to read books or list off a bunch of long-dead theorists to understand it. Essentially, it is summed up in a pithy slogan; ‘Credit on every meter and a rope for every nonce.’

However I still want to break down exactly what I mean by this. The first part is fairly self-explanatory. ‘Credit on every meter’ means that everyone is looked after. Nobody, as long as they are responsible with their money, should be lacking the ability to heat their homes, cook themselves and their families a nutritious meal or to put the lights on at night. Responsibility is an important caveat, though. We all know, whether we deny it or not, that there are people who spend their money frivolously and then complain about the ‘cost of living crisis’. For some, it really is a ‘lack of responsibility crisis’. Hence, there must be measures taken to ensure that those who receive help are responsible enough to actualise the aid they receive, that is, to use it to help themselves. One can only help themselves if one has the basic requirements of survival. So it is not stifling of ones potential if one indeed does have credit on their meter guaranteed, in fact, it is necessary to suppress missed potential.

This does not mean a radical overhauling of the social relations of production as Marxists would have it, which is to say, it does not require socialism to be practiced. Rather, we should change the meaning of socialism to remove it from its violently revolutionary associations. It must become an ideology of self-actualisation, where ones obligations to society mean more than what one can expect to receive from society. Socialism as an obligation towards social good, rather than socialism as revolution. Of course this is not a paean to liberal individualism which holds that the individual is the core unit of human experience. It is an understanding that the individual is a part of the greater whole of social relations and thus is compelled to self-actualise for the sake of social cohesion and trust rather than solely to their own benefit.

The second part means what it says on the tin. Paedophiles, rapists and murderers do not deserve mercy. For too long our society has tolerated paedophiles and abusers, having a superficial hatred for them whilst being uninterested in actually dealing with the problem. The people’s revulsion and disgust at this state of affairs are obvious, but liberals and radicals alike align to tell them that they are not allowed a real solution. The people’s justice is to be scorned and feared, whilst the liberal justice, the ‘rule of law’, is to be lauded and worshipped like holy scripture. We see this in the spontaneous reactions to paedophile outings. The people gather to protest their outrage at such abominable acts and the enforcers of liberal justice, the police, run to protect the offender! The people are obviously furious at the denial of real justice (which would be death, denying the rapist/paedophile existence and hence, the ability to commit further offences) but the liberal state works to deny it to them. The liberal justice then, fails the people and does not enact their will. It exists exogenous from the popular will and its ideology deludes it into believing that its principles should be held above the will of the people. We must develop a populist approach to the law, which is to say legal codes and punishments must be enmeshed in popular will, rather than be at the whimsy of the desires of educated and democratically unaccountable elites who believe in reformation as god.