
Socialists Should Talk About Aspiration
Rebecca Long-Bailey’s “aspirational socialism” is an attempt to overcome a pervasive problem: after a decade of austerity, many working people don’t believe that politics can make their lives better.
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Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune, and the author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation.
Rebecca Long-Bailey’s “aspirational socialism” is an attempt to overcome a pervasive problem: after a decade of austerity, many working people don’t believe that politics can make their lives better.
This is not the time to abandon the socialist policies that would most improve lives in the very areas Labour lost. Instead, we must build a more effective movement that can win them.
Not long after Margaret Thatcher rose to power forty years ago, she decimated huge swaths of Britain with deindustrialization, privatization, and cuts. Those same areas now have the opportunity in this election to bury her legacy once and for all.
Labour’s plans to invest in a million green jobs can transform the very parts of Britain decimated by Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms — and begin to undo the damage of deindustrialization.
Tory governments since Margaret Thatcher have starved Britain of investment, fueling inequity and leaving its infrastructure to crumble. It’s up to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to rebuild the country and invest in the future.
International speculators are playing games with our housing market — and we’re the ones losing.
Financialization isn’t a perversion of an otherwise well-functioning system. It’s just capitalism’s latest survival mechanism.