Quote Originally Posted by Ash View Post
Agreed with all that about The Iron Handbag, though I'd add my take that what she promised the aspirational was the individual solution, which is going to look faster and more glamourous than the old collective solutions offered by the labour movement that she was busily dismantling. Rise out of your class rather than with it. Which is fine, but it's not going to work for everyone. There was a load of other stuff around community that was bound up with the old labour movement which tends to get forgotten about now. Social values of a traditional and conservative nature. She smashed them up too.

As for globalisation, it's literally a race for the bottom where the winner is the one who can do the job for the lowest amount of money, in the worst possible conditions, and the losers get even less than that. And trendy liberals love this because the word 'global' makes them sound thrillingly internationalist, cosmoplitan and all that stuff, unlike those ghastly racist plebs who hate foreigners. Of course, it's never the jobs of the trendy liberals that come under threat.
The labour movement was grounded in an industrial culture that created those communities, though. The erosion of that industrial culture was inevitable longer term - although unions hastened the process by making industrial success more difficult, thus killing the goose that laid the golden egg. What seems clear to me is that that culture was a product of a very specific time and place between the start of the industrial revolution and the advent of the post-industrial society. That 100-odd years was the sweet spot for the labour movement and in a society without that culture, it no longer has a clear purpose.