Letter to Daily Telegraph 20.04.17

Sir. The notion that the British left is in any way “progressive” needs to be challenged. They have highjacked the word for too long. Nicola Sturgeon and others are a little like Canut trying to hold back the tide of actual progressive change by defining progress as a retrenchment of costly state and municipal interference in ordinary people’s lives. A culture of dependency on state largess funded by taxpayers and government debt is what is really meant by Sturgeon, Labour the Lib Dems and the Greens as “progressive”. In a world where people increasingly demand freedom and democracy backed by a safe, efficient, cooperative and importantly affordable state, the left is like the bloated capitalists of yesteryear.