Thursday 15 January 2009

Gambler's remorse

I have a spoon, so let's see what's in the pot:

“To hope... that a Labour Party can be built up in a population quivering from an indulgence in games of hazard is pure folly. Such a population cannot be organised for sustained political effort, cannot be depended upon for legal support to its political champions, cannot respond to appeals to its rational imagination. Its hazards absorb so much of its leisure; they lead it away from thoughts of social righteousness; they destroy in it a sense of social services; they create in it a state of mind which believes in fate, luck, the irrational, the erratic; they dazzle its eyes with flashy hopes; they make it absolutely incapable of taking an interest in the methods and aims of reforming politicians. They lay it open to seduction of demagogues, to the blandishments of the hail-fellow-well-met type of candidate, to the inducements of the common briber, to the flashy claptrap of the vulgar and ignorant charlatan.”
J Ramsay MacDonald on gambling (c.1905)


Well, we did get a Labour Party - nay Labour led governments. We also got leaders, and businessmen [sic] of the sort mentioned in the last sentence. Do we know why we're in this economic mess?

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