[This is the closest Mbeki has come to telling the truth in a long time. He didn’t quite say it… but he edged towards it. Actually, we are far far far left… but they are trying to keep up pretenses and trying to make it look reasonable. Anyhow… Mbeki clearly shows he is against individualism. Yep, the ANC need MORONS and ZOMBIES because anyone else, with a functioning brain will see that we’re being led by idiots and liars into the pits of hell and we’re all expected to follow along happily. Jan]

South African President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday carefully placed his government on the left of the political spectrum and attacked those who celebrated individualism and the denigration of the role of the State.

In a lengthy speech in Parliament at the start of his Budget Vote debate on Wednesday, Mbeki quoted the writings of a former Observer editor-in-chief Will Hutton — now a columnist in the UK. Mbeki noted that in Hutton™s book “The World We’re In”, attention was drawn to the global struggle “to defend the public sector against an ideological onslaught that seeks to celebrate individualism and denigrate the state”.

He quoted Hutton: “As the new conservatism has honed its rhetoric and political programmes in the United States to celebrate individualism and denigrate the State, so that same philosophy has become seamlessly part of the new international common sense … we are all becoming American conservatives now.”

Mbeki continued to quote Hutton, saying that the rights of the propertied “and the freedom of business come before any assertion of the public interest or social concerns has become the consensus orthodoxy”.

“In this climate taxation is depicted as the confiscation of what is properly our own — an intolerable burden that should be reduced. The social, the collective and the public realm are portrayed as the enemies of prosperity and individual autonomy… and worse are opposed to the moral basis of society grounded as it should be in the absolute responsibility of individuals to shoulder their burdens and exercise their rights alone.”

He noted that Hutton argues that Western democracies had been characterised by “one broad family of ideas that might be called Left — a belief in the social, reduction in inequality, the provision of public services, the principle that workers should be treated as assets rather than commodities, regulation of enterprise, rehabilitation of criminals, tolerance and respect for minorities — and another broad family of ideas that might be called Right: An honouring of our inherited institutional fabric, a respect for order, a belief that private property rights and profit are essential to the operation of the market economy, a suspicion of worker rights, faith in the remedial value of punitive justice and distrust of the new.”

Mbeki emphasised that there could “be no doubt about where we stand” with regard to this “great divide”. It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton called ideas “that might be called” Left.

Mbeki underscored this, saying the obligations of the democratic state to the masses of the people required that he should not join the Right.

“We would never succeed to eradicate the legacy of colonialism and apartheid if we joined the campaign to portray the public realm as the enemies of prosperity,” he said

Meanwhile, opposition leader Tony Leon said Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain was, rather than take the view of Hutton, incorporating the best parts of the private sector in the public sector.

He noted too that Britain was trying to withdraw from the European labour regulations regime. – I-Net Bridge

Source: Daily Mail & Guardian
URL: http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=117698/p>