Socialism for a Sceptical Age

Why calling every bad thing socialism destroys political discourse

6 min read

Just now

Amongst the litany of arguments we see made by people on the right when it comes to topics such as socialism, one of the most annoying (but perhaps most amusing) is when they simply attribute vague things they don’t like about things currently happening and say this is socialism. We saw this in the US with the right claiming that Biden’s America was socialist because of the prices of goods, for instance, and we see this in Britain also.

In Britain, people on the right will point to high taxes in certain areas and claim that this is an example of socialism. This is an age-old right-wing argument that they’ve been making for decades, and it was constantly made by Margaret Thatcher throughout her 11-year term as Prime Minister.

Laila Cunningham is a councillor in London, and now a London Mayoral candidate for Reform UK and she recentlty posted a clip of her on GB News, a right-wing propaganda outlet where she was having a discussion with Michael Walker of Novara Media in which she made a number of very questionable claims about Britain being socialist. She started off by pointing out that she originally thought socialism would come through violent revolution, such as we saw in Russia however, she argued that socialism has been brought…