Artillery Row Podcast

Why the left has nowhere left to go

Chris Bayliss and Tom Jones discuss how progressivism got left behind

This week on The Critic Show, Chris Bayliss and Tom Jones discuss the article “The left is intellectually exhausted”, which argues that so-called progressives have failed to keep up with the times. At a moment when Britain is widely described as broken, the left should be politically ascendant. Instead, they argue, it has struggled to offer any serious analysis of how government and the state have drifted into stagnation.

Chris and Tom suggest the deeper problem is that the modern left struggles to face political realities. Moral questions are often treated as substitutes for practical ones, leaving basic policy problems unanswered. By focusing on signalling the right values rather than addressing difficult trade-offs, the left often ends up asking the wrong questions altogether. They also look ahead and predict how the left may eventually have to choose where it stands within an increasingly fragmentary right-wing political structure.

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