This week’s lazy Tory Party attack – Oxfam
“The recurring [Tory] strategy is, if someone disagrees with you, don’t try to argue your case, just try to smear the person or organisation making the attack – say they’re ‘socialist’, ‘stalinist’ or just ‘politically motivated’.”
Let’s all watch Iain Duncan Smith doing that on Question Time on Thursday, as a living example.
This follows a very well-worn path by the Tories and the extreme Right. Back in the 1980s the National Association For Freedom, now the Freedom Association (but still NAFF) attacked Oxfam and a number of other leading charities as really being political pressure groups. In Belgium, the Security Services, according to Lobster, were at one time so full of extreme Right-wing paranoiacs and loonies that they were investigating Oxfam as a Communist organisation. It also shows the influence of the transatlantic Right, as they’re also reviving a campaign against Oxfam and other charities on the grounds that they are Socialistic and keep the Developing World in welfare dependency.
So the tories think that by branding something as socialist we won’t like it then?
It seems “socialist” has been a swear word since the mid-1990s. Go figure.