On the points about unemployment, there’s statistical data to back-up your claim that it’s now come to pass that higher unemployment just is something the post-1979 settlement accepts:

http://badconscience.com/2009/08/19/is-high-unemployment-a-policy-choice/

skip the text (it’s a bit confused) and just go to the graph showing unemployment rates. Notice that post1979, the lowest levels of unemployment were permanently above the highest levels experienced from 1970-79. That is, post-Thatcher unemployment never went below the worst days of that supposedly terrible decade.

Which says somethnig about how popular perceptions now define and understand “terrible”…

Yes, I would have preferred Gordon Brown to say something different too.

Tom, Dave, Dom

I think the question of what language we use to desribe what we want and how we want to get there – whether to seek to re-appropriate terms which currently mean something else, or whether we accept that often such tersm are irrevocably ‘lost’ and actually damage the socialist cause even when we use them – is a fascinating one something I’ll try to return too. As a general point, though, we shouln’t be scared to develop our own terminology on our own terms.

“And to the extent that socialists begin using the idea of aspiration in the hopes of rebranding it, they find themselves caught within the internal logic of the meaning aspiration must necessarily have under capitalism: individualism.”

I don’t think socialists should talk about aspiration (which in the public debate is assumed to be bound up with individual advancement), but I’m not sure that the internal logic here is quite as strong as all that.

I was really struck when I was a councillor by the extent to which people’s aspirations were about their community and expressly opposed to aspiration-as-individuals-getting-rich. I blogged about this – Middle England, home-owning, Daily Mail readers absolutely hated buy-to-let landlords because the actions of these landlords harmed aspirations to live in a nice, decent area where people knew each other.

By acting on these concerns with local campaigns, we got lots of new activists involved, we increased support for things like new social housing developments, and we got to a stage where local homeowners gave time and money to help council tenants when they were flooded (and Labour got 60% of the vote). By responding to people’s real aspirations, rather than those which capitalism seeks to impose on people, I think we can start to build these alliances amongst working-class people that Paul is talking about.