Peter of Peter Risdon gives me an opportunity to restate why I'll be voting Labour tomorrow, and at the same time to defend myself against his implied charge that I begged the question when I gave my reasons a few days ago. The main reason I gave was that 'social justice trumps other considerations'. Peter says he agrees with this, but that there's a great chasm between my view of social justice and his view. And then he adds:
I'm left wondering, again, why it is that socialism seems to demand advancement by begged question, in a way that no other branch of politics seems to.
Well, first, socialists doubtless do beg the question often enough, but they have no monopoly on doing this. And, second, though I am a socialist, socialism wasn't at the heart of the reasons I gave for voting Labour - I have no socialist expectations of a Labour government. My social-justice reason was a less far-reaching one: in a nutshell, that one can expect more from Labour in the way of policies contributing to social justice (on my conception of this) than one can from the other two main parties.
Yet I wasn't begging the question. To beg the question is to assume, in your premises, the truth of the conclusion you have set out to establish; and in that post I hadn't set out to establish anything. I was giving in summary form my own reasons for voting Labour. It would have been more than rash of me to think I could make a case for a whole conception of social justice in one or two lines. And I didn't try. Neither will I now. But in a very short blogpost I feel entitled simply to telegraph, without more ado, that I think there are unjustified inequalities in our society, and that Labour has a better record of addressing these than the Conservative Party does, and is more likely than are either the Tories or the Lib-Dems to look to the needs of working people and the less well off. I'm perfectly familiar with the fact that there are other conceptions of social justice, the proponents of which are less concerned about inequality and poverty than I am, if concerned about them at all; but I'm not obliged to take these on in everything I write, or indeed in anything I write - though, as it happens, I sometimes do.
