To call Labour 'Stalinists' for proposing regulation is beyond absurd

Mark Steel in The Independent

Some people might react to the energy companies raising prices another 8 per cent by saying, “It shouldn’t be allowed.” If you’re one of those people, you should be aware that you’re like Stalin. Because after Ed Miliband’s speech in which he said he would freeze energy prices for a while, he was attacked for being like Stalin by several Conservative politicians and newspapers. So if your neighbour says today, “Ooh those blooming gas people, we shouldn’t let them to put their ruddy prices up again”, tell her, “You murdering bastard. I know your sort, first you starved millions of peasants to death, then you signed a pact with Hitler. Well I’m not afraid to stand up to you, even if you are likely to incarcerate me in a Siberian prison, Mrs Whittaker.”

This is the history that will soon be accepted, that communism collapsed when millions of people demanded that electricity prices were doubled. Heroic citizens stood on the crumbling Berlin Wall and proclaimed, “At last we are free to vote and listen to rock music and charge thousands of pounds for turning the radiators on.”

This is a common response now to any proposal that big business is suspicious of. The suggestion that landowners may be required to use some of their land for housebuilding, to “expand towns such as Stevenage”, was compared by the Institute of Directors to “Joseph Stalin’s notorious seizure of land from prosperous Russians.” For those not familiar with the methods of Stalin, he sent his army to shoot any farmers who didn’t hand over all their land to the state. So if you own a garden in Stevenage you’re in trouble.

Tanks will roll past Luton and on to Welwyn Garden City, rampaging soldiers ignoring the cries of children as they transfer the waste ground behind Stevenage Asda to Hertfordshire County Council, cruelly laughing as they build two-bedroom affordable flats while the people of Bletchley can only wonder if they’ll be next.

Even more worrying, opinion polls show that 75 per cent of people support renationalising the railways, which even Labour aren’t proposing, so three-quarters of the population is WORSE than Stalin. This means that if Stalin was alive in Britain now, his speeches would start, “You lot want too much nationalisation, that’s your trouble.”

So we should write letters to First Great Western Trains such as, “Not only does this country have the most expensive rail network in Europe, but last week my train to Cardiff was delayed by two hours and I had to stand all the way. Congratulations, this proves we’re free. Please please don’t ever give in to those interfering Stalinists who’d take away your right to rob us blind and leave us with deep vein thrombosis.”

Similarly, Scottish Southern Energy’s managing director Will Morris explained his company’s latest 8 per cent price rise by saying, “Our aim is to keep prices low.” But that would clearly be immoral and Stalinist so be thankful he’s prepared to make a stand for freedom and put them up. Along with our payments we should send a tip, and a note saying, “Thank you Mr Morris sir, if I may address you sir, for putting up the prices an’ all, for us simple folk don’t want the burden of what to do wiv spare money and only go and waste it on crack like what happens wiv communism.”

Even when the European Union issued a directive that bankers’ bonuses should be kept to just double their salary, David Cameron went berserk about “interference”. Any attempt to regulate the behaviour of big business in any way is seen as an outrageous intrusion, against the laws of nature and sinful.

The Bible will be rewritten soon, to read that “Jesus took the seven loaves and two fish, and gave them to the starving crowd of thousands who all ate and were satisfied. And the Chief Executive of the Galilee Haddock Corporation did smite Jesus for artificially increasing supply, thereby interfering with the price as determined by the free market. And Jesus learned to refrain from miracles for the Institute of Directors did say they were Stalinist.”

For 30 years the trend has been towards allowing the biggest companies and banks to do whatever they like, even after the system crashed. To be fair this does create a wonderfully free society, as long as you’re on the board of one of those companies or banks. Obviously the section of society that isn’t on the board of a multinational corporation or a bank hasn’t done so well, but there will always be some minority with something to complain about.

After the crash of 1929, Western governments took the view that the banks should be regulated a bit, and these rules remained until they were ripped up in the 1980s. But this time the banks, businesses and individuals that fuelled the crash have carried on exactly as before.

Now Labour has suggested a handful of modifications to this system, and they’re called Stalinists. So we should allow the companies to behave as they like, until sections of the population sit freezing, unable to travel, their 40-year-old sons and daughters huddled with them as Stevenage remains unexpanded, maybe keeping a diary of their existence in the icy conditions that goes, “We’re all very grateful. At least it’s not like it would be under Stalin.”

Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves

Museums of art should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and display them accordingly. Step through the lobby into the gallery of love

• 
• • Alain de Botton
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 10 October 2013 13.35 BST

Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet might help you make a long-term relationship more exciting.

What would you do to help someone who felt deeply anxious about the future? Or who was dragged down by a sense of sadness and loneliness? How could you make a long-term relationship more exciting or alleviate your impression of being a loser?

My answer in all of these cases is to recommend that you look closely and repeatedly at certain works of art. To be more specific, I'd advise taking in Sugimoto's North Atlantic Ocean for the first problem, Richard Serra's Fernanda Pessoa for the second, Jan Steen's Woman at her Toilet for the third and a 15th-century statue of the Buddhist saintly figure, Guanyin, for the fourth.

The idea that one might use art for a purpose, for "instrumental" reasons, tends to set off alarm bells. Art is not an instrument, comes the almost automatic reply. It shouldn't be thought of as some kind of tool. It's not a pill. It shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to cheer you up or to make you a more empathetic person. Art galleries aren't chemists.

I couldn't disagree more. If culture is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might call our souls. Art galleries should be apothecaries for our deeper selves.

Religions have always been clear on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the west, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice. A lot of Buddhist sculpture had an equally clear mission: to encourage us to achieve an inner calm by contemplating the serene expression on the Buddha's face, especially his smile. We should take some inspiration from these examples and demand more from the art of our times.

There is nothing wrong with thinking of artworks as tools and asking them to do things for us. They can help our psyches in a variety of ways: rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses and reawaken appreciation. But in order to do these things, they need to be better signposted as having the power to do so. Modern galleries should recognise the therapeutic potential of their collections and honour it in the way they display them. At present, art museums are typically set out under headings such as The Nineteenth Century or The Northern Italian School, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. But this may not do very much for us in our deep selves. A more fertile indexing system would group together artworks from across genres and eras according to our inner needs.

In my ideal museum, you would enter into the lobby and find a map showing galleries devoted to a range of topics with which we often need help: work, love, family, mortality, community, status, anxiety. In the gallery of love, for example, you might be shown Pisano's Daphnis and Chloe, a deeply evocative reminder of the sense of gratitude and wonder with which most of us start relationships, but all too soon abandon (art is a superlative memory-bank for precious emotions that otherwise disappear). The gallery might then move us on to a Richard Long sculpture, where highly irregular and jagged stones were brought into harmony within a perfect circle, a metaphor for the way our own differences would ideally be accommodated in relationships.

Through such themed galleries, art would start to serve psychology in the same way it has served theology for centuries. A walk through a museum of art would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the emotions which are easiest for us to forget but life-enhancing to remember. Arranged in this way, museums of art would then be able to claim that they really had fulfilled that excellent but as yet elusive ambition of becoming substitutes for our cathedrals and churches in a rapidly secularising society.

The Royal Mail sell-off is not simply about bean-counting

Behind talk of needing to balance the books is a far-reaching project to unleash market forces into all domains of our lives

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Thursday 10 October 2013 20.31 BST

Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi

Balancing the books – or counting beans, if you want to be dismissive about it – is what this is all supposed to be about. The cuts in social spending are regrettable, we are told, but they have to be made because the government cannot have more outgoings than its income, as no sensible household should. Didn't Adam Smith, the grandfather of economics, tell us that what "is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom"?

The argument for book-balancing has been used even to justify the privatisation of Royal Mail, not least because the usual argument about inefficiency of public enterprises does not apply to it. The sale will increase government revenue and thus reduce budget deficits, it is said. In the same vein, the government has patted itself on the back for selling (and planning to sell) the shares of the bailed-out banks at a profit, further reducing deficits.

Don't be fooled by all the boring language of bookkeeping, however. Behind it lies an ambitious project to restructure British society fundamentally by expanding the domains of our life that are subject to market forces. In the last few years, regulation has been strengthened for the financial sector, although not as much as you would have thought, given the mess that it created. But in almost all other areas of life, the trend has been an unleashing of market forces. And the results have been rather stark – and will become more so, if the project is allowed to continue.

Thanks to cuts in social spending, the disabled and the elderly have had to buy more expensive supports from the market – or, more typically, put up with greater discomfort and indignity. With cuts in unemployment benefit, an increasing number of workers have been forced to accept zero-hour contracts and other employment conditions that are more fitting for developing countries, if not exactly for the Victorian era.

Privatisation and contracting-out of government services have meant that more and more services that used to be provided on the basis of citizenship are now distributed according to how much people can pay. As we have already seen with energy, water and railways, privatisation of "natural monopolies" means higher prices and/or lower quality services, unless regulation severely constrains market forces, as it does in countries such as Japan. In the most extreme cases, privatisation of natural monopolies can mean more deaths – ranging from casualties of rail accidents caused by under-investment in safety to untimely deaths of pensioners weakened by inadequate heating.

When Royal Mail joins this list, we can be assured that deliveries to remote areas will become less frequent and/or more expensive, while postal workers will have greater workload and less time for human contact.

The point is that markets are run on the principle of "one pound, one vote", which means that those who have enough money can fulfil even the most frivolous of their desires, while those who don't may starve to death. And it is because we don't want such outcomes that humanity has learned to control market forces through public regulation – ideally decided on the "one person, one vote" principle of democracy.

As a result, over time, many things have been taken out – at least partially – of the market: human beings (slaves), child labour, public offices, basic education, healthcare and so on. Even for the marketed things, how you can make money out of them has come under increasing restrictions. For example, in the old days drugs did not require an approval before sales, and companies did not have to reveal anything about themselves when selling shares.

Of course, in the past few decades, the trend towards such "de-marketisation" has been reversed in many countries, especially in the UK. However, that was not because the boundaries of the market as they existed in the 1960s and 70s had been drawn in violation of some natural laws, as the proponents of deregulation and privatisation like to suggest. It was mainly due to the shift in political balance of power towards the moneyed classes, which has unfortunately been accelerating in recent years.

The argument that there are no natural boundaries of the market is best illustrated bySingapore. This successful country is often portrayed as the paragon of free market, but it is actually something quite different. All of its land is publicly owned, 85% of housing is supplied by the public housing corporation and more than 20% of national output is produced by public enterprises, in industries ranging from shipbuilding and semi-conductors to airlines and banking.

Saying that there is no one correct way of drawing boundaries around the market is, of course, not to say that we can do without markets. Vibrant markets are essential for generating prosperity and improving human welfare, as the counter-examples of the Soviet bloc countries show. But that does not mean that more market forces are always better, in the same way in which salt is essential for our survival but too much of it is harmful.

Markets are in the end man-made devices for utilitarian purposes, not a force of nature that we should not try to resist. If they end up serving the interests of only a tiny minority, as is increasingly the case, we have the right – and indeed the duty – to regulate them in the interest of greater social good.

More than jihadism or Iran, China's role in Africa is Obama's obsession

Where America brings drones, the Chinese build roads. Al-Shabaab and co march in lockstep with this new imperialism

• 
• • John Pilger
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 9 October 2013 20.15 BST

Hu Jintao, who stepped down as Chinese president last year, in Tanzania on a tour intended to cement China's ties with Africa. Photograph: STR New / Reuters/REUTERS

Countries are "pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world", wrote Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in Nairobi was a bloody facade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa and a war in Asia are the great game.

The al-Shabaab shopping mall killers came from Somalia. If any country is an imperial metaphor, it is Somalia. Sharing a language and religion, Somalis have been divided between the British, French, Italians and Ethiopians. Tens of thousands of people have been handed from one power to another. "When they are made to hate each other," wrote a British colonial official, "good governance is assured."

Today Somalia is a theme park of brutal, artificial divisions, long impoverished by World Bank and IMF "structural adjustment" programmes, and saturated with modern weapons – notably President Obama's personal favourite, the drone. The one stable Somali government, the Islamic Courts, was "well received by the people in the areas it controlled", reported the US Congressional Research Service, "[but] received negative press coverage, especially in the west". Obama crushed it; and last January Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, presented her man to the world. "Somalia will remain grateful to the unwavering support from the United States government," effused President Hassan Mohamud. "Thank you, America."

The shopping mall atrocity was a response to this – just as the Twin Towers attack and the London bombings were explicit reactions to invasion and injustice. Once of little consequence, jihadism now marches in lockstep with the return of unfettered imperialism.

Since Nato reduced modern Libya to a Hobbesian state in 2011, the last obstacles to Africa have fallen. "Scrambles for energy, minerals and fertile land are likely to occur with increasingly intensity," report Ministry of Defence planners. As "high numbers of civilian casualties" are predicted, "perceptions of moral legitimacy will be important for success". Sensitive to the PR problem of invading a continent, the arms mammoth BAE Systems, together with Barclays Capital and BP, warns that "the government should define its international mission as managing risks on behalf of British citizens". The cynicism is lethal. British governments are repeatedly warned, not least by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, that foreign adventures beckon retaliation at home.

With minimal media interest, the US African Command (Africom) has deployed troops to 35 African countries, establishing a familiar network of authoritarian supplicants eager for bribes and armaments. In war games a "soldier to soldier" doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. The British did this in India. It is as if Africa's proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master's black colonial elite – whose "historic mission", warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the subjugation of their own people in the cause of "a capitalism rampant though camouflaged". The reference also fits the son of Africa in the White House.

For Obama, there is a more pressing cause – China. Africa is China's success story. Where the Americans bring drones, the Chinese build roads, bridges and dams. What the Chinese want is resources, especially fossil fuels. Nato's bombing of Libya drove out 30,000 Chinese oil industry workers. More than jihadism or Iran, China is Washington's obsession in Africa and beyond. This is a "policy" known as the "pivot to Asia", whose threat of world war may be as great as any in the modern era.

This week's meeting in Tokyo between John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary, and their Japanese counterparts accelerated the prospect of war. Sixty per cent of US naval forces are to be based in Asia by 2020, aimed at China. Japan is re-arming rapidly under the rightwing government of Shinzo Abe, who came to power in December with a pledge to build a "new, strong military" and circumvent the "peace constitution".

A US-Japanese anti-ballistic-missile system near Kyoto is directed at China. Using long-range Global Hawk drones the US has sharply increased its provocations in the East China and South China seas, where Japan and China dispute the ownership of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Both countries now deploy advanced vertical take-off aircraft in Japan in preparation for a blitzkrieg.

On the Pacific island of Guam, from where B-52s attacked Vietnam, the biggest military buildup since the Indochina wars includes 9,000 US marines. In Australia this week an arms fair and military jamboree that diverted much of Sydney is in keeping with a government propaganda campaign to justify an unprecedented US military build-up from Perth to Darwin, aimed at China. The vast US base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is, as Edward Snowden disclosed, a hub of US spying in the region and beyond; it is also critical to Obama's worldwide assassinations by drone.

'We have to inform the British to keep them on side," McGeorge Bundy, an assistant US secretary of state, once said. "You in Australia are with us, come what may." Australian forces have long played a mercenary role for Washington. However, China is Australia's biggest trading partner and largely responsible for its evasion of the 2008 recession. Without China, there would be no minerals boom: no weekly mining return of up to a billion dollars.

The dangers this presents are rarely debated publicly in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch, the patron of the prime minister, Tony Abbott, controls 70% of the press. Occasionally, anxiety is expressed over the "choice" that the US wants Australia to make. A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute warns that any US plan to strike at China would involve "blinding" Chinese surveillance, intelligence and command systems. This would "consequently increase the chances of Chinese nuclear pre-emption … and a series of miscalculations on both sides if Beijing perceives conventional attacks on its homeland as an attempt to disarm its nuclear capability". In his address to the nation last month, Obama said: "What makes America different, what makes us exceptional, is that we are dedicated to act."

Subramanyam Swamy Speaks

Some of the reasons behind the fall of the Indian Rupee

Subramanian Swamy talks on Islam

Some details on Dar al Harb can be found here:
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Dar_al-Harb

Ed Miliband isn’t offering socialism – but the Tories are still terrified

Owen Jones in The Independent

The rule of capital is “unimpaired and virtually unchallenged; no social democratic party is nowadays concerned to mount a serious challenge to that rule.” If he was still with us, the socialist Ralph Miliband would have noted two big changes since he wrote these words not long before his death in 1994. Firstly, he’d observe – with little surprise – that capitalism has plunged itself into yet another almighty mess. Secondly, he would undoubtedly be consumed with pride that his youngest son had assumed the leadership of one of these social democratic parties. Momentous events indeed: but his wistful conclusion would have remained the same.

That in mind, I wonder what Ralph Miliband would have made of his son’s transformation from a “laughable blank sheet of paper” to “frothing-at-the-mouth Communist who is going to nationalise your mother quicker than you can say ‘Friedrich Engels had a cracking beard'”. Ed Miliband’s suggested crackdown on land-banking (once endorsed by Boris “Commie” Johnson) and a temporary freeze on energy prices (backed by arch-Leninist Tom Burke, the former Tory special adviser on energy) have provoked comparisons with undesirable elements ranging from Robert Mugabe to the Bolsheviks. After he stood on a soapbox in Brighton and indulged a bystander asking when he would “bring back socialism”, the British right have behaved as though Labour are planning to finish what Lenin was doing before he was so rudely interrupted.

In part, it is the sinister red-baiting of Ed Miliband through his dead father, culminating with the Daily Mail accusing the Labour leader of planning to drive “a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us love”. Pass the spliff, Mr Dacre. “Like a good Marxist,” writes The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore, “he detects the cowardice latent in capitalists,” accusing Miliband of being “part of an ideology” which is “ultimately pauperising and totalitarian.” Jeremy Hunt odiously endorsed the Mail’s lunacy, arguing that “Ralph Miliband was no friend of the free market and I have never heard Ed Miliband say he supports it.” George Osborne, meanwhile, accuses Ed Miliband of making “essentially the same argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital.”

This is what is really going on. The right are so drunk on three decades of free-market triumphalism, so used to the left being smashed and battered, that they believe even the mildest deviation from the neo-liberal script is unacceptable. They thought all of these battles had been won, that they were rid of all their turbulent priests, and now they are incandescent at the alleged resurgence of defeated enemies. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be dead? It’s not even the most moderate form of social democracy that the right are trying to drive from political life. Anyone who does not advocate yet more aggressive doses of neo-liberalism – more privatisation, more cuts to the taxes of the wealthy, more attacks on workers’ rights – is liable to come under suspicion, too.

The British right’s strategy is pretty clear. They want to do to “socialist” what the US right have done to “liberal”: turn it into an unequivocally toxic word that no-one in public life would want to associate with, and use it as a means to smear political opponents deemed to deviate from Britain’s suffocating neo-liberal consensus. Bemusing, to say the least, given Labour first officially declared itself a “democratic socialist party” under Tony Blair in 1995 as a sop to the left in the party’s new revised Clause IV. He even wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet entitled Socialism. Yes, granted it meant nothing more to him than motherhood and apple pie, and he had more leeway than Miliband because it was rather more difficult to pin him down as a heartfelt lefty, but the point is even New Labour could happily bandy “socialism” about.

But let’s get a bit of perspective here. Socialism? I don’t think so. Labour have – wrongly – committed themselves to Osborne’s spending plans in the first year of a new government. As Michael Gove gobbles up the comprehensive education system for dinner, Labour’s response has been, to say the least, muted. Medialand may be wailing about 1970s socialism being back with a vengeance, but given polls show 69 per cent want the energy companies nationalised, the Labour leader still found himself to the right of public opinion. No commitment on rail renationalisation, either, which some polls show is even the preferred option of Tory voters. There’s suggestions Labour would hike the top rate of tax up to 50 per cent again, but polls show the public would be happy to take it to 60 per cent. Not exactly the full-scale expropriation of the bourgeoisie, is it?

In truth, Ed Miliband strikes me as an old-style social democrat, perhaps what would have been described as the “Old Labour Right” before Blair’s Year Zero. He generally seems well-intentioned about dragging the political centre of gravity away from the Thatcherite right, but appears to fear a lack of political space to do so. He has made moves towards a mild social democracy in limited areas – but it is just that, mild, although even that is too strong for those now imitating the hysterical rhetoric of Barack Obama’s Tea Party opponents.

It is difficult, sometimes, not to be overwhelmed by the  hypocrisy of the right. They don’t mind a bit of statism, as long as, generally speaking, it’s propping up the wealthy. Banks bailed out by the taxpayer, not free-market dogma; infrastructure, education, and research and development that all businesses depend on, paid for by the state; private contractors who owe their profits solely to state largesse; even mortgages now underwritten by the state. It is only when it is suggested that the state might help those near the bottom of the pile that the right cries foul. In their world, “moderation” means the biggest cuts since the 1920s, the driving of over a million children into poverty, privatising the NHS without public consent and dropping bombs on foreign countries. “Extremism” is curbing energy prices, asking the booming wealthy to pay a bit more tax, and stopping construction firms squatting on land during a housing crisis. So let’s start telling it as it is: they are the extremists, however much they squeal disingenuously about the “centre ground”.

Real democratic socialism would not mean the odd curb on energy prices. It would mean a living wage instead of subsidises for poverty pay, and allowing councils to build housing rather than taxpayers lining the pockets of private landlords. It would mean arguing for social ownership – from banks to the railways – giving real democratic control to workers and consumers.

That is not currently on offer from Labour. But the right fear that, if even mild social-democratic populism proves popular, the door might open to more radical ideas. Their whole Thatcherite consensus could prove imperilled. And that is why the British right are starting to sound like bad-tempered Joseph McCarthy clones who stigmatise even timid social democracy as dangerous extremism to block any further shift away from free market extremism. But a word of warning to the right. Look across the Atlantic. How has the Tea Party-isation of the US right worked out for them? Because that is exactly where you are heading.

Obamacare begins – and the right is terrified that it will work

Rupert Cornwell in The Independent

In a week in which all the talk was of shutdown, the most notable development here in Washington was something that opened up. I refer to the launch of the online federal and state health exchanges that are a key feature of Obamacare, allowing those without health insurance to shop around for the best plan.

Readers who have managed to keep up with the latest antics of what passes as the United States Congress will be aware that the reason Republican hardliners shut down the government was to force the President to delay – or to put it less politely, dismantle – his signature legislative achievement. Yet in a splendid two-finger gesture by fate, on the very day that veterans' services, national parks and a host of other government functions were closing, the health exchanges, symbol of everything those Republicans detest about Obamacare, were opening for business.

True, the moment was pretty shambolic. Overwhelmed by visitors, the websites virtually seized up on day one, though things seemed to improve slightly as the week wore on. But it was a start, and let it never be forgotten what Obamacare is attempting: to bring the US in line with every other advanced industrial country and provide healthcare for all its citizens, irrespective of their means.

Others had tried it before. Harry Truman called for universal health insurance in the late 1940s, only to be described by Republican adversaries as a crypto-communist. Two decades later, Lyndon Johnson did push through Medicare and Medicaid for elderly and poor Americans. Not, however, before a certain aspiring conservative politician named Ronald Reagan predicted that Medicare would see Americans "spending their sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like when men were free".

Then came Bill Clinton. Alas, he created the impression that a coterie of White House officials, led by his wife, Hillary, was trying to foist its pet ideas upon a suspicious country and he, too, failed. But in 2010, after a monumental fight, Obama's plan was finally approved by Congress.

Yet still Republicans continue their Canute-like refusal to accept the rules of democracy. No matter that the measure was signed by the President and ratified by the Supreme Court, or that Republicans resoundingly lost the 2012 presidential election in which Obamacare was a prime issue. The law, their leaders say, is a "monstrosity," a "trainwreck" that must be fought by every means, even if that means closing down the government.

Now, no one would argue that the reform is perfect. Even without the distortions and abuse peddled by the right- and left-wing media alike, it is extremely hard to understand. Nor will it cover absolutely everyone. If you started from scratch, you would almost certainly go for some form of single-payer system, a universal, government-funded scheme of the sort that Truman advocated.

Determined not to make the Clintons' mistake, Obama consulted with every interested party: Democrats and Republicans, hospitals, private insurers, doctors and the pharmaceutical companies. He bent over backwards to retain the existing structure of employer-based coverage, even dropping proposals for a "public option" favoured by the left as a way of keeping the private insurers honest. In doing so, he bowed, in effect, to the conservatives' argument that an alternative state-run insurance scheme would pave the way for a single-payer system.

But, as Obama has painfully discovered, offer Republicans an olive branch and they'll use it to whip you. Since 2010, the Republican-controlled House has passed no fewer than 42 resolutions seeking to overturn Obamacare (albeit knowing that the Senate would reject every one.) Now it has shut down the government, even though 70 per cent of the US public disapproves of the tactic, and even right-wing commentators argue that the way to get rid of Obamacare is via the ballot box, not blackmail. Elect a Republican president and a Republican Congress, they say, then repeal the thing.

At state level, where Republicans dominate, the sabotage of Obamacare is endless. Many states have failed to set up health exchanges. Citizens are being urged to flout the law and pay a fine rather than obey the individual mandate that requires them to buy insurance. Most inexcusable of all, a swathe of red states is refusing to expand Medicaid, which helps the poor. That will be critical for the success of Obamacare – even though the federal government is picking up 100 per cent of the cost for the first three years, and 90 per cent thereafter.

Why this scorched-earth opposition? After all, the mandate was originally a Republican idea, put forward by the impeccably conservative Heritage Foundation some two decades ago. Obamacare, moreover, is based on the healthcare reform enacted in Massachusetts in 2006 under the state's then governor, Mitt Romney – the Republicans' White House candidate in 2012. And at a simple human level, why oppose a law providing cover for 28 million people who don't have it?

One reason is Republicans' visceral dislike of Obama, on political, personal or racist grounds – or a blend of all three. Ideologically, they are terrified not that healthcare reform will fail, with the dire consequences they predict, but that it will succeed.

Success would strike at the very core of Republican belief, that government is bad for you and should be reduced to the bare minimum to sustain a functioning state. Despite public wariness of the law as a whole, several of its main provisions are extremely popular (as the once reviled Medicare now is.) If Obamacare works, Americans would feel better about government in general; the terrible monster erected by Republican demonology would be seen to be benign, after all. What price the party's electoral prospects then?