Pierre Bourdieu on Right-handed mentality.

While reading Pierre Bourdieu's work on class and inequities I recently came across his book (a collection of interviews and essays) titled 'Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market', where I discovered a fantastic quote which really encapsulates how the British centre-right think and act. Bourdieu states:

"The opinion of people who write in the newspapers, intellectuals who advocate the 'minimal state' and who are rather too quick to bury the notion of the public and the public's interests... We see there a typical example of the effect of shared belief which removes from discussion ideas which are perfectly worth discussing. One would need to analyse the work of the 'new intellectuals', which has created a climate favourable to the withdrawal of the state and, more broadly, to submission to the values of the economy. I'm thinking of what has been called the 'return of individualism', a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which tends to destroy the philosophical foundations of the welfare state and in particular the notion of collective responsibility (towards industrial accidents, sickness or poverty) which has been a fundamental achievement of of social (and sociological) thought. The return to the individual is also what makes it possible to 'blame the victim', who is entirely responsible for his or her own misfortune, and to preach the gospel of self-help, all of this being justified by the endlessly repeated need to reduce cost for companies". (1998: 7)

For me this really epitomises the coalition government we live under today and their unjustifiable policies surrounding education and the NHS.