Peter Hitchens writes:
Just as there are still Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Borneo, unaware that they should have surrendered 63 years ago, there are still people who think ‘New Labour’ is Right-wing.
I’ve tried to get the message across to them, ever since the whole Blair project began. This is the most revolutionary government since Oliver Cromwell, dedicated to overthrowing the moral, social and cultural order of this country. But simpleton Labour Leftists (who want to nationalise Mr Whippy vans, Starbucks and eBay) and dimwit Tories (who likewise don’t grasp that the battlefield has shifted) just don’t get it.
The truth is – and I know it because I was a Sixties Trotskyist myself – that the Blair-Brown Labour Party is crammed full of unreformed revolutionaries. That’s why the MI5 files of that era have been so zealously destroyed. I tried to obtain my own docket and was refused on feeble grounds.
The fact is that mine went in the incinerator along with Peter Mandelson’s, John Reid’s and many others whose interesting pasts are much-rumoured around Westminster, but impossible to prove.
But now you don’t have to take my word for it. Last week, my lonely warnings were confirmed in an astonishing public statement by Tony McNulty, Minister of State at the Home Office.
Mr McNulty was sucking up to a pro-liberty group, who didn’t think much of his enthusiasm for jailing people without trial.
Believing that everyone there was a Leftist like him, he tried to win them over with these words: ‘I know it’s terribly hard to believe but I used to be radical myself. I used to think that politics was about selling newspapers...my excuse was I was very, very young but, you know, like a lot of government, I’m an ex-Trot.’
Now, I don’t find it hard to believe at all. Looking at the bland, prosperous faces of the Parliamentary Labour Party I see my generation, the ones who between about 1965 and 1975 learned to loathe patriotism, the Armed Forces, proper policing, proper schools, traditional religion, marriage, the Monarchy and all the other things that ‘alternative’ comedians are paid handsomely to sneer at on the BBC.
What a conformist bunch we were. And how hard we were on anyone who broke ranks – as I discovered when my direct experiences of Communist countries and of the inner workings of the Labour Party persuaded me to change my mind.
Hardly a week has passed since when I haven’t been gratuitously mocked or personally insulted by my former comrades. These people haven’t changed their minds. They haven’t the courage, the character or the experience to do so.
They’re too fat for the jeans and they’ve lost the hair, but they still think what they thought back then. Mr McNulty’s totalitarian belief in imprisonment without trial – justified, of course, by supposedly noble ends – comes straight from his revolutionary teens. Trotsky would have approved.
Which is why some of us are determined to restore the party that was otherwise destroyed by Communist and Trotskyist infiltration of the unions and the Constituency Labour Parties respectively, eventually leading to the creation of New Labour by utterly unrepentant old Communists, Trotskyists and fellow-travellers.
The party owing more to Methodism than to Marx, indeed owing nothing whatever to Marx. The party of the Welfare State, workers' rights, progressive taxation, full employment, strong local government, a strong Parliament, "patriotism, the Armed Forces, proper policing, proper schools, traditional religion, marriage, and the Monarchy". The party of Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell.
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David, you claimed Militant was restricted to Liverpool a few days ago. Note the phrase "the party your grandfather voted for", which you almost use in your blog entry, is the tagline of another organisation who use 'British' in their party name.
ReplyDeletePhilip Cross
"which you almost use in your blog entry"
ReplyDeleteWhere?
Good to see the "any use of the word British is Fascist" line being trotted out. Nothing remotely comparable applies in any other country. But then, in no other country is the inteligentsia (or those who think of themselves as such) as pathologically anti-patriotic as it is here.
Militant barely existed beyond Liverpool, and was tiny even there, where its councillors would not have been elected without the words "The Labour Party Candidate" next to their names. At one time after their expulsion, they were actually seeking (and gaining) election as "Official Labour".
The ostentious expulsion of this negligible faction has been the cover ever since for those who have never recanted their revolutionary Marxist past and who have morphed effortlessly into New Labour. They could always pretend that the sectarian Left had been purged with the expulsion of Militant. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Philip Cross and his like are rootless cosmopolitans. They love the EU and their idea of the US or Israel for the same reason that they loved the USSR: they hate Britain.
ReplyDeleteOn Militant, funny how they tracked down the only couple of dozen working-class Trots in the country, to a city in the North, and made such great play of purging them. The London and Oxbridge Trots were left entirely alone, as were the far more numerous Communists.
Just look where they all ended up. They got what they always wanted, they destroyed the Labour Party.
Being called a "rootless cosmopolitan" is a compliment, and was the term used by the former Soviet regime against the Jews. Actually, I am against the "war on terror" and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. I admit some sympathy for the "greater union" because I am anti-provincial rather than anti-British. Where is the "Lancaster Review of Books" or the "Yorkshire Post Literary Supplement"? Provincialism means the glorification of sport and 'popular (or unavoidable) culture' and little else.
ReplyDeletePhilip Cross
"Provincialism means the glorification of sport and 'popular (or unavoidable) culture' and little else."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 00:007's point is proved, I feel.