The Little Red School Book

There was a programme on Radio Four this morning about this largely forgotten work, which referred to "child molesters and dirty old men" as merely having "no one to sleep with", and which encouraged to children to seek inspiration from pornography even when it featured sadomasochism and bestiality. We were informed that the chapter on drugs "could now come from the National Curriculum". Quite so.

The programme was also quite right that, for all the adolescent pseudo-Marxism, the Communist Party was dead against this book, since it was nothing but a glorification of bourgeois hedonism. But today, this country is entirely run by adolescent pseudo-Marxists, utterly unrepentant student stalwarts of Communist and Trotskyist organisations in the Seventies and Eighties, whose lives remain, deep into late middle age, nothing but an adolescent glorification of bourgeois hedonism.

Indeed, I am increasingly of the view that those who are busily engaged in overthrowing Toryism, and replacing it with definition in the pseudo-conservative terms of unrestricted markets and endless foreign wars, are not mere imitators of the old Communists and Trotskyists who overthrew a phenomenally successful Christian-based bulwark against Marxism and replaced it with New Labour.

Rather, since upper-class Marxists are nothing unusual in themselves (they have always been far more common than working-class Marxists), these people were and are actual infiltrators. Just as Trotsky's Fourth International infiltrated, took over, and may yet have supplanted the American Republican Party - because who would ever have looked for them there? -, so people of admittedly rather less intellectual seriousness, even if broadly of the same kind, really do look to have infiltrated, to have taken over, and quite possibly to have supplanted the British Conservative Party.