Compass Points

My copy of The Broken Compass is still on order, since I am doing my bit and acquiring it through a bookshop rather than Amazon. Call it a moment of madness if you will. Having heard Peter Hitchens talking about it on Start The Week, I am looking forward to reading it even more than I was before.

But I hope he will accept that most members of the Fabian Society never held views remotely comparable to those of the Bloomsbury set, and therefore do not hold views remotely comparable to those of the Primrose Hill set, except on matters (such as welfare provision, or trade union rights) on which they did or do also have the agreement of those whose patriotism, moral and social conservatism, or both is the stuff of which he can only dream while the Tories still exist.

If something economic is, was, or realistically would have been acceptable to Gaullists, Christian Democrats, the Australian followers of B A Santamaria, conservative Democrats, that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal, the League of Polish Families, much (historically, most) of Ulster Unionism, the whole of the DUP, the SDLP (whose relationship with Irish Nationalism is now even more ambivalent than ever), and so on, then what could possibly be the problem with it?