The 1997 Election should have been a proper contest. New Labour had a programme of undergraduate Marxery from twenty years before where social, cultural and constitutional matters were concerned, but wanted to leave exactly as they were the economic matters that were the reason why absolutely any Labour Leader at all had by then been bound to win for four and a half years. None of this was discussed.
Instead, the same media that now refuse to report Harriet Harman’s truly scandalous past shrieked “sleeeeaaaaze!” until it was barely even a word. Labour would and should have won anyway. But this coverage (or lack of it) delivered a crushingly huge majority which at least appeared to vindicate the Blair Project, and which left the Dear Leader wholly independent of more economically left-leaning, more conservative and more patriotic elements of his party either within or beyond Parliament. In its old economically left-wing, conservative, patriotic strongholds, turnout is now sometimes as low as one in three, and the BNP is filling the void.
Much the same thing is beginning again. The extremely liberal social and cultural views, attitudes and behaviour of the people now running the Conservative Party are never mentioned. Nor is their strong stance in favour of a united Europe under overall American control. Nor is their wholesale acceptance of, and indeed desire to extend, the New Labour constitutional agenda. Nor is anything else about them. They are simply presented as fresh, clean, pretty and posh, whereas the Government is stale, dirty, ugly and frightfully non-U. After two terms of Cameron, if not before, turnout in the old Tory heartlands of the social conscience, traditional values, patriotism and constitutionalism will sometimes be as low as one in three. In a third term, if not before, the BNP will fill that void.
For, if this strategy works (and it is mercifully still unclear that it is doing so), then we will be given another government of ultra-capitalist, ultra-liberal, Eurofederalist, uncritically pro-American constitutional vandals, with another majority so enormous that it can just ignore the dwindling band of social consciences, moral and social conservatives, patriots and constitutionalists. Those four overlapping categories of Tory gave Margaret Thatcher an awful lot of trouble before going on to oppose Maastricht. But of that, another time.
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Didn't you write almost this exact same post in a comment over at the spectator yesterday? And wasn't it completely ignored except for one person who took offence at your patronising "of that, another time"
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think that was?
No, it was Verity, who asked me to expand at greater length about the specific content here.
ReplyDeleteFen feels patronised by anything he can't understand. He must feel patronised a lot of the time.
ReplyDeleteAlas not, because he normally only ever encounters his own kind. I'm astonished that he got to the end of this. He must have started there.
ReplyDeleteNow, back on topic.
I thought hyping up the danger of the BNP was a lazy, prejudiced, Oxbridge grad maneouvre?
ReplyDeleteThat's why the BBC does it. Only too successfully.
ReplyDeleteSo why do you do it?
ReplyDeleteI don't exactly inhabit the world of Broadcasting House or Television Centre. Therefore, I can see what all this lavishing of publicity on the BNP is doing.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't making them the bogeyman, so that any opinion outside the North London dinner party orthodoxy can be labelled "BNP" and kept out of discussion. That is the intention, but not the effect.
Rather, it is normalising them. In all their thuggish, racist, Holocaust-denying ghastliness.