On, And On, And On

Just a few comments that I have posted in response to others on yesterday's Telegraph piece:

I am no more in favour of silencing organised labour by abolishing trade union barons than of silencing the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons; as soon as you got rid of one (it could have been either), then you were bound to get rid of the other. This applies locally as well as nationally. But neither toffs nor union officials can be made to go away. They either retain their responsibilities, or they become irresponsible.

How is requiring, or giving preference to, the holder of a union card different from requiring, or giving preference to, the holder of a British passport? It isn’t. Both are means to prevent down-skilling and undercutting. You can’t have “free” movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour, including migrants; or vice versa. You can’t have a “free” market generally, but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography; in sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, if you will.

It was the Swingers, not their parents, who voted for the very “right-wing” Tory manifesto of 1970, accounting for the unexpected Labour defeat that year, the key to understanding all British politics since. They then voted first for Thatcher and then for Blair, who, as much as anything else, was so convinced of the merits of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll that he sought to spread them around the world at the barrel of a gun.

On trade union barons and hereditary barons:

The argument against either is the argument against the other.
The argument for a sort of bourgeois, especially urban or suburban bourgeois, and most especially metropolitan bourgeois triumphalism. Unrestrained either by organised labour or by the aristocratic social conscience. The bourgeoisie is necessary, and in principle a good thing. But not as the victorious class in essentially a Leninist sense, imposing its dictatorship accordingly. No class should be in that position.

No wonder that the people who swung in the Sixties then voted first for Thatcher and then for Blair. And no wonder that Blair kept Thatcher’s anti-union laws in place, while Thatcher’s Children would leave Blair’s constitutional vandalism unrepaired.

On the apparently serious suggestion that Blair got rid of hereditary peers because the unions wanted him to:

Plenty of trade unionists agree with a lot of things with which Tony Blair does not agree. His reason for abolishing hereditary barons was the same as Margaret Thatcher’s reason for abolishing trade union barons: there must be no brake on his class and hers, enabling it (as any other in that position) to give full vent to all its very worst features.

More generally:

It took Thatcherism to impose the Sixties Revolution on much of the country. Before that, the State or State-underwritten guaranteeing of the economic basis of paternal authority in families and communities had largely kept it at bay. In many places, almost totally.

This has been a revolution in three parts, but one revolution all the same: the Sixties, the Eighties and the Noughties.

On the motives of Thatcher and Blair:

They didn’t see their motives as bad. They were not, I think, being malicious. They were just horribly, horribly wrong. Thatcher’s dislike of (among much else) hierarchical, ritualised trade unionism and its “restrictive practices” was very much of a piece with Blair’s dislike of (among much else) the hierarchical, ritualised, hereditary peerage. They thought that it was bad for Britain. But, as it turned out, it was nowhere near as bad as the alternative. And if they couldn’t have worked out that that would be the case, then they shouldn’t have been in the job.

And on the allegedly "belated" conversion of people such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to the importance of fatherhood:

There is nothing “belated” about it. The miners, the steelworkers, the ship-builders and the rest all said exactly this. And they were right. The problem was the Prime Minister of the day, who, contrary to what she later pretended, had a very cold relationship with her own father; he didn’t even give her away, although he was present.

Plenty more could be said. Thatcher's abolition of the GLC because it was controlled by the "wrong" party set the precedent for the slow motion, but now almost complete, abolition of the House of Lords for the same reason. Thatcher voted both for abortion and for easier divorce (and defends them both in her autobiography), and she went on to introduce abortion up to birth, while Major made divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract.

As Education Secretary, Thatcher closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled. As Prime Minister, she replaced O-levels with GCSEs. The creation of any more grammar schools was recently banned by Act of Parliament. The Tories voted for it.

And so on, and on, and on.