Monday 6 December 2010

Heaven's Light His Guide?

The fun and games over Mike Hancock's manner of life have been allowed to distract from the fact that a man who appears to be one of this country's leading voices against the insane rush to launch a New Cold War against Russia is a former member of the SDP, which was conceived and born in the betrayal both of Gaitskellism and of Christian Socialism over nuclear weapons as surely as in the betrayal of Gaitskellism over Europe.

It was also conceived and born in the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, in the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, in her regret at not having resigned in protest against past Labour measures to restrict immigration, and, related to all of those but especially to the last, in a fanatical hatred of trade unions. All of this it carries over into the present Political Class, on which it is one of the three principal influences, the other two being the 1970s sectarian Left and the 1980s sectarian Right. On the eve of this year's General Election, there were more former SDP members in the Shadow Cabinet than on the Lib Dem front bench.

But Hancock has expressed in the past the view that his constituents had the right to know that the laws to which they were subject were made by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. He shows dangerous signs of liberal, democratic and centrist sentiment when it comes to a legislature which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report, or when it comes to being subject to the legislative will of assorted illiberal and anti-democratic extremists, or when it comes to the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies.

And now, he turns out to be an opponent of the New Cold Warriors, who were used to their own way under the ridiculous Blair creature and the likes of today's ubiquitous Chris Bryant, he of the Henry Jackson Society and the Euston Manifesto, but who are struggling to adjust to the fact of an upper-class Tory realist as Prime Minister and of someone who desperately wants to be one (and who really is steeped in the history of Toryism) as Foreign Secretary.

The presence of Bryant is a public declaration that this is a wrecking operation before anyone stops to ask what conceivable threat Russia either does, or would even wish to, pose to the United Kingdom in this day and age. Never mind what post-Soviet Russia embodies, namely pre-Soviet Russia's pre-eminence among the Slavs in their historic role as the gatekeepers of the True West, the civilisation founded and defined by the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism, and the Roman Empire, as against the pseudo-West, with its godless, rootless, borderless, metrosexual globalism. Or, if the problem is dependence on Russian gas, then why we don't just build lots more nuclear power stations and re-open the pits. Or why it is perfectly acceptable for our political and media life to be riddled, including around and possibly in the Coalition, with people who were at least supportive of, if not paid by, the Soviet Union.

Perhaps it takes someone from the provincial, rather than the metropolitan, SDP to make that last point? Someone driven into its arms in despair, despite being neither a Eurofederalist nor a hardline Cold Warrior (always more a Trotskyist position than anything else, as hatred of Russia and China still is, and diametrically opposed to the stance of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan), and not necessarily a decadent social libertine, a comprehensive schools fanatic, a supporter of unrestricted immigration, or a maniacal union-buster, either. Someone, in fact, like Mike Hancock.

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