Thomas Roller or anyone else, you can post comments like this as a joke if you like, but when they are this good and well-read anyway, then I will not only put them up, but invite (those seeking to post comments, please note) comments only on their substance, and not on anything else:
I for one welcome the return of one of our traditional northern industries. David - you should have known that the Blairites would not be happy with this, having done their best to kill off our traditional base over the last 13 years. I urge you not to pay any attention to them or their discredited policies. They inhabit their own little world, harbouring absurd delusions of grandeur and spouting reams of gibberish every day. They arrogantly assume that they are entitled to a seat in one House or the other, the only difficult question being which one!
We need an alternative to Blairism-Thatcherism modelled on the vision David has long championed: one-nation politics based on patriotism and traditional social democracy. We need an interventionist industrial policy (which requires a government with an understanding of heterodox principles), a Burkean respect for local religious and civic traditions and a realist foreign policy based on the ideas of Morgenthau. I would also add a healthy dose of Oakeshottian cautiousness to the policy mix. Only then can we can throw off our Thatcherite shackles and build our ‘Brasilias of the north’.
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Your deriders have correctly identified your position and your appeal.
ReplyDeleteI honestly wish that I had written this, and that does not happen all that often these days: I have become quite difficult to impress by anyone who is still alive. But I endorse every word of this.
ReplyDeleteWhat we used to call the New Right claimed to defer to all sorts of authorities, but I have never come across one of them whose position was remotely close to theirs.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, at least where those who were British Tories or classical European conservatives are concerned, their position was closer to yours, to the traditional social democratic wing of Labour voters even if not of prominent national politicains. As Thomas Roller correctly identifies.
Enoch Powell once said that if Thatcher thought that she had been influenced by his ideas, then she could not have understood them properly.
ReplyDeleteThe 1980s Radical Right was supposed to have been heavily influenced by the Peterhouse School. But while they might have agreed, and might still agree, with the architectural conclusions of David Watkin (although not enough to put any of them into practice), they did not and do not share the principles on which he arrived at them. And on which specific point did or do they agree with anything by Roger Scruton, or Maurice Cowling, or Edward Norman?
On the contrary, Cowling's Mill and Liberalism, to cite only one of the most obvious examples (and Cowling's own foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition is invaluable if you really want to understand the New Right), could have been written directly against them. Have they never read it?