Centre Forward?

Calling one’s position “the centre ground” is a way of claiming that is the only acceptable position. But where do the views of our “centrist” Political Class and its media courtiers actually come from?

Three toxic streams feed into the current Political Class. Stream One is that of John Reid, Peter Mandelson, Ralph Miliband, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power. Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth, Geoff Gallop (Tony Blair’s mentor at Oxford) and the International Marxist Group. Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that controlled the National Union of Students. Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and Trotskyism; Milburn’s only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as “Haze of Dope”. The most powerful man in the voluntary sector, an old university friend of Tony Blair’s, the recently knighted Sir Stephen Bubb, who was one of the surcharged and disqualified Lambeth councillors. And so on, and on, and on. Including the assembled New Labourites who sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook.

They have very cleverly described themselves as “Social Democrats” in the knowledge that, while almost all Britons on hearing or reading that term think of it as referring to the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist tradition within the British Labour Movement, it was also the name of the party of the Russian Revolution, to the Bolshevik majority within which looked back the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Labour pro-Soviet faction, and the Trotskyists, partially overlapping as those, and many more besides, often were. So it arguable that they have not lied directly. But it indisputable that they have used a term in such a way as to assume its meaning within the tiny Leninist subculture, rather than its meaning in ordinary usage even among the politically well-informed. In so doing, they have monstrously deceived the electorate.

Stream Two is that of the old cheerleaders for the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown, as well as the old defenders of Pinochet’s Chile and of other Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America. In those circles, it was also normal to demand the dismantlement of the public services, the legalisation of all drugs, the abolition of any minimum age of consent, and so on. Again, these views have never been recanted; indeed, they have largely come to pass.

And Stream Three is the SDP. Apparently unable to see that the trade unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, it was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Tony Blair without the rate for the job. It had betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed Christian Socialism and Gaitskellism over nuclear weapons, adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, and carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration. Faced with Bennism and Trotskyism on one side, and with the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, it advocated exactly the wrong thing, “more, not less, radical change in our society”. Alliance with the Liberal Party committed the SDP to constitutional agenda scarcely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, many of which have now been enacted and most of which are now the policy of all three parties.

These streams are by no means entirely distinct. For example, the upper classes were the only section of society in which, right up to the fall of the Soviet Union and even beyond, it was perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist. It was just dismissed, in an attitude unknown to the rest of Britain at the time, as an amusing little eccentricity such as any proper toff is obliged to have. Not everyone might have known that the then Sir Anthony Blunt was a KGB agent, but everyone, including Her Majesty His Employer, knew that he was a Communist, and snobbish as only Marxists ever quite are. Then as now, and really at every point in between, anyone who was sufficiently grand could secure advancement in the Conservative Party, and it was considered vulgar to enquire as to specific political opinions.

Who would look for them in the Conservative Party? Yet the utterly posh world of MI6 and the upper echelons of MI5 was absolutely riddled with them right up until the bitter end, to the point that it had become a standing joke even among the general public. Everyone knew that the KGB’s main recruitment ground was not the patriotic, socially conservative trade union movement or anything like that, but Oxbridge in general and Cambridge in particular, and only the public school rather than the grammar school circles even there. (There was in fact a huge amount of patriotism and no shortage of social conservatism in the USSR, but that is another story.) The perfectly preposterous idea that Harold Wilson, of all people, and for heaven’s sake even Ted Short and George Thomas in the more recent versions, were somehow Soviet sleeper agents continues to serve what has always been its purpose, that of pure distraction from what ought to be the blindingly obvious.

In 1981, Michael Foot refused to endorse Peter Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons; in 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords. The only British Minister ever known to have been an agent of the Soviet Bloc (specifically, of Czechoslovakia) was John Stonehouse, the Labour MP most closely associated with the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs in the days when it was still trying to persuade both main parties, and later the only MP ever to have sat in the English separatist interest, before, having left Parliament, he joined the SDP. In Stonehouse, the three toxic streams met. He cannot have been the only one. He was not. And he is not.