I am now older than at least two members of the Shadow Cabinet, including the one about whom everyone is talking. Ho, hum.
The appointment of Stephen Twigg proves two things. First, that Twigg no longer has a Blairite bone in his body, or else Miliband would never have countenanced him. And secondly, that the "free" schools are now a non-issue. The only specific policy on which the Conservative Party contested the last Election, but how many of them are after all? And how many of those were private schools facing bankruptcy but nevertheless still possessing an eye for the main chance?
The existing ones will be left alone under Labour, but that in itself demonstrates that they are not worth bothering about. The Honourable Toby "I wasn't posh enough at Oxford" Young needs to get over himself. And this whole debate needs to get over him, too.
But Andy Burnham is a loss, even if he will be good at Health (where the lead in the Lords seems to have passed from Shirley Williams to a close Miliband ally, David Owen), and even if I do need to start admitting that Health is now at least as important to my own life as Education is.
Within and around the very academic Labour Government of the day, there was great concern that the events of 1968 would lead to a loss of State funding for universities, and thus to a loss of academic freedom. C B Cox and A E Dyson were Labour supporters when they initiated the Black Papers, and Cox was vilified by the Thatcher Government and its apologists when he resisted its, their and her Gradgrindian philistinism. As much as possible of the anything but Gradgrindian, anything but philistine grammar school tradition was maintained at classroom level by individual, often very left-wing teachers until they themselves retired.
To say the least, they would have had no objection to the inclusion of Latin in the English Baccalaureate, any more than Andy Burnham, with his English degree from Cambridge, can really share the view of those who object to that inclusion.
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You would have been in it today if it had not been for our break dancing friend in 2003.
ReplyDelete"You've ruined his career!"
ReplyDeleteOnce screeched down the street at one of us by the other one's sister.
I'll give you a clue. It was not at him. And it was certainly not by an archdeacon's daughter.
What goes around, comes around. It has been coming around to him for quite some time. But it is far from done yet.
What with this old adversary, that silly boy who thought that he was Kelvin MacKenzie, and Damian Thompson, you certainly know how to annoy your pretentious social inferiors. And how to avenge yourself upon them in two cases. Why not in the third?
ReplyDeleteOn topic, please.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, Adrian. What goes around has already starting coming around to him and will be doing so with quite some force for quite some time.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the fight against the economics boys, Mr Lindsay. When is what goes around going to come around to them and make them pay for all the damage that they have caused?
They have told two generations of simple-minded politicians that there was no alternative to their approach of slash and burn, feeding the homeless to the hungry, keeping people under control by frightening them into submission with the prospect of being slashed, burned, made homeless and fed to the hungry. See what an influence you have had on me and so many others in your capacity as "Academic/management staff".
Maybe they will be held accountable when you really are in the Cabinet. If some upstart really did put a stop to that prospect years ago, then he should be slashed, burned, made homeless and fed to the hungry. Looks as if that is well in hand. Don't mess with David Lindsay, as another of your ex-tutees can testify.
My, my, David, the loyalty that you inspire. With one exception, and look what happened to him.
ReplyDeleteMiliband and Twigg are both PPE, so I fear that replacing Burnham with Twigg is replacing academic purism with something rather more technocratic, the slippery slope to "Gradgrindian philistinism".
The ground seems to have been conceded to Michael Gove, with his degree in English. Like several people here, how I wish that you were there.
A pity that Tom Watson was not given Culture, Media and Sport, although bet on him for that job in government.
ReplyDeleteReeves and Umunna will look good on telly, but have we learned nothing from the Blair years and Cameron's present experience? There are lots of pretty boys of both sexes in and around the Cabinet. Most people cannot name any of them, never mind cite anything that they have ever done.
I'll be the next person to say it: it should have been you, and whoever stopped that from happening in 2003 or whenever is a traitor to both the country and the movement. Where is he now?
No Stella Creasy?
ReplyDeleteWhat a shockingly personal question.
ReplyDeleteNothing stella about your creasy, I'm sure. Or creasy about your stella.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, you are a great loss. A highly distinctive character, frighteningly clever and well-read, with a huge potential reach both way beyond traditional Labour voters and deep into them, the two places New Labour could never reach.
You would have been a very good fit into the Ed Miliband project. I can think of no one else with both your breadth of appeal beyond our natural supporters and your depth of appeal to the people we lost under Blair. Yes, a very great loss. Someone needs to be answerable for it.
Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory should be quite an event, then. What's after that, David?
ReplyDeleteSeveral projects are being planned, but the one most likely to come to fruition first is a collection of extended book reviews: Peter Hitchens, Peter Oborne, Phillip Blond, Maurice Glasman, Rod Dreher, Simon Jenkins, Nick Cohen, Andrew Anthony, Melanie Phillips, Oliver Kamm, Douglas Murray, and many more besides.
ReplyDeleteAnything on economics?
ReplyDeleteVariously interspersed, of course. And specifically a chapter on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level, Robert Skidelsky's Keynes: The Return of the Master, and probably also Mehdi Hasan's The Debt Delusion.
ReplyDeleteYou know perfectly well that they don't count. Don't you? Do they?
ReplyDeleteWhere would it all end? Where might it all end? Where will it all end?
ReplyDeleteAnd then there is Distributism added to the mix...
Is it true you pretended to be an academic? No wonder you got slung out on your ear. Your stupidity is legendary.
ReplyDeleteAny chance of including the insight you sent them doolally by reproducing from the blogger who calls himself Lord Keynes? You know, the point that Hayek is not even important to the economic school that claims to look to him? Unlike Keynes, Hayek is just not very important at all. Not so much wrong, although that too. Just not important. Do include that. Reading it in print will bring on their full blown nervous breakdowns.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, no. The University calls me "Academic/management staff", which is their description of me. Take it up with them, although don't hold your breath for a reply.
ReplyDeleteI have made use of that position to publish a book on Theology and related matters with a preface by one of the most important theologians in the world, I am about to publish a book on History and Politics with a preface by one of this country's most prominent political journalists, and I am also a President of a Senior Common Room and a member of the Governing Body of a college.
As to slinging out, I do not know to what you are referring. Does the above sound like slinging out to you?
Free Beveridge, I'll see if I can work it in. Like Keynes, and with Friedman as at most a partial exception, Hayek was not a "proper" economist. Hayek, in particular, is still looked at askance even by very right-wing "proper" economists, although they realise that they have to be careful to whom they say these things.
It is very much like the attitude of even very conservative "proper" theologians when it comes to C S Lewis or G K Chesterton: they are perhaps vaguely glad that anyone has been pointed in the right direction by having been been converted to the former's Mere Christianity or to the latter's Orthodoxy, and they might even have been such people when they were very young indeed, but that is strictly as far as it goes. I am not necessarily endorsing such a view, only pointing out that it is there. And that is also the attitude to Hayek even among those who might be regarded as on the same side as he was.
Hayek was a political philosopher. One of his doctorates was in political science. The other one was not in economics. Economists are not necessarily being complimentary when they call someone a political philosopher, any more than vice versa. And even as one of those, if Reagan and Thatcher really did believe themselves to have been influenced by Hayek, then, as Enoch Powell said of his own alleged influence over Thatcher, they cannot have understood any of it. Powell is another example of my earlier point, since his only academic background was in Classics generally and Ancient Greek specifically.
But he had overriding and undergirding social, cultural and political reasons why he wanted the economy to be organised in a certain way. He did not see economics as a positive science. That was why he was influential.
And that was why he would never have passed muster as a "proper" economist. Nor would Keynes. Nor would Hayek. Nor, really, would Friedman. Nor, even, would Adam Smith. The only figure of any importance to have held that politics ought to be defined in terms of economics, rather than they other way round, was Marx, so that thus to define is precisely to be a Marxist.
But Marx, a lover of philosophy and literature whose father had forced him to do law at university but who was never very good at it, had no academic background in economics, either.
Yes, yes, yes, as I have now said to you twice today. These facts about economics and economists should have become educated common knowledge decades ago. If anyone can find a way of working them into something, then it is you. So do. Please, please, please do. Drive the keepers of the cult to dribbling lunacy. They have always been right on the edge of it.
ReplyDeleteThere is some economic material in Essays Radical Orthodox, on Catholic Social Teaching, on the critique of capitalism and Mraxism, on Radical Orthodoxy's unacceptable political quietism born out of a lack of contact with the poor, on Chesterton and Belloc, on Dickens as a social reformer.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Chesterton, there is more than a touch of him about you. Take those insights in that comment. All proposals for economic organisation are motivated by social, cultural and political aspirations, and defining politics in terms of economics is the definition of Marxism. Either of those is as important as anything GKC ever wrote and taken together they approach the importance of something by Newman.
Steady on!
ReplyDeleteThe directory now lists you as "SCR President" and gives you one of those contact forms for people who are too important to be troubled by the people who might make use of your publicly available email address. You really are the great and the good now. I assume that your university email address since the jurassic period still works for those who know it?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes. Of course.
ReplyDeleteYour exact position in this University has always been the stuff of speculation. But there has never been any room for doubt about the fact that you had one.
ReplyDeleteThe University Directory should give your position as "David Lindsay" and anyone who enquired further should be told that it was not for them to know, or that the description was self-explanatory, David Lindsay is this University's David Lindsay and that is just that.
Either of those answers would be the truth, both of them have been for years. Long may you remain, Mr Lindsay. You will. Driving lesser minds to madness for many decades to come, as you have been doing for well over a decade already.
I have been here a long time, and I cannot imagine Durham without David Lindsay.
ReplyDeleteClearly, neither can Durham. He has repeatedly proved impossible to get rid of, so now no-one bothers to try, if anyone still wants to. "But I'm..." "Yes, dear, but he is David Lindsay." So he is, and may he ever remain so.
But what when his Cincinnatus moment finally comes? Will he abandon his plough to be Consul of Rome? Of course not, he will carry on doing both. We are talking about David Lindsay here.