They would lose UKIP half of its voters at European Elections, who are Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. Moreover, the Old Tory half is far from "free"-market libertarian, as these two no doubt are.
Instead:
The historic patriotism and social conservatism of the Labour Movement has been almost completely purged from the House of Commons. As has the related sceptical and critical attitude of traditional Tories towards capitalism, consumerism, the American Republic and its culture, the Zionist project, and wars to make the world a better place.
The heirs of Liberal and Social Democratic calls for democracy and transparency, and campaigns against political extremism and (unlike me) against protectionism, now support the European Union’s undemocratic secrecy, its subjugation of us to the legislative will of Stalinists and neo-Nazis, and its Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, which are anything but protective.
Each of these three baleful tendencies has led to a neglect of the Commonwealth, of the Arab world and Iran, of the Slavic and Confucian worlds, and of Latin America. Those historic British ties could not be more important. Such ties as we have really ever had to Continental Europe and to the United States are less and less so, however much one might love Europe and America.
But hope is at hand. I have been inspired by the victory of George Galloway at Bradford West, and by the call from Peter Hitchens for traditional conservatives to become parliamentary candidates, as he himself might do. We need putative Independent candidates for the 2015 General Election. The Liberal, Conservative, Labour and Social Democratic Parties all emerged when parliamentarians from different parts of the country encountered each other and found themselves able to co-operate in the service of shared principles, aspirations and concerns.
To read the rest of this article (exactly 1600 words), those in a position to publish it, preferably for a fee, are invited to email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.
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will you be standing in the new seat with Lanchester in it?
ReplyDeleteNot against Pat Glass.
ReplyDeleteI support the re-election of Pat, of both sitting County Councillors (Labour's Ossie Johnson and the Independent Richie Young), and of all those Parish Councillors who want to carry on. However, there will be some retirements, creating space for new people. I know who I hope that those will be, but it would be wrong to name them on the Internet at this stage.
If anywhere else could offer me a berth, then do please get in touch, although whether or not I am one of our candidates is beside the point.
I am very sorry if you are determined not to contest this seat. Uncharacteristically, you seem to be putting personal friendship before political commitment. Next year's probable Independent county council candidacy by one of your political godfathers, which would definitely succeed in the town he pretty much owns politically, would give you a ready made machine in the largest town. A very big step towards being the first past the post. Remember, that is all you would need, the single largest number of votes cast by those who could be bothered to cast them, nowhere near the majority of eligible votes. Over the next three years you could easily pull that off here, but it is far from clear you could do it anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteHow much of a fee would you want? And would we have subediting rights? I represent a vehicle which may well be interested but from a quick perusal of your blog the text would likely need cleaning up.
ReplyDeleteEmail me. But I am not interested in the dumbing down that Fleet Street types sometimes come on here to request. If you can't keep up, then you are on the wrong site. And this is most emphatically a serious project for serious people.
ReplyDeleteI would agree very strongly with that, Mr. L. You are one of the last people who still writes in English rather than in Journalese. If they wanted to change it to that, then you should refuse on the grounds that they obviously did not reach the sort of people whom you would want to read it.
ReplyDeleteThe extreme narrowing of the social base of journalism, I am afraid.
ReplyDeleteIt used to be full of people for whom education, and state education at that, had been the means to self-improvement. Now, though, it is made up of people who never had to do anything at school or university, because they knew that they were guaranteed plum jobs anyway, and they had no desire for any sort of culture.
So they cannot cope with subordinate clauses, or literary references, or slightly obscure words, or the subjunctive, or anything like that. And they know absolutely nothing about how ordinary people live. Like politicians, in fact.
Bring back grammar schools.
Sam Bridges sounds as if he would never publish anything with the word "Confucian" in it, but knowing you that would be the least of his worries. What else have you managed to cram into 1600 words? "Nomenklatura"? "Melkite"?
ReplyDeleteOnly "Melkite", alas. "Nomenklatura" had to be cut in order to include the paragraph with "Melkite" in it.
ReplyDeleteWhy am I not surprised? There's only one David Lindsay.
ReplyDeleteLeveson is about to send the entire London media to jail, so we are going to have ample opportunity to start again on a basis which does not assume that the readers are both as rich and as thick as the writers.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry, Mr Lindsay. Or Dr Lindsay, as we like to call the latter-day Samuel Johnson, doctored by popular acclaim.
ReplyDeleteThe media ignored Galloway completely and he still romped home. They are losing readers at a colossal rate, and as Jack says half of their staffs are about to be incarcerated.
Who would listen to you if you went in with them? It would do you harm, not good. They are distrusted and hated like the politicians, bankers and policemen with whom they drink and "flirt".
Keep up the fight for one last outpost of civilisation while our decadent media, politics, banks and police all collapse around our ears. When they are gone, you will be left, and we will be left with you.
You are a very great man and I hope to God that you will be in Parliament as soon as possible.
He probably is a real hack, but any correspondence with him would ben a wind-up. He is either Kamm or one of Kamm's little gang, given short shrift in the last couple of days when they tried to defame you to someone without doing the most basic research into how you and that someone were connected.
ReplyDeleteNo organ of Her Majesty's Press would publish this, and that is the problem. Think about it, which one would it be? As set out in the Conclusion to the landmark Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, any hope of a hearing for the views mentioned in this post ended with the failure to appoint Rod Liddle as Editor of the Independent.
We can only pray that Jack is right and that Leveson brings down so many of them that we can truly start again from scratch when it comes to the Fourth Estate of this Realm.
I don't believe Sam Bridges was real any more than you obviously do. But what would you do if you were ever denied martyr status and someone said all right, we'll have you?
ReplyDeleteOver and over again you have managed to cast yourself as "the man it should have been" which is a very comfortable existence compared with having to do things and take the consequences.
What would you do if your perch to carp from was ever cut away and your devotees were denied their opportunity to feel dispossessed on your behalf? I think you are very good at what you do and that is not a compliment.
It must be very nice to be you, stuck in the self-fulfilling prophecy of being loved because you were wronged over and over and over again, always the morally and intellectually better man who was screwed over by the stupid and the sinful.
"Never had his chance" means "never had his chance to get it wrong" and "never had his chance to have to make compromises". Think on that.
You would never write for the MSM again, not after the Telegraph. You would never re-join the Labour party for the same reason, look at the way they treated you last time. You are a real loss to both commenting and politics itself and it must be very frustrating for you. But you are their loss. Damian Thompson is now practically unemployed and his drinking is out of control, that boy who was preferred over you politically has sunk without trace.
ReplyDeleteAnd perish the thought that David Lindsay might have had any part in either of those reductions in circumstance.
ReplyDeleteAs one of the few people who have ever asked both Damian Thompson and Neil Fleming what they think of you, let's just say that their victories over you were decidedly pyrrhic and they know it. Pyrrhic, now there's a word that Sam Bridges would want to cut.
What goes around comes around. But Lord forbid that the saintly Mr. Lindsay might ever have played his part in bring them around.
It is an interesting question, isn't it: what if you were ever given a hearing? Your whole appeal is based on being denied one, and on how much less clever and morally upright than you are the people who are given one. Any victory over you is pyrrhic, to have beaten David Lindsay is to have proved yourself less worthy than him, thereby entitling everyone to despise you and yearn for David Lindsay instead. You have been getting away with that one for years. It must be nice.
ReplyDeleteNo-one needs to tell you that the media are a closed club whose loyalty is to each other. "Subediting rights" means the right to change it to something you never wrote so as to humiliate you, as directed by Oliver Kamm or that piece of filth, Damian Thompson. As you know, it doesn't matter which paper, they are all a single entity like the political parties.
ReplyDeleteIf Sam Bridges had been real, obviously he would have emailed you directly, not expected you to discuss terms on the Internet.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I don't know when Damian Thompson has ever written anything remotely as bad about you as you do even on his own blog about him. And as gleefully recounted on here, Neil Fleming's relatives have been known to confront you in the street about your ruination of his career.
I need hardly have bothered. He was perfectly capable of ruining it for himself.
ReplyDeleteOn topic, please.
Thank God, someone who is prepared to sate the proper relationship between politics and those who are there to report it, not to dictate what may or may not be said.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful piece! I'm the comment editor of a major national newspaper and I'd like to pay £5k for the rights to the whole thing. Is that acceptable to you? Please indicate here and then I can email you the contract.
ReplyDeleteI'm not that cheap, and would in any case expect to exchange contracts by courier service like gentlemen.
ReplyDeleteWhat is your normal fee? I'm sure we can match it for quality like this.
ReplyDeleteAs I said earlier, he would never work for the MSM again after how the Telegraph treated him. Not for five grand. Not for five million. Not if he has any sense, anyway. A declining niche of poisonous people, half of whom will be in prison this time next year. As George Galloway proved, who needs them?
ReplyDeleteDiscussing money on the Internet, darling?
ReplyDeleteI notice that the fee is only "preferable". You really believe in what you are doing with this one, don't you? Very you. I remember you at university, constantly kept down by Durham's own Bullingdon element in things like the JCR and the Union Society. I know that by the end you had two school governorships in the real world, but even so. In our day, Durham treated lunacy as normality and vice versa, serious people as jokes and vice versa. We now have three political parties and an entire media run on the same lines.
ReplyDeleteLoving your description of political journalists as "glorified gossip columnists" over on Coffee House, and there to prevent political debate instead of reporting it. Spot on.
ReplyDelete@20:35, and they all came crawling out of the woodwork to scream down his Telegraph Blog, of which they would not have understood a single word.
ReplyDeleteI know that his book says that getting Liddle to edit the Indy was the last hope, but that hope really died with his own Telegraph Blog.
The Officials had never given us a platform before that, and his old Durham enemies, who could not begin to comprehend what was at stake, have made sure that they never will again. It is all up to us Provisionals now.
Mabel forfeited what little right she ever had to be taken seriously when she bowed to that. But then it was all a setup in the first place. No wonder you now identify any offer as a trap laid by Oliver Kamm or his minions.
ReplyDelete