Sandra White MSP was right: it is hypocritical to be a member of NATO and yet claim to oppose nuclear weapons.
Angus Robertson MP was right: it is hypocritical to oppose membership of NATO while supporting Partnership for Peace.
And Alyn Smith MEP was probably hoping for his Nye Bevan moment: "naked into the conference chamber - you call that Nationalism? I call it an emotional spasm." Instead, he has probably secured himself nothing more than a place so low on the next list that he will stand no realistic chance of re-election.
In England, Scotland and at least the English-speaking parts of Wales, the way is now clear for a party which rejects the defensively useless financial extravagance and moral outage of nuclear weapons, and which rejects continued membership of a dangerously interventionist and expansionist military alliance which, even if its avowed purpose ever really existed, undeniably served that purpose 20 years ago, when that alliance ought therefore to have been wound up.
Many things about the 2015 Election make one think of it as a 1974 moment, a time for those who cherish his memory or his legacy to ask themselves, "What would Enoch have done?" Let this be another one.
Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you.
Miliband will never be the one to give up the Emperor's Hammer.
ReplyDeleteWhy would he? Why would he want to appear facile, weak? Why would he want to put the workers in Barrow who build the submarines out of work? Why would he want to make the UK reliant on other countries for the Emperor's Hammer? Don't fire back with this rubbish that's it controlled by the Americans either. It isn't. It's only controlled by the crews of those submarines. Why would you forfeit such a powerful advantage over every other nation on Earth?
Where to begin?
ReplyDeleteWith Chapter Five of Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, beginning on page 127, for a start.
How is life in the 1980s? Soon, very soon, you will discover that the threat never existed. Sorry, that should have come with what will later be known as a spoiler alert.
You have splendidly annoyed them no end below the line on Coffee House today, but cemented Fraser Nelson's argument above the line, by pointing out that Peter Hitchens, Norman Tebbit and Phillip Blond have already as good as said Vote Labour "and there are still two and half years left to go." Scrapping the useless and wicked Trident while pulling the plug on the useless and wicked Nato, old Powellite causes both, would not only consolidate Hitchens' support but also bring on board figures like John Laughland. If Ed plays this right, if he does as you suggest, then he could split the Old and New Rights from each other definitively for a generation or more and bring the Old Right into the Labour voting family for most or all of that time. Stranger things have happened.
ReplyDeleteThe successive Liberal takeovers of the Tory machine in order to create the Conservative Party, for example. Or the emergence of Labour out of the union of Radical Liberalism and Tory populism. Both set out, along with so much else, in a book somewhere.
ReplyDeleteYou have seen my Coffee House comment, so I shan't repeat it it. But it sets out several areas in which Ed Miliband's Labour either is or could be the only voice and vehicle of the Tory sensibility, of British paleoconservative feeling. And this is another one.
The very great man, Dr John Laughland, indeed. Stuart Reid. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. In this as in so many matters, what a great shame that Auberon Waugh and Michael Wharton (Peter Simple) are dead.
And all at the loss of whom? Of what? Of Valdor and what have you? There are only about three of them, and they either all switched to voting Conservative when the Heir to Blair became Leader, or else they have some insurmountable emotional obstacle to ever voting for anyone except the official Labour candidate, no matter what.