Monday 21 January 2013

Grit

How many years in a row is this? Three? Four? This is what winters are going to be like from now on. It is perfectly obvious that we do need the infrastructure investment necessary to turn us into Scandinavia or Canada.

But who is going to dare to propose that? For one thing, think of the carbon footprint, darling. It is no wonder that there are twice as many Labour peers as Conservative ones on the Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

That is one of many ways in which there is no more a popular but politically effective New Right now than there was in the 1980s, when social conservatives and educational traditionalists might as well have carried on voting Labour, as many of them had previously done, for all the influence that they had on the doings, rather than on the sayings, of Thatcher and of her Government. Eurosceptics would have been a great deal better-advised to have done so.

And even upholders of the aristocratic tradition advocated by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and the Sunday Telegraph could not have had any less influence by doing so. Indeed, they would have found natural allies among those equally concerned to preserve the equally moderating and civilising influence of organised labour and of the culture that it sustained.

2 comments:

  1. That's right.

    Thatcher was indeed booted out by Heseltine and co for speaking the truth on the EU and standing up to Delors and his EU trade union lobby (no, no no was the answer every British Premier should have given Brussels).

    "I have not rolled back the frontiers of the state at home only to see them re-imposed at the European level".

    Indeed.

    But, since the EU was and is in bed with your treasured trade union movement, and since every EC regulation that smothers our small businesses, (from maternity rights to Agency Worker Regulations), is the wildest dreams of those trade unionists made flesh, and helps big multinationals smother small firms, where does that leave your philosophy?

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  2. Exactly where it has been consistently since the 1940s.

    Your version of Conservative history, and especially of Thatcher's record, is pure fantasy.

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