I am proud
to own the only national daily newspaper (so far as I am aware) that
gives the BBC Parliament schedule in its television listings.
No wonder
that it is read avidly by Shire Tory parliamentarians and their staff as
a reminder of the more civilised Britain that prevailed before She came
along.
Are you on about the Soviet Star? If Hitler had bought bulk copies of it, rather than the Soviets, would you be buying it?
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly was it that the world's most genocidal regime found so attractive about the Morning Star?
Just asking.
Always touching to hear from the last living Blairites. The only people who ever say that. Well, apart from Julian Lewis, the only MP to sign an amendment to that effect to EDM 1334.
ReplyDeleteThat's right: MPs from six parties openly take my view, and those from the seventh and largest (very traditionalist ones, of whom there are still a few for now) are routinely regular readers of the thing itself.
Whereas one fringe member of that party has agreed with you, and on Syria even he agrees with the paper itself. Though not with the last living Blairites.
Anonymous does have a point though re its origins. It was the paper of an enemy power that wanted to destroy everything you hold dear.
ReplyDeleteRubbish. When? I mean specifically, when?
ReplyDeleteIt was never an official organ of the Communist Party, unlike Marxism Today, for which Tony Blair wrote as an MP and I suspect, although I'd have to check, as a Shadow Minister.
And that party was no puppet of the USSR; just ask the people, in that country and in this, who wanted it to be.
In any case, the Soviet Union never was a military threat to the United Kingdom, either in capability or in aspiration. No serious historian, by definition still holds that it was.
The proper Tory ones, before the emergence of the anti-intellectual New Right, never did. They always mocked the Cold War to scorn, and everything that they said about it came true.
I am going to do a post at some point about the fact that an allegiance to foreign powers is a feature of the Right rather than of the Left in this country. Just read The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail (with honourable exceptions) or The Sun, and you will see exactly what I mean.
There is nothing new about this. Margaret Thatcher has just died, and Nelson Mandela is most unwell. Then there were the 1930s. Only one MP was interned during the War, and he was not a Communist, an ILPer, a Labour Soviet fellow-traveller, a Labourite generally, or anything like that.
This is unique in the world, so far as I am aware. Nowhere else is the Right's motto, "Someone else's country, right or wrong."
"And that party was no puppet of the USSR; just ask the people, in that country and in this, who wanted it to be."
ReplyDeleteWhat about its flip-flopping between 1939 and 1940? The war is an imperialist conflict until the USSR gets attacked.
"In any case, the Soviet Union never was a military threat to the United Kingdom, either in capability or in aspiration. No serious historian, by definition still holds that it was."
Granted but its ruling ideology, if ever imposed in this country, would have meant the destruction of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Are you seriously suggesting that the Morning Star was not sympathetic to the Soviet regime?
No more than a lot of people. And a lot less than some, as its own letters page sometimes made clear. Occasionally still does.
ReplyDeleteThe Soviet Union's "ruling ideology, if ever imposed in this country, would have meant the destruction of the monarchy and the Catholic Church"?
Quite apart from whether the USSR ever even had a "ruling ideology" in actual fact, neither of those things need necessarily have happened, the second one certainly would not have done, and in any case, what if the moon were made of cream cheese?
There was never the tiniest possibility of a Soviet invasion of Britain. Or of anywhere in Western Europe as defined by Churchill's carve-up with Stalin. There was no means. Nor was there any will.