Once A Trot

We all know about neoconservatives, convinced in their old Trotskyist way that the Left is whatever they happen to think.

They insist that their support for neoliberal capitalism, and for never-ending global war in order to spread it, constitute the position of "the real Left" or even of "the decent Left", while the contrary position is "Fascist" and "reactionary".

Brian Brivati was at it in his despicable Guardian obituary of Tony Benn, which that newspaper ought to be ashamed to have commissioned, never mind to have published.

(Benn, by the way, lost the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party to the wildly over-praised Denis Healey due to the combined efforts of the Trotskyist IMG and of MPs who set up the SDP almost immediately thereafter. Take out either of those, and Benn would have won. Whether that would have been a good thing or a bad thing, it is the full story.)

From the same background comes, increasingly, Peter Hitchens. More and more, he merely changes "Left" to "Right", or "conservative", or "proper Tory", or what have you.

But the old Trot trick, even the old Trot tick, is substantially unchanged. The only permissible opinion is whatever he happens to think.

Anyone who does not hold to every detail of that is "left-wing", in the way that anyone who does not agree with every detail of the programme of whichever Trotskyist groupuscule is "right-wing".

Hitchens's extremely precise blueprint for a new party is more than redolent of the founding charters of such groupuscules, complete with the unshakeable conviction that huge numbers of people are just waiting to be organised by, in, through and as such a formation.

Thus, confronted even with very right-wing BBC figures indeed such as Andrew Neil or Robbie Gibb, Hitchens can and, in his own terms, must sincerely insist that they do not count, due to their not agreeing with him about ... well, due to their ever not agreeing with him about anything.

Anything.

Including the things about which he is entirely correct, such as military non-intervention in Syria or Ukraine, such as cancelling Trident, such as renationalising the railways, or such as bringing back the Central Electricity Generating Board served by a large number of publicly owned coal mines.

All of these positions have to be "right-wing", because they are the opinions of Peter Hitchens. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with any of them has to be "left-wing".

If pushed, there is an attempt to claim that these things are not really what Left and Right are about; that they are now purely about social and cultural issues.

But that is absolutely and entirely the premise of the 1970s New Left. To hold it is to be on what was once so named.

As, of course, Peter Hitchens was at the time.

Fundamentally, he still is.