And proud of it

On at least three blogs, the mighty http://iaindale.blogspot.com and two maintained by old friends of mine (http://innerwestcentral.blogspot.com and http://letsbesensible.blogspot.com), there appears the following anonymous comment:

"Why are you giving a platform to David Lindsay? He is the prophet, apostle and high priest of paleo-Labour, with its Old Labour means to High Tory ends. He is the statist, syndicalist, nationalist and theoconservative voice of the provinces. He is a reactionary Catholic and a Little Briton masquerading as a Socialist. He is a pan-Slavist, a pan-Arabist and a Bolivarian. He is the Peter Hitchens of the pseudo-Left. He is a ghastly throwback to the days when Constituency Labour Parties were run by union closed shops full of Catholic fundamentalists and working-class Tories. At least he isn't actually an MP or a newspaper columnist. Please, please, please stop helping him to become either or both."

Well, I am not "masquerading" as anything. Mine are "High Tory ends", "nationalist and theoconservative", if by that is meant opposition to the increasingly dictatorial central apparatus of both parties (which, at least since 7th July 2005, have largely functioned as a single organisation), taken over by what is in fact a Marxism which has merely changed its ending so that victory belongs to a bourgeoisie stripped of all its best characteristics (and thus to an America, that most bourgeois of countries, likewise so stripped). It retains intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard élitism, its Trotskyist (specifically, Shachtmanite) entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported (including by force of arms) throughout the world while vanguard élites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries.

In this neoconservatism, the Whig, Jacobin and Marxist fallacy of human perfectibility by its own efforts and in this life alone (explicitly denied by, in and as the foundation of the Conservative and Labour traditions) reaches the nightmare point at which people believe that that perfection has actually come to pass, with the bell-curve of American wealth distribution (and of wealth distribution in other countries in so far as it conforms to that in the US) corresponding exactly to intelligence, talent, "merit", human worth.

Thus, it is deemed to be no better than "ordinary" people deserve that, barely within one generation, we have gone from a situation in which a single manual wage could provide a high degree of comfort for the wage-earner, the homemaker and several children, to one in which anything like such a manner of life is beyond the reach even of a childless couple with two professional salaries. The incomes of the poorest fifth of the population have declined since 1997, but no one in the neoconservative political class cares in the slightest, since that class now takes it as axiomatic that the poor deserve their poverty.

By contrast, I believe in the conservation or restoration (as the overwhelming majority of Britons wishes) of such good things as national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts), local variation, historical consciousness, family life, the Christianity (and thus the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West) professed by seventy-two per cent of Britons in the most recent census, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, and respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death.

"Free" market capitalism corrodes all of these to nought, both directly and by driving despairing millions into the arms of equally corrosive Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism. Just as one cannot logically oppose the decadent social libertinism deriving from the 1960s without also opposing the decadent economic libertinism deriving from the 1980s (or vice versa), and just as one cannot logically oppose the European Union's erosion of our self-government and culture without also opposing that by global capital and by American hegemony (or vice versa), so likewise one cannot logically oppose the unrestricted movement of people without also opposing that of goods, services and capital (or vice versa).

Liberty, equality and fraternity are inseparable from nationhood, family and property, since liberty (the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed) is inseparable from equality (the means to liberty, and never to be confused with mechanical uniformity), thus from fraternity (the means to equality), thus from nationhood (a space in which to be unselfish), thus from family (the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learnt), and thus from property (each family's safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, and therefore requiring to be as widely diffused as possible), which is the guarantor of liberty as here defined.

Marxists, including neoconservatives, are correct that the family, private property and the State have a common origin, with each absolutely necessary in order to maintain the other two; but Marxists, including neoconservatives, are wrong to see this as a bad thing, and therefore to desire the withering away of the State, which they know would be the withering away of the family and of private property, and which they want precisely for that wicked reason. The neoconservatives (including David Cameron and Tony Blair, the former's "liberal-conservatism" being a distinction without a difference) do in fact recognise all of this, but they follow Leo Strauss in hiding their true views from the electorate. We must be determined to expose them, and to defeat them. Does that make me a "High Tory", a "nationalist" and a "theoconservative"? If so, then that is what I am proud to be.

Furthermore, mine are "Old Labour means", "statist and syndicalist", if by that is meant the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and in the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government, the whole paid for by progressive taxation, and all these good things underwritten by full employment. These are the only means to the conservation or restoration (as, I repeat, the overwhelming majority of Britons wishes) of such good things as are listed above, and support for which is presumably what make me a "High Tory", a "nationalist" and a "theoconservative".

Does support for those means as ferociously as for those ends make me "Old Labour", a "statist" and a "syndicalist"? If so, then that is what I am proud to be, not least because, like so many people, my "Old Labour statism and syndicalism" in fact derives from, and in my case was instrumental in leading me to, my "reactionary" (orthodox) Catholicism, as well as always having been inseparable from my British and Commonwealth patriotism as a "Little Briton". The very last thing involved here is "masquerading".

Of course, coming from that tradition - even knowing people like that - probably does mark me down as provincial, and certainly marks me down as not metropolitan in that sense. Well, so I am. Those who think this somehow something of which to be ashamed should consider, as this "voice of the provinces" never ceases to point out, that General Elections are in fact won and lost in "statist, syndicalist, nationalist and theoconseravtive" Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands. If they were won and lost in London and its environs, then, as of the 2005 Election, there would now be a Tory Government with a large majority. But they are not, so there is not.

I am "a pan-Slavist" in that I am disgusted at the neoconseravtive dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and putatively of Russia, in the Wahhabi interest (and also at the hypocrisy of Clare Short, Private Eye and others, for turning against the neocon-Wahhabi alliance in Iraq without apologising for having cheered it on at the tops of their voices in Yugoslavia).

I am "a pan-Arabist" in that pan-Arabism, like pan-Slavism, is an originally Christian, largely Catholic bulwark both against Wahhabism and against its Shi'ite twin, the two (intended) beneficiaries of the neoconservative removal of a pan-Arab government in Iraq (Saddam was an old man anyway, and the Ba'ath Party could have led Iraq through a transition after his death which is completely impossible now), as they would be of the removal of just such a government (already in that transitional phase) in Syria. The Christians of Syria and Lebanon will then pay the highest price, as those of Iraq and Palestine are already doing. Speaking of Palestine, over half the Jews in Israel are now Arabs in the pan-Arab sense (their first language is Arabic), while an Arab even in the more usual sense now sits in the Cabinet, as another has done on the Supreme Court for quite a while. Those who are castigated for calling such appointments "betrayals of Zionism" are quite right, and thank God.

I am "a Bolivarian", about which I know far less but am busily finding out, in that I look most optimistically to the (devoutly Catholic) newly-inaugurated President Rafael Correa of Ecuador's "Revolución Ciudadana para volver a tener Patria", his "Citizens' Revolution to return to having a Fatherland"; what a thing it must be to have retained the very word "Patria" in one's language. Bolivarianism strikes me ever-more as one of the world's great hopes for the Socialist means to the conservative (i.e., anti-capitalist, anti-globalising, anti-neoconservative) ends.

I agree with Peter Hitchens a startling amount of the time, and so do many other "statist, syndicalist, nationalist and theoconservative" "Old Labour" people out here in "the provinces", who would be very put out indeed to be described as "the psuedo-Left". For, while there cannot actually be "Catholic fundamentalists", the real old Labour Party derided above had huge numbers of members, and it actually won contested elections on very high turnouts, rather than depending on mass abstention in order to "win" by default against no serious challenge, as has now happened three times in a row. I am very, very proud to stand in that tradition, with a view to the re-creation of such a mass-membership, electorally successful movement.

So there.