Can You Feel It?

Neil Clark not only plugs my comments on Peter Hitchens (very many thanks, Neil), but also writes:

The journalist and author Peter Hitchens (the Hitchens brother who's got the brains) has a penned a thought provoking article on what is wrong with today's Britain and how we can put it right.

The basic problem is that in the last forty years Britain has overdosed on both social and economic libertinism.

Social libertinism begets economic libertinism and vice versa: Roy Jenkins and Margaret Thatcher may have been political opponents, but were really two sides of the same coin.

Today, the millions of Britons who are moderate social conservatives, but who don't believe that 'market forces' should rule every aspect of our lives, are effectively disenfranchised. What is needed is a new mass movement/political party, which combines moderate social conservatism (emphasis on the family, personal morality, prioritising on social cohesion above economic 'growth', tougher prison sentences, bans on the sale of violent video games/violent rap music), with measures to rein in the pernicious effects of turbo capitalism.

We need to combine all that was good and decent about the 'old', sovereigntist left, with all that was good and decent about the 'old' sovereigntist right. We urgently need to restore our country's independence and work on a commonly agreed popular programme of national, democratic renewal. Such a programme would include such sovereignty-restoring measures as withdrawal from the EU, NATO and WTO; bringing public transport and the utilities back into public ownership, drastically reducing the gap between rich and poor, and re-introducing capital punishment for murder.

Back in 2003, I wrote of the urgent need for an old left-old right anti-war alliance. But it's not just to stop the neo-cons and their 'liberal' interventionist allies that we need such a realignment. We need it to save our society too.

Pity about the capital punishment bit, I know. But something is stirring. Something big.