Baseless

The BBC has missed a trick by not pointing out that Channel Four’s Dispatches last night was really just an hour-long reading out of material from the Newsnight-exposed forgers at Michael Gove’s Policy Exchange, as previously cut and pasted by Nick Cohen for publication in the Observer. That programme was presented by Martin Bright, Political Editor of the New Statesman, raising very serious questions indeed about what has become of that magazine. Who is going to ask those questions, and where?

Still, the programme had a point, albeit one at least as applicable to the Cohen-Policy Exchange Nexus/Axis, about the take-over of British political and wider public life by old Marxist baby boomers. Hardly anybody of that generation was ever actually involved in such politics, yet those who were now seem to be running pretty much everything. Even the judiciary. As Rod Liddle asked in the Spectator a couple of weeks ago, “How the hell did that happen?”

So much for Marx’s own dictum that the base dictates the superstructure. We might not have Marxist economics (although that is debatable, if you merely change the ending so that the bourgeoisie wins while leaving everything else intact). But we indisputably have Marxist everything, and everyone, else. So I, too, ask, how the hell did that happen? And what can we do about it? Well, this, for a start.