The Wrong Right

It is always good to hear from old friends who are readers of this blog. Several have been in touch today, and I agree with all of them that one would rather not use the term "right-wing" to describe those who fight the morally and socially conservative, staunchly patriotic fight against poverty, idleness, ignorance, illness, squalor and war. But it seems to be unavoidable in practice, although of course I heartily concur that our record more than bears comparison with that of those who instead filled and fill their heads with adolescent drivel about dialectical materialism, the vanguard elite (guess who?), the dictatorship of the proletariat (to which they never, ever belong), the permanent revolution, and all that.

"It starts with far-fetched think tank papers. Those become pickled into a rigid dogma code. You go through the years sticking to that: outmoded (not that it was ever inmoded), misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs. And you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour Government - a Labour Government - flogging off the schools and hospitals to multinational corporations, relegating local authorities from providers to mere commissioners of services, bowing the knee to Rupert Murdoch, trying to privatise the Royal Mail, allowing pubs to stay open all night, legislating to permit super-casinos, reclassifying cannabis as if it were harmless, banging people up for prolonged periods without even so much as charging them with anything, attempting to impose identity cards and to put everyone on a national DNA database, recording us all on CCTV hundreds of times per day, colluding in secret legislative activity at EU level, dangerously weakening public service provision and trade union bargaining power by setting up toytown parliaments all over the place, importing a new working class which understands no English except commands and can be deported if it steps out of line, and waging wholly aggressive wars in order to effect "regime change" in countries posing no threat whatever to the United Kingdom."

Whereas we are the true radicals, precisely because we are the true conservatives and the true patriots; and vice versa. But 30 years ago, a supposedly "moderate" new party was set up, not by or for us, but specifically against us and our reviled industrial and municipal machines, as if they, with their endless ties to the wider communities that they very largely defined, were somehow the problem. That party duly sank like a lead balloon, having left the Labour Party to be taken over by those who went on, 15 years ago, to create what they also intended to be a new party, once again defined specifically against us. When will it be our turn? When we can be bothered to take it, that's when.