Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging thinktanker, aspiring novelist, "tribal elder", 2019 parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, "Speedboat", "The Cockroach", eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Blue Is The New Black
Read the comments below, and very often above, the line on the more rightish websites. Then ask yourself exactly how these obsessive enemies of any and all State action differ in the slightest from those who wave black flags and who daub anarchist symbols on the property that they have damaged or destroyed. There is no difference. They even come from much the same background. Yesterday's vandals were not marching with Ed Miliband. They were marching against him, and, in their view that the problem with the cuts was that they did not go far enough, they were marching in support of his brother. Though also, provisionally, in support of the Coalition.
I had thought that no one would ever write this. But then I had thought that no one would ever mention Damian Thompson's "recreational and domestic arrangements" and how they pervert orthodox Catholic witness in British politics and the British media.
ReplyDeleteIf the Mail on Sunday has its way and takes down Michael Seed then he will take an awful lot of people down with him. Including the living link between neolib/neocon faux-Catholicism and neolib/neocon faux-Toryism. The space will be cleared for tremendously important insights such as that in this post and in so many of your posts.
Interesting that it should be the Mail on Sunday, the main British media outlet for conservative criitiques of global capitalism and its wars.
ReplyDeleteEven if, last week, it did take the page on which someone like Mark Almond, John Laughland or Anthony Daniels should have been laying into the war in Libya, and instead give it over to a piece of anti-Obama boilerplate by Andrew Roberts.
The Mail titles generally provide a welcome home for Peter Hitchens, Stephen Glover, Peter McKay, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the foreign policy (even if not the economic) views of Andrew Alexander, and the social policy (even if not the foreign policy) views of Melanie Phillips.
Great points. There was a time when proper conservatism meant proper respect for the State. Of course, that was when conservatism meant conserving things.
ReplyDeleteFor a good example of modern anti-state Rightism in action, see the occupation of Iraq by the Bush Administration, which tried to turn the country into a modern "conservative" model, complete with extreme privatization and the mass dismissal of civil servants. The result was anarchy and chaos on a massive scale.