Tuesday 22 November 2011

The Euston Jackson Challenge

An hour or so ago, one Euston Jackson placed this comment under my post on the twentieth anniversary of the demise of Marxism Today:

It is not far off 20 years since Peter Hitchens brought out The Abolition of Britain. Your next book is universally expected to attract the sort of attention from left to right not seen since then. Why is the collection in response, anticipated almost as eagerly, being written by your mates and edited by one of your much younger protégés? What are you afraid of?

To which I replied:

Nothing.

Nor is he any "protégé" of mine.

The responses book is his project, not mine. If the people from whom you take your moniker want to do their own, then I am not stopping them. I might even get a freelance commission somewhere to review it.

So, between them, can the Euston Manifesto Group and the Henry Jackson Society find, say, five people each capable of contributing a review of between one thousand and two thousand words, plus one to answer each of the 10 individual chapters, of Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, which is to be published (I refuse to say by whom, because certain Euston-Jacksonites will only play silly buggers if I do) early next year?

The first paragraph of my book reads:


Each of these articles is a standalone piece, and all were written in the early summer of 2010 before being revised very slightly in November of that year and subsequently. Three political parties, any two or more of which could be in coalition with each other at any given time, as could all three of them, have fought a General Election over which is the party of “the centre ground”, any dissent from which is therefore branded eccentric and extreme. Tedious and tiresome old 1960s types who imagine that they are still enfants terribles (or ever really were), and who bleat that “Communism did not fail, because it has never been tried”, have now been joined by tedious and tiresome old 1980s types who imagine that they are still enfants terribles (or ever really were), and who bleat that “capitalism did not fail, because it has never been tried”. Grow up, the lot of you.

And the Introduction concludes:

The first and second sketch out a wholly alternative vision of British politics, actually in keeping with the views and values of the British people, because faithful to several histories that it is now no exaggeration to describe as suppressed. The third deals with the cults of Tony Blair (such as there is), of Margaret Thatcher and of Winston Churchill. The idea of Blair as a vote-garnering machine is as baseless as the idea that General Elections are won and lost in the South East. Thatcher’s factual record in office bears little resemblance to the claims of her most vociferous detractors and none whatever to those of her most vociferous defenders. Churchill was ballot box poison, the intense public dislike of whom until he was safely dead was fully justified by his horrendous and even horrific record.

The fourth traces the roots of the American Republic, of the campaign against the slave trade, of Radical and Tory action against social evils, of the extension of the franchise, of the creation of the Labour Movement, and of opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, back to Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688, such that within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly radical consequences. “Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.”

The fifth therefore sets out the conservative, Tory arguments against nuclear weapons and against Post Office privatisation. The sixth sets out both in principle and in practice that the restoration of liberty is the condition for the restoration of proper sentencing and of proper regimes in prison; it then sets out the potential role of the Liberal Democrats in general and of Simon Hughes in particular on this and other issues, including the illiberal and undemocratic European federalism about which he has expressed doubts in the past. The seventh sets out the Catholic, left-wing and all-Ireland case for the Union.

The eighth addresses the real Islamic threat, which is not about terrorism and not even primarily about immigration, but about the appeal of Islam in the religious revival that is about due in this country, mirroring the historical Islamisation of many another economy, society, culture and polity, and to which contemporary Western civilisation is particularly open due to its de-Christianisation and the related acceptance of a series of errors ultimately deriving from Judaism’s denial of Original Sin and from its unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation. The ninth examines the real historical and contemporary relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, but insists that, while there is no special relationship, America is still a special country. It sets out a possibility for consolidating the coalition of morally and socially conservative economic populists and foreign policy realists that put Barack Obama in the White House.

And the tenth tackles head on the lies spread in advance of the Pope’s State Visit to Britain, and the character of the liars who spread them. The ridiculous theory that a mere predilection for homosexual acts is somehow a basis for individual and collective identity comparable to class, or to ethnicity, or to the sex that is written into every cell of the body; that persons rather than only acts are homosexual or heterosexual, those words being nouns as well as adjectives: that theory is barely, if yet, 40 years old, and was invented in, by and for pederastic subcultures. The anti-natal movement is a direct attack on women, on non-white people, on the poor, on the working class, and on the electoral base of the Left. The popular fantasises about Pius XII and the Holocaust, and about the Inquisition, are precisely that: fantasies. The real target is the Catholic Church’s comprehensive and coherent witness to metaphysical realism, to the doctrinal essentials of historic Christianity, to the sanctity of life, to Biblical standards of sexual morality, to social justice, to environmental responsibility, and to peace, including the right of Lebanese Catholics to live free from bombardment, and the right of Catholics in the western part of the Palestinian State created in 1948 to live in that State rather than under military occupation and martial law.

Unless they can get a practising Catholic for that last one, then they are simply not trying.

Anyway, over to them.

24 comments:

  1. Good morning, and welcome to What You Won't Be Reading On Harry's Place.

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  2. How about Greg Pope to respond to Chapter 10? It would be fascinating to read the deputy director of the Catholic Education Service for England and Wales trying to defend the position of Oliver Kamm, Nick Cohen et al.

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  3. Or MacShane. He should definitely be in this somewhere.

    He's an Ealing Abbey boy, you know.

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  4. Chapter 6 might prove a challenge and a half. Have they any Lib Dems? I can't think of one.

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  5. Please could you advise us of your sales figures for 2010/2011 for your first two publications. All of your blog posts suggest significant sales were obtained.
    January 31st 2012 is the deadline for Self Assessment tax returns to be submitted online for the tax year ending April 1st 2011.

    Benefit fraud is a crime.

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  6. I don't know what the last bit is supposed to mean.

    My dealings with the Revenue are immensely civilised, and I have never filled in a Self-Assessment form in my life. One does not keep a dog and bark oneself. We know to arrange these things in Lanchester and around the High Tables of Durham, darling.

    Now, on topic, please.

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  7. Benefit fraud! Give over! Try and imagine the great man signing on in his Savile Row suit, or already in black tie in the late afternoon because he was going on to something in the evening. Almost as funny as the idea of him filling in his own tax form because he had nobody to do it for him. Sorry, off-topic.

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  8. Can you claim your fabulous suits and shirts as workware? Plus your trademark silk breast pocket handkerchiefs? They are essential to the job of being David Lindsay.

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  9. You are managing to publish this in Britain? You are doing well. Things are not as they were. That is the reason why I doubt that the EMG/HJS crowd will pay the slightest attenion. They could never be able to bring themselves to face that fact.

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  10. In London, even. I know. How times change. And how quickly.

    Unless and until they prove me wrong, I contend that they cannot answer me; that they have not the intellectual resources with which to do so.

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  11. Unrepentant Blairite22 November 2011 at 23:12

    Chilling. With Ed Miliband come Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour. With Maurice Glasman and Blue Labour comes this. I hope this book of decent left responses takes off and tears your book to pieces. Those of us still in our party can start getting it back before the next election.

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  12. With Labour Party unitary selections approaching the fate of the buses across the division needs you to move quickly in order to re-join and be selected. Go North East are quaking at the prospect.

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  13. If Mr Lindsay stands, he will do it as David Lindsay. Ozzie Johnson's seat would be toast. Richie would cling on, being Independent. But Ozzie is the Labour Chief Whip who forced through the bus cuts to Lanchester, the bus cuts to Burnhope and the bus cuts to Saint Bede's. Mr Lindsay would probably not even have to put out a leaflet. Richie Young (Ind.) first, David Lindsay (Ind.) second. Place your bets now.

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  14. My goodness, it is a long time since I read anything quite like this. Not only the content, but also the style. As we Thomists, you and I, might put it, not only the substance, but also the form.

    You are telling the reader to rise, if necessary, to your intellectual level, or else accept that this book was not written for him.

    All this, and James Murdoch off the Board of Times Newspapers, too. Bravo!

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  15. How has it taken so long to publish it?

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  16. The surgeon's knife.

    Not that it matters, the history hasn't changed.

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  17. "The third deals with the cults of Tony Blair (such as there is), of Margaret Thatcher and of Winston Churchill."

    This is weak. Either there is a cult of Tony Blair worth talking about, in which case you don't need the parenthetical phrase, or there isn't, in which case you shouldn't be talking about it. Trying to have it both ways just weakens your point.

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  18. Buy the book in early 2012. It is all explained. Why someone who was recently Prime Minister for 10 years has so little popular following is important in itself...

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  19. Why not do what you have done before with these sorts, send them a round robin email and then reproduce it on here so that they are publicly challenged?

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  20. An erstwhile housemate of mine signed the Euston Manifesto and is now Director of Research for the Labour Party. I wonder if his old email address still works...

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  21. So who is publishing your book?

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  22. I'm not saying, because I know why you are asking. You'll know when it comes out.

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