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.