As my own generation starts to become politically prominent, the two main parties have managed to find a wildly disproportionate number of people who were in favour of the Iraq War.
Hardly anyone in the country was, including almost no one born in the 1970s.
Yet anything up to half of the latter who are now Labour MPs not only were, but remain at least broadly liberal interventionists to this day.
One of the supposed rising stars even abstained on Syria, and has since used Prime Minister's Questions to criticise the Government's defeat on that issue. Are there no Whips these days?
(The proudest achievement of my life is to have guaranteed that another such will never be an MP. That is what I have instead of children, and I should fight no less hard in order to protect it.)
The same is true of almost all of my vintage who are now Conservative MPs; I am open to correction, but I can think of only one exception, and he is as good as certain to lose his seat.
To put the matter no more strongly, this is most unrepresentative.
The proudest achievement of my life is to have guaranteed that another such will never be an MP. That is what I have instead of children, and I should fight no less hard in order to protect it.
ReplyDeleteIsn't that a bit strong even for you? He does hate you, you know that. But nowhere near as much as you hate him. Nowhere near.
Isn't that a bit strong even for you?
DeleteNo.
You may not like to know the full truth.
ReplyDeleteBut the 244 Labour MP's who voted for the Iraq War-what you call "liberal interventionists"-included the likes of Michael Meacher and Jon Cruddas.
Blair built a very broad Labour alliance.
To their credit, they are both very penitent about it.
DeleteStrikingly few of the pro-war lot from the House at that time are still there, and very many of those are retiring.
The 2010 intake was mostly older than usual, and made up of stalwarts who were prepared to give it a go in a bad year.
Thus, leftish or fully left-wing and anti-war types such as Pat Glass, Grahame Morris, Ian Mearns, Ian Lavery, and so on.
But the 2015 intake needs to be watched very, very carefully indeed.
Christopher Hitchens was always fond of pointing out to the Left wing "anti Israel" Clinton lovers that the only time a US President ever stood up to Israel was when George HW Bush threatened to stop all loans to Israel unless it immediately dismantled all settlements and stopped building new ones, and the person who killed that stone dead was "the hero of every liberal in America" Bill Clinton.
ReplyDeleteI am the last person to defend Bill Clinton.
DeleteThat wasn't my point, sir. My point was that the only President ever to stand up to Israel was a Republican.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course.
Oh, I quite agree. The record of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Jim Baker and so on where these matters were concerned is in one of my books, in fact.
DeleteLike his brother, Christopher Hitchens was always interesting even when one disagreed with him.
ReplyDeleteA liberal, yet he was pro-life, against the conscription of women into the workplace, against radical feminism and even against mass immigration.
And bitterly opposed to political correctness-or as he famously said; ""With "the personal is political," nothing is required of you except to be able to talk about yourself, the specificity of your own oppression. That was a change of quality as well as quantity. And it fit far too easily into the consumer, me-decade, style-section, New-Age gunk").
""You can go to a Left-wing meeting today where someone says, "The meeting doesn't stop till we discuss the question not just of Cherokee lesbians, but Cherokee lesbians who have to take an outsized garment label." It's barely an exaggeration. There will always be someone who wants it all to be about them. ""
""So what was for a moment something that was social, general, collective, educational, and a matter of solidarity very quickly dissolved into petty factionalism""
He was also brilliant on what happened to the Left in 60's.
""What they forgot, I think, because they all took as their model Dr. King's civil-rights movement, was that the whole reason for the success of that movement was that it was not a movement for itself The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.""
""I remember very well the first time I heard the slogan " the personal is political." I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom.""
""That slogan summed it up nicely for me: "I'll have a revolution inside my own psyche." It's escapist and narcissistic.""
Indeed.
Wrong on many things. But he is a sorely missed voice on the Left.