Full Marx?

Peter Hitchens returns to his familiar, and far from baseless, theme of the Eurocommunist roots of the New Labour project. 

But he implies that the Blairites, as enthusiastic participants in the Sexual Revolution and in the associated drug culture, were somehow un-Tory, so that it is the Conservative Party that has moved in their direction over the last 20 years. That will be completely laughable to anyone who has ever encountered the Tory subculture at any of the grander universities.

The discovery of the works of the conveniently dead Antonio Gramsci was able to provide an ideological framework of sorts for the realisation that Marx's Revolution was never supposed to have started in the former Russian Empire, that the form that it had taken there was incapable of replication in Western Europe, and that numerous aspects of it had become thoroughly embarrassing. (That position goes well beyond Trotskyism, in which the Soviet Union went wrong very early on, but the Russian Revolution itself was and is fundamentally sound.)

And that in turn was able to provide an ideological framework of sorts for purporting to remain on "the Centre Left" while fulfilling the cherished dream of the Oxbridge lower middle class to meet the Bullingdon Boys exactly where they had always been economically, chemically and sexually, not merely since the 1960s, but since 1066.

So yes, New Labour was indeed a takeover by the Right. It would not have passed as one in a land of Gaullists or of Christian Democrats, of conservative traditions with deep roots in Magisterial Catholicism or in Confessional Protestantism. But this is not such a land.