And Now, Ed Koch Is Dead

There is a logically unimpeachable combination of neoliberal economics, a liberal social policy which is nevertheless open to authoritarian measures against those whose perceived lack of enlightenment renders them a threat, rigid state secularism (even if accompanied by occasional, and occasionally even by regular, religious observance), and an aggressive military expansionism in that cause, especially in support of those countries which already most fully embody it. Above all, that means, or at least it has meant until recent years, the State of Israel. Since that position is, in a word, American Jewish, and above all New York Jewish.

Anglo-Jewry has always been a very different story, for the most part observantly Orthodox well into the post-War period and still very largely so, with the result that even Maurice Glasman, who the last time that I saw him tucked heartily into a Chinese meal full of both pork and shellfish but who was brought up kosher ("Making up for lost time"), can draw on the haggadah and the halacha, the Midrash and the folkways, of the old Yiddish East End in order to form and inform Blue Labour.

In so doing, he finds a natural affinity with Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, with Radical Orthodoxy, with the Old Labour that owed "more to Methodism than to Marx", with the Anglican-based Tory populism that contributed as much as Nonconformist Radical Liberalism to the emergence of the Labour Movement, with the broader Tory tradition or metatradition behind that (far greater than the Conservative Party, itself in any case a fairly recent, and largely a Whig and Liberal, invention), and even with aspects of Islam as explored by Riyad Karim.

Could there be an American Blue Labour? Chestertonians and Burkeans are said to be on the rise as the Republican Party tries to reconstruct itself. I very much hope that that is true. And the recent elections indicated that the Bobby Kennedy black-blue coalition was now the Democratic majority as surely as was the George McGovern coalition of non-white ethnic minorities with urban and suburban, often Jewish, liberals.

Those last long ago decided that the essence of Jewish identity, and even of Judaism, was to be found in a celebration of dissent, argument, strict state secularism, egalitarian and democratic family structures, avant garde educational methods bound up with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, internationalism in general and liberal interventionism in particular, an openness to people's and organisations' Marxist pasts and to whatever they might have retained from those days, minimal religious observance and negligible religious instruction, all with a view to the highest or fullest degree of individual freedom and self-realisation, themselves defined in terms of all the foregoing.

Initially, it was America that was idealised as the civic embodiment of those principles, by reference to a very particular reading of the Founding Fathers in such terms, and retaining the more or less explicit view that Jews were to form the liberal vanguard, the natural elite, the national or societal conscience. Later, mostly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel also came to be so identified, in that case by so reading people who were in many cases still alive to correct such a wild misrepresentation, yet who rarely, if ever, did so.

This would of course have been unrecognisable and repugnant to its originators' near ancestors in Central and Eastern Europe. That point is made most starkly by the very heavy rewriting of the Yiddish tales of Sholem Aleichem in order to turn them into Fiddler on the Roof, in which a man dressed like the first audience's great-grandfathers articulates that audience's own prejudices rather than those of its great-grandfathers.

A real life Tevye would have held views far more akin to those of a 1960s New York Jew's Catholic neighbours, mostly of Irish and Italian stock, but also German and East European, the blue (i.e., blue-collar, working-class) in the black-blue: unshakeably committed to ecclesial, civil and parental authority, which were inculcated by thoroughly traditional forms of education at the heart of which was the systematic impartation over many years, from early childhood until at least the middle or late teens, of a very extensive body of highly specific religious knowledge which was in no sense up for debate.

In political terms, this issued as much in an utterly uncompromising anti-Communism as in participation in organised labour and community activism, in a commitment to the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and in sympathy for Civil Rights, of which it was in fact often Jews who were more sceptical, although the Communist Party's involvement in things like the NAACP did the cause no favours among the white ethnics in the North, who historically, and at that time well within living memory, had been just as much victims of things like the Ku Klux Klan.

Again, it was America that was idealised as the civic embodiment of those principles; again, by reference to a very particular reading of the Founding Fathers in such terms. A reading which was absolutely ridiculous considering how ferociously anti-Catholic the Founding Fathers were, but there we are. That would remain the fundamental, even if no longer always the conscious, frame of reference for most of the readers of the New York Post. Under its present Proprietor and Editor-in-Chief, Rupert Murdoch, that newspaper has done more than anything else to turn its readers into adherents of that which the rival, Jewish frame of reference has now become in practical policy terms.

But with even the New York Times, the house journal of that rival position, turning against key parts of it, what hope is there of keeping Pat and Carmine, Rosie and Carmela in line? In fact, Pat and Carmine, Rosie and Carmela have already seen through big business social liberalism and its global spread by force of arms, and they are reverting to a pattern of voting accordingly. Even at the Presidential level, which was where there was most desertion from the late 1960s onwards.

And now, Ed Koch is dead.

No Hunt Balls

Melissa Kite and Rod Liddle both make important points.

But the most important of all is this: the hunting ban was the means whereby disgraceful Labour MPs were cajoled into supporting the Iraq War.

By Tony Blair and Hilary Armstrong.

Both of whom went on to vote against the hunting ban.

After Real Labour, The Real Tories?

On Question Time, Alan Johnson, since Blairites are still the only Labourites ever allowed on it, pointed out the strong support for nuclear power from Labour Copeland Borough Council, with the blockage coming from the Conservatives on Cumbria County Council. But it is a complete waste of time trying to explain the realities of energy policy. That debate has been carved up between George Monbiot and James Delingpole.

Speaking of which latter, he was the only Loony Righty on Question Time this week, which is unusual, since there are usually two and not uncommonly three, that last being the norm on Newsnight discussions. Although famously not a member of David Dimbleby's Bullingdon Club, it is difficult to imagine that anyone who had also not attended the same Oxford college as that BBC grandee would have been allowed back on the air after anything like the Corby fiasco.

But even he articulated his doubts about intervention in Mali, with both Lord West and Michael Portillo using This Week to express themselves explicitly against it. Foreign policy realism seems to be making a comeback. In the next Parliament, to be dominated by the re-emerged Real Labour, will the other main voice be that of the re-emerged Real Tories? And might their media spear-carriers include even Michael Portillo and James Delingpole?

Private Principles

It is no more or less "hypocritical" for a politician of any party to send his or her child to a commercial school than it is for a politician of any other party to do so. At least Labour politicians ever use the schools for which they legislate, unlike most Lib Dems or practically all Conservatives.

As Harold Wilson made manifest while both Prime Minister and a parent, there has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish these strange institutions, which sell themselves as especially adept at putting pupils through an examination system which is largely rubbish anyway, and which frequently embody the views that adolescence ought to be lived out in single-sex residential environments while the relationship between parents and children ought to be strictly financial and nothing more.

Meaning that Diane Abbott was no more or less a hypocrite than any Conservative or Liberal Democrat, including Nick Clegg. She certainly acquitted herself better than Tony Blair or Harriet Harman, who did in fact send their children to schools that it was then, although mysteriously not for very much longer, the Labour Party policy to abolish.

Easily Replaced

As, together with "unimpressive", Nigel Lawson today describes the City boys who keep threatening to leave the country if they do not get their own way. He also calls for the whole of RBS to be nationalised, so as to force it to lend to business. That's right. Nigel Lawson.

But he is still only halfway there. Investment banking and retail banking should be split completely. All of the banks should be turned into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by statute, the same Statute Law that already forbids building societies from engaging in investment banking.

Apart, that is, from the public stakes in HBOS and RBS, which should indeed be increased to 100 per cent. Those are permanent, non-negotiable safeguards of the Union, as public ownership always is. Therefore, the profits from each of those stakes should be divided equally among all the households in the United Kingdom.

No Delight

Turkey is already a member of NATO, and is on course to join the EU. Marxist terrorists, Kurdish and otherwise, will soon be our legislators, too. Along with the Kemalist secular ultranationalists of Dönmeh extraction ideologically and otherwise. And along with the ruling Islamists, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud having also been of probable Dönmeh descent. What a thing is unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, of which no example could be sharper than that which gave rise to the Dönmeh.

For Turkey is a land, by no means the only one, of two Far Rights, which fight it out between themselves as the nearest approximation to a meaningful political choice. That did not used to be the case: the Kemalists used to be barely assailable in practice, and of course they retain control of the Deep State, ever-ready to stage an American-backed military coup if the Islamists start to go too far. Or is it, any longer? Apparently not, it would seem.

The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, to which Unionists from Northern Ireland seem oddly attached or at least have done in the past, is a thoroughly Kemalist affair. It seeks to be an outpost, ideally an integral part, of a mainland country which arguably never really existed, and which certainly does not exist now. The Ulster Unionist fondness does then begin to make sense, although such a forlorn condition might just as easily endear the place to Republicans from the Six Counties. But what if Turkey as she is now sought to conform her little offshore hobby to herself?

The Real Opiate of The Masses

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith writes:

Recently there has been a flurry of comment about pornography, all of it taking roughly the same point of view, which is quite remarkable, considering the usually irremediable plurality of opinion on more or less everything in our society. But here they all are, people as diverse as our own Francis Phillips and the Labour MP Diane Abbott, along with Allison Pearson at the Telegraph. They are all making the same point: pornography is morally corrosive, a bad thing, and an especially bad thing for girls, who have to live with its effects on boys.

That this is a serious problem, no one should doubt. Of course, there has always been porn. There was even porn of sorts in ancient Greece and Rome. However, today’s situation is different. Porn is now everywhere, and readily available at the touch of a computer keyboard. You do not, as in the past, have to pay for it. And by a process of osmosis, porn seeps out of its own sphere and into the mainstream. People like Jeff Koons and Ilona Staller are the harbingers of things to come. It is not hysterical to talk of a pornified society.

This brings me to the real point I want to make, which concerns the prescience of George Orwell and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may remember that the Ministry of Truth, which is charged with pumping out lies, has novel-writing machines to turn out the equivalent of penny dreadfuls for the masses, as well as “Pornosec”, the pornography section, which produces porn for the proletariat (“the proles”). Pornosec is overseen by party members who are enrolled in the Junior Anti-Sex League.

Orwell has a point here. The first is that pornography is a sort of opium for the masses. It keeps them politically quiet. Winston Smith’s hope that the proles will one day rise against the tyranny of the Party is a vain one, because the proles are not interested in politics, but are stupefied by a diet of porn and bad fiction. Porn in short saps your strength, and turns you into what we would nowadays call a couch potato. (Orwell did not live to see the modern television age: if he had, can you imagine what he would have made of it?)

The second point is the concept of the Junior Anti-Sex League. The Party opposes sexual relations, encouraging its keenest adherents to forgo relationships and instead have children via artificial insemination (“artsem”); this is because a sexual relationship happens in the private sphere away from the prying eyes of the Party, and is something the Party cannot easily control. To be a member of the League and to work in Pornosec is not contradictory. People who denigrate the value of sexual relations will be at home with porn production. Because porn in the end is not about relationships at all. Indeed, porn signifies the end of all relationships and their replacement with something quite different, namely masturbation. That is what we mean by the commodification of sex that porn brings about: this is the product at which this whole vast industry is aimed.

Porn is, of course, morally wrong; but it is philosophically wrong too: it represents a perversion of reality, and that is extremely serious. To enter the world of porn is to go through a particular type of looking-glass, to be in a world where nothing is in fact as it is. Because we are in the world, we all need to embrace reality – porn represents an attempt to seduce us into an anti-reality.

The chief aspect of porn that contradicts reality is the way it exposes the private to public view, in the process perverting it. It creates what some writers have called “Pornotopia”. But the world is not like that. In reality, sex acts are private and not spoken about because they are in a true sense incommunicable. The feelings that may be shared and communicated by a couple cannot be shared by anyone else. To drag sex into the open is to destroy its meaning. Sexual relations are not a performance, and porn stars are not lovers. Porn represents not a caricature of love and sex, but a destruction of its meaning. And if we destroy the meaning of sex and love, then we damage our humanity and we damage our society.

George Orwell would, I think, be amazed by us. We are rushing into the sort of slavery that we should most want to avoid. We are proving one of the slogan’s of Big Brother’s English Socialism (“Ingsoc“): Freedom is Slavery.