Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The Delusions of the Italicised Left

Reading Labourlist, the blog run by co-smearer Derek Draper, in the midst of the tide of disgust generated by Damiangate is a strange experience. The posters seem to live on some other planet where an entity known simply as 'the left' both is and is not connected to the ruling party. Brown's dirty tricks (read this post by Guido for yet further horrors) are, apparently, nothing to do with 'the left' and yet, at the same time, the Labour Party - the one that Brown leads and that has been in power for the last twelve years - is the best hope of 'the left'. Which part of 'have', 'cake' and 'eat' don't they understand? The point is that the corruption of Brown is structural. 'The left' love their meetings, their plots and plans, their cults of personality. Above all, they love the narrow politics of secret meetings and side of the mouth conversations. Damian McBride is the perfectly predictable product of such a culture, that he should be embraced by Downing Street seems to be a perfectly predictable expression of Brown's personality. ('The left', I should make clear, has no connection with the non-italicised left which consists of brave and sincere thinkers like Nick Cohen.) With the wise and saintly Frank Field now effectively calling for Brown to go, Damiangate is swinging like a wrecking ball through a still baffled administration. The Labour Party may have resigned itself to losing the next election, but does it really want to go down enmired in these corrupt shenanigans? I don't think so. I'm standing by my 'gone by June' prediction for the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime.

15 comments:

  1. Golly, you were up early. Brown won't be gone by June. He's hit rock bottom and is holding on to those "green shoots" for dear life. His creatures, because they were all formed in an intellectual and moral vacuum, have no choice but to stick with him.

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  2. So how do if someone is a non-italicised leftie or an italicised one? Is it like U and non-U?

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  3. So how do we know if someone is a non-italicised leftie or an italicised one? Is it like U and non-U?

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  4. I think you are right about the month Bryan, but wrong about the year - unfortunately. He will be gone by June 4th, 2010. God, it looks worse in print

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  5. Nice to read such a tribute to Frank Field. The related issue is how any government can avoid becoming victim to the blogscape broadly defined - taking in Twitter, Facebook and myriads of interactive fora. The wiki world as Evan Davies (4:09) called it on Monday. Martin Kettle replied that Labour had been very interested but hadn't found a way to tap into this 'insurrectionary' world, as Obama had so effectively in his presidential campaign. But Obama was the outsider then. It it merely corruption and incompetence that's causing the problem now? Watson was Parliament's first blogger, he's the Minister for Digital Engagement, and look where it's got him. The anarchism goes deep online in a way that's ultimately not pretty. Without wishing to defend McBride and others scraping the barrel of the new medium, this cultural fact also needs to be faced.

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  6. PS a more relaxed view of trolling just picked up on twitter. It all depends on one's experience

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  7. when he goes - and I think he should - what then?

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  8. Nick Cohen's of the left ? blimey, every day, something new.
    The left of course is a state of mind rather than a political entity, most sane people get over it at the end of puberty, except Weggie Benn of course, who had the ideal credentials, being a certified toff.
    The last truly socialist administration ended with Clem Attlee, ever since then we've been inundated with pretenders.

    Frank Field is of course a one off, a decent man wandering in the wilderness.

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  9. Nick is of the true left, as opposed to the loony left, the old left, the new left and now the italicised left.

    At least, he claims to be of the true left - can't think why he'd want to; it all seems a bit People's Front of Judea. Why can't he just be Nick Cohen, because that's obviously what he is.

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  10. There are good, sincere, civic-minded folks on the left, on the right and in the middle. They join political parties at ward level, do leafleting in all weathers, try to take action on things like improving litter collection, confronting anti-social behaviour where they can, generall attempting to help others along. There's a good number of these folks still out there. Problem is, there ain't enough of them and they are frequently met by smart alecs who do very little for their communities and say stuff like 'you're all the same'.

    They join a party, because that's the best way to get this type of thing done. (If more did it, we might have a better neighbourhoods). With the shenanigans in Westminster, you can well imagine them thinking they are of something, but not of it at the same time. Just as a Man City fan might love City, but not Mark Hughes and Robinho. I would easily put Frank Field, Peter Kilfoyle and Kate Hoey into this category. If these non-italicised folks jumped ship and joined the Tories, who's to say another Jeffrey Archer or Aitken won't come along and sully their good name and ideals? The anti-politics mood we have at the moment is more, not less, likely to accelerate the continuing trend towards top down rule from agencies run by bureaucrats, which is where modern politics has been leading us.

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  11. They've been in power too long, it always goes the same way - doesn't matter which party it is.

    This is why we need to keep the first past the post system. With PR you can never get rid of the bastards, which you need to do in a huge cathartic electoral avalanche every decade or so.

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  12. Brit: hear hear on first past post.

    Malty: Atlee went to the old school, my father met him a couple of times, big part of my anecdotal history, delightful, thoroughly decent, just like Field, agreed.

    Spongebob: Very good points, the only difference between left and right being (as Tom Sowell points out in The Vision of the Anointed) that in a political disagreement the right doesn't tend to assume moral superiority but the left somehow always does. It's this messianic side that bothers me (as a messianic type in another area!) If you run into an Aitken or Archer in the Tories - and I take Aitken's change of heart as genuine by the way - it's not such a great comedown. But with the sense of operating on a higher plane on the left comes lack of reality, hypocrisy, deceit, ruthlessness, cruelty and an inability to apologise, all of which do considerable damamge.

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  13. I agree with you about Aitken, Richard. My point was that somewhere down the line someone fouls up and brings the whole shooting match into disrepute. And I'm as turned off by liberal righteousness as much as anybody else.

    In my past I got involved with a local ward Labour Party - and I was taken by what a thoroughly decent bunch they were. I've retained a distrust of the liberals ever since. Curiously, they tended to like their Tory opponents far more. I think the average age of the group (there were about ten of us) was about 55. It was far from the metropolis so instead of passing resolutions about Palestine, they worked to improve the state of the shopping precinct, set up luncheon clubs for the elderly, lobbied for a skateboard ramp in the local park - small things that made a difference. I imagine they are shaking their heads about Brown/McBride as much as everybody else.

    The political right can get righteous too - particularly around issues such gay rights, abortion and immigration. It's just their views are not endorsed by the likes of the BBC and the equal opps industry in the same way the left's sacred cows are wont be.

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  14. As an empiricist-evangelical - something I've never articulated before so thanks - I can say nothing against your experience S-Bob. I have also met the very good at the local, lower echelons of Labour.

    As an evangelical empiricist I feel the three areas you mention at the end are a tiny bit different. There's no doubt though that the so-called Christian right in America has come on very strong on all three and that this has been harmful in all kinds of ways. (The thing I'd be most concerned about is that Jesus never came to endorse any of our power structures and grubby political compromises, the outright denial of which plain truth has I'm sure put off many who would otherwise be inspired by the most radical person in history.)

    I do feel abortion is a key moral issue, having said that. Does that make me feel morally superior and thus take on all the negative attributes I ascribed to the left-liberal anointed? I sincerely hope not - but it's a very good warning, thanks.

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  15. And Councillor Antonia Bance is embraced by Oxfam, where she heads the UK poverty campaign. Indeed Oxfam which has become Gordon Brown's recruiting ground for people who can polish his image: Justin Forsyth, Brendan Cox, Stephen Doughty...

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