On Being Nice, and on how Gordon Brown Saved the Pound

Yet again I am told to honey my words (this time on the subject of fatherless families) with sentiments which I regard as futile or worse. If I prefaced every statement I made about this subject with ‘of course most single mothers do a great job…’ , do readers seriously think that I would be any less hated, by those who hate me (and they do) for my moral and religious opinions?

As I’ve explained in my previous posting, whether single mothers do a great job or not is beside the point. The absence of the father from the home makes it likelier that the child ( especially a boy) will do worse in life, however good the job that is done.  Everyone would be better off if the children were brought up in stable, lifelong marriages. I refuse to apologise for, or qualify this factual statement with concessionary flannel . To do so would suggest that I was afraid of my critics, and that I conceded that they had moral right on their side.

On the contrary, to do so would be to give credence to the smear, that those who favour stable marriage are in fact persecutors of single mothers. This smear has been immensely effective in shutting down this debate, It won’t work for me. It’s not just that I’m not ‘sorry’ to have ‘upset’ the Emily Thornberry tendency, who think that phoney outrage is a substitute for facts and logic.

It’s also that I am proud that I still stand up for the married family, and am not ashamed to do so. So no more of this stuff about being ‘emollient’. Why should I seek to please or appease people who hate everything I stand for, and cannot distinguish between loathing my ideas and loathing me? Do my correspondents truly think that, if I make these concessions, Ms Thornberry and her Twitter friends will soften towards me? I can tell them it is not so.
Lenin, as so often, had it right…though you often have to read him backwards, as if you were being an instruction manual in what not to do, if you want to defeat revolutionaries.

 ‘Probe with a bayonet’, said that horrible man ‘If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, shove harder ’.

Revolutionaries respect only those who fight them as hard as they fight themselves. They scorn compromise and offer no mercy to those who give in to them.

Hard principle needs to be stated without compromise . If you are afraid of a crowd,  whether physical or electronic, you will never be able to lead , and you are not worthy of any responsibility. If you are ashamed or nervous of your own opinion, then people will wonder if you truly hold it.

As for Gordon Brown, the absurd distorted hate figure which the Useless Tories used with such effect to drum up their dying vote in 2010, it is most interesting to read Alastair Campbell’s latest diaries.

Mr Campbell is at last becoming interesting, as he has no need to keep secrets any more. And one of two really interesting things in his serialised memoirs (in the Guardian)  is the detail of the real row between Anthony Blair and Gordon brown.

This was always portrayed as a sort of soap opera personal rivalry, between sunny, charming Anthony and grim, dour, unhinged Gordon. But in fact there was an issue - and it was British membership of the Euro. Brown, well-advised by the (almost equally mocked and misrepresented) Ed Balls, successfully resisted great pressure from Blair and most of his ‘modernising’ Cabinet colleagues (themselves backed by those keen Tory allies of David Cameron, especially Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke) to abolish the Pound Sterling.

In short, Gordon Brown saved the Pound.

However bad our economic circumstances are now, imagine how much worse they would be if Blair, Heseltine and Clarke had got their way. And wonder how things would have been if John Major, or David Cameron, had been in office at the time, with no Balls or Brown to stand in their way.

Yet Tory voters were persuaded to hate and loathe Brown, while they were urged to vote for and admire David Cameron, a man who had by then reneged on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty( and yes, he had, and I was there when he announced it and tried to wriggle out of his commitment, and he knew what he had done, and he looked thoroughly ashamed of himself and fearful he would be found out) on his promise of a vote on the Lisbon.

It is an interesting example of people being persuaded, by propaganda, to do wholly irrational things. And it bolsters my view that, until modern neuropsychpharmacology was invented (plus steroids), and until there was widespread use of cannabis, individual madness was far less common in our world than the madness of crowds.