Why Owen Jones Has Got it all Backwards
For 15 years now, I���ve been trying to explain to left-wingers what ���left-wing��� means. It is strange that, while many of these people have a clear grasp of modern technology, can ���get��� references to TV programmes, films and rock bands of which I have never heard, and are, how shall I say, more fashionable dressed than I, they still approach politics as if it hadn���t altered since 1945.
They still seem to think that nationalisation of industry is a major aim of the left. They still approach Marxism, if they approach it at all, as if Soviet Communism was the end point of Marxist thought, and nothing has happened since. Many imagine that Marxism was defeated utterly in 1989-91, when the Soviet empire fell. Likewise they still view the USA as the arsenal of reaction, a highly-conservative country at home and abroad.
No wonder that, stuck in these categories, they are clueless about the real nature of New Labour and of the Tory Party which has embraced New Labour���s policies (without understanding their aims and origins).
To me, dealing with people so utterly out of touch with modern political developments is much like meeting a male person who still wears detachable cellulose collars, sock-suspenders and vests, plasters his hair to his head with brilliantine, uses a typewriter, and still listens, via some electronic time-warp, to the Home Service and the National Programme on his wireless.
Nationalisation, for instance, was always rather marginally connected with socialism. It existed before socialism . Leaving aside the armed forces (the earliest state enterprises) King Charles II nationalised the mails, Stanley Baldwin nationalised the BBC, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity distribution, Dwight Eisenhower nationalised America���s highway system.
The question of whether, say, the railways, are state-owned or not is a practical one, not an ideological one. Long before Harold Wilson came to lead the Labour Party, nationalisation was dead as a real left-right issue in this country.
Roy Jenkins���s 1959 book ���The Labour Case��� and Anthony Crosland���s ���Future of Socialism��� correctly identified the left with moral and cultural revolution, and with dogmatic social egalitarianism. The lasting achievements (like them or not) of the 1964-70 Labour government were not economic or in the field of state ownership. They were : comprehensive schooling, an egalitarian political project of huge power, adopted (despite its utter educational failure) by the Tory Party as well. This issue is the true litmus test of modern politics, and is not merely Labour���s real Clause Four, but has become David Cameron���s Clause Four as well; the array of legal changes summed up (by a resentful Jim Callaghan) as ��� the permissive society��� - simple, swift unilateral divorce, the de facto decriminalisation of cannabis (actually enacted, using a Labour template, by the Tories in 1971), the removal of the principle of punishment from the criminal justice system, the keystone of this being the abolition of capital punishment for heinous murder; the introduction of what rapidly became abortion on demand. This last would be followed by the prescription of contraceptive pills first to the unmarried and then to those under the legal age of sexual consent without the knowledge of their parents.
These vast changes, described and explained in my books ���The Abolition of Britain��� (1999), ���A Brief History of Crime��� (2003) and ���The War We Never Fought��� (2014) utterly transformed private life and the nature of British society, and have been continued and reinforced, never reversed or moderated, by subsequent governments of all parties. One major result has been the transformation of the police force from a locally run, conservative consensual enforcer of the public will into a highly-politicised (and nationalised) exercise in social engineering, with a hilariously slight interest in actual crime or disorder.
They were accompanied by an increasing willingness to permit large-scale immigration, and a decreasing willingness to insist on the integration of the new arrivals. This aided the process of diluting and replacing the former conservative, Christian culture of the country, which came to be seen as ill-mannered towards the new citizens. Thence came multiculturalism, and the insistence on���Diversity; and ���Equality��� eventually enshrined in the Equality Act put through Parliament by Harriet Harman with the qualified but definite assistance of Theresa May.
The surrender of law-making powers to the European Union (whose original directive the Equality Act, among many similar, transforms into British law) made all this much easier, and assisted in the general denaturing of what had formerly been a very particular and unchanging society.
The name ���Equality Act��� concealed the fact that its aim wasn���t so much equality, but the de-privileging of various institutions and ideas which had previously been considered supreme. The married state became one of many equally respected positions, thus losing its privileges. Protestant Christianity, likewise, became one among many competing beliefs, none to be regarded as more favoured than any other. Whether you like this or don���t like it, it is impossible to pretend that it is not a profound change.
Abroad, the USA (especially after the Clinton Presidency) became the arsenal of political correctness ��� both in its own domestic affairs and its policies overseas - and liberal globalism. Meanwhile Russia, having thrown off Communism became the most socially conservative major country on the planet. Eurocommunism, the original basis of Blairism, grasped that political and social radicalism could readily exist alongside economic liberalism. It also saw that regulation was easier to achieve - and in many ways easier to exercise - than nationalisation, and that the old models of Moscow socialism were utterly outmoded. It is beyond comical that anyone imagines that Vladimir Putin���s Russia has anything in common with the USSR. On the contrary, it���s a violent reaction against it. You just need to look, to see. But people don���t look.
It���s hardly surprising that children of the Cold War have found all this hard to grasp. Right is left and left is right. It is full of paradoxes and of things and people trading under aliases.
Yet they should have tried harder. More credit should be given to my late brother, Christopher, for correctly identifying the modern USA as the most revolutionary power on the planet, opposed to crabby conservative concepts such as national sovereignty, sweeping away the tedious restraints of migration controls and protective tariffs. It���s this economic liberalism - allied with the personal liberalism of ���Nobody can tell me what to do with my own body��� which has somehow become identified with the British Conservative Party and the American Republicans, even though it���s not in the least bit conservative.
This is why Owen Jones���s reference to Alan Milburn���s private enterprise activities in his article http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/09/peter-hitchens-tory-trotskyite-left-right#comment-59164209 misses the point so totally. The left no longer has the slightest difficulty with business or wealth. It���s utterly relaxed. Peter Mandelson and Deng Xiaoping , both educated in Marxism, both concluded that to get rich is glorious. Did they cease to be revolutionaries?
I don't think so.
Hasn���t New Labour revolutionised Britain? Isn���t China revolutionising the world, far more than it did before Deng let rip with the capitalism? Did Mr Milburn?
What Owen Jones should be more interested by is Mr Milburn���s incessant ( and well-publicised and well-received, not least by the Blairite Tories) calls for greater egalitarianism in our society
and
Right wing? I do not think so.
Neoconservatism���s Trotskyist origins aren���t accidental. It���s a revolutionary project, cunningly adapted for our times, by people who never ceased to be revolutionaries but learned that the old methods would never work. The teenage leftists of the 1970s have not become conservatives. They have become radical, revolutionary liberals a thousand times more effective than they can ever have hoped to be. If Owen really doesn���t like the ���political consensus that combines free-market economics with social liberalism���, then he has a very tough epiphany ahead of him.
Or he can do what almost all my generation did, and sink comfortably into the liberal consensus, where every slogan of their college days is now conventional wisdom, and men in their 60s still struggle into their jeans and attend Rolling Stones concerts, marvelling at how funky they still are.
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