Monday - May 21, 2012

the shrine of the Blessed Barack ….

I’ve been reading this lady for awhile, and find she’s right most of the time. Of course, by her lights I’m sure she always correct on the things she writes about.
Sometimes I suspect she’s more conservative then I am, without being so extreme which in anger I tend to be at times.

A couple of years ago, she appeared on American TV for a Fox News program. I forgot which one.  I listen to her on BBC Radio, she has a great speaking voice and flawless delivery. 

Well, today I think she outdid herself.  I think this is the best column I’ve read by her, and I have read a lot.
I won’t post the whole column but hope you will see the rest at the link provided.  Just click on Melanie Phillips. It’s worth reading it all and I really think #10 and friends should be reading her too. Of course they won’t. And what she says about Labour possibly getting back in while scary, has a lot of truth in it if things play out as she says they could.  Question is, will Conservatives but especially Mr Cameron who is referred to as conservative lite, wake up in time.

This is no time for chillaxing, Dave. Even Labour looks more Tory than you

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

Maybe if the Prime Minister raised his eyes for a moment from playing Fruit Ninja on his iPad, and also paused from adoring at the shrine of the Blessed Barack, he should look behind him and worry.

Ed Miliband has been an object of scorn and derision for Conservatives from the moment he was elected leader of the Labour Party.

Recently, he appointed Jon Cruddas, described by Tories as a Left-wing union stooge, to take charge of the party’s policy review and thus be responsible for setting Labour’s course for the next general election.

t the same time, we read that Tony Blair hopes to make a come-back into British political life. Some may be tempted to greet this particular news as the political equivalent of the Return Of The Mummy.

Coupled with Cruddas’s appointment, it may lead them to conclude that the Labour Party is now lurching ever deeper into la-la-land and political irrelevance.

They could not be more wrong.

The appointment of Cruddas is an inspired move. Writing him off as a Left-winger is to miss the point by a mile.

For Cruddas possesses one very important insight which has so far quite eluded David Cameron and his band of muddled modernisers.
Cruddas realises that if socialism is to have any appeal, it must adopt a platform of social conservatism.

Some may be confused by this. How can socialism be conservative?

Very simply: by connecting to people’s experience of how the world actually is, rather than trying to reshape that world into some pre-ordained idea of how it should be.

Unlike so many on the Left, Mr Cruddas does not shudder at the purportedly knuckle-dragging views of ordinary people.

On the contrary, he respects their attachment to nation, family, community, tradition — all the things, in fact, that the Left has been busily tearing to shreds.

While others demonise the white working class as racists if they complain that immigrants are taking their jobs, Mr Cruddas sympathises with their situation and their anguish at the break-up of traditional communities. 

Criticising his own party’s indifference to these matters, he has called for tougher immigration controls. 

In similar vein, he strongly sympathises with public anger over the denial of a democratic voice on ever-deeper European union. As a result, he champions a referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the EU at all.

With public fury over the EU growing exponentially by the day, if Labour calls for such an in/out referendum this will badly wrongfoot the Prime Minister. 

As it happens, not that long ago opposition to EU membership was a core position of the British left, not the right.

And when at the beginning of the 20th century the Labour Party famously ‘owed more to Methodism than Marx’, its hallmark was social conservatism — something that Cruddas, who teaches Labour history at Oxford, understands better than most.

The idealism of the Left was based then on the belief that strong families and deep attachments to community and nation were essential for a decent society, and to improve the life-chances of ordinary people.

You don’t have to endorse Cruddas’s union links to realise the importance of a society with deep roots, in which people believe in something beyond their own wants and needs.

And that’s where the return of Blair is potentially so very significant. For just like Cruddas, Blair’s great insight was that to win power he had to promote such socially conservative values.

The soundbite that gave him the party leadership, ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ conveyed the fact that he understood — just like Cruddas — that many were living in a state of siege from crime and disorder, and that he identified with the desperate desire for order and security.

Similarly, once he became leader he pronounced that he would stop the plunge in education standards and also end ‘something for nothing’ welfare dependency. 

Of course, once in office things didn’t work out like that. Education and welfare reforms ran into the sand. And far from conserving and protecting what people cherished about their society, Blair set about reshaping it in order to create a utopia of the brotherhood of man.

Hence his insistence that all family lifestyles — married, one-parent, gay — were equally desirable. Hence also his promotion of the oppressive PC agenda of self-proclaimed ‘victim’ groups and hate crime laws, in the apparent belief that prejudice could be eradicated from the human heart. 

The genius of Tony Blair — and it was political genius — was to understand that elections can only be won on the true centre ground, which means respecting the innate social conservatism of the public.

And so now Cameron faces the prospect of a Labour opposition that is more Right-wing than he is — and which may come to power as a result.

‘I am the heir to Blair,’ Cameron famously said. In his dreams. He never even understood what that meant.

This has to be my only post for today. Apologies to all.

Posted by peiper     on 05/21/2012 at 11:54 AM   
Filed Under: • Politics • UK •  
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