Idealogs and Zenophobes / Forward, not Back - no comments

A few eccentric emails have made their way to our mailbox in recent months, though none so peculiar as the ones Oliver Kamm is receiving from defenders (one in particular) of George Galloway. One is quoted verbatim in his post, Hords of zenophobes.

It's pretty easy to criticise, and indeed fall about laughing, at the unnamed writer's haphazard use of the English language, but it's worrying that they would probably describe themselves as "real Labour" or "a lifelong Socialist", when the brain is so clearly filled with a tangled web of paranoia, exaggeration, contradiction, half-baked theory, and factual error.

No doubt everyone's political views are made up of these components, to a greater or lesser degree, but I think this guy is an extreme case. This is why it's especially concerning that so many of his points and his weaselled phrases:

'nasty bunch' ... 'infest the body politic' ... 'Christian coalition' ... 'strident views' ... 'feudal economic slavery' ... 'political thugs' ... 'authoritarian selfish-individualism' ... 'oldest and dirtiest rightwing ploy' ...

(to quote a few) can be found again and again in the 'intelligent' press, and are clung to by people who call themselves liberal or left-wing.

The problem with lazy and vacuous political thought like this is that when it comes up against something that has been developed, mulled-over, scrutinised, and which people actually believe in, it doesn't stand a chance, and political parties who have committed to it are blown away. This, for me, is the key to what happened to the Labour Party during the 1970s and 1980s. Stuck with policies it couldn't defend, and which it didn't entirely believe in, how could it come up with a message it could sell to the electorate? For all the inconsistencies in Thatcherism, the underlying neoliberal agenda drove all before it, sweeping not just the electorate, but a fair crop of 'thinkers' who would once have described themselves as "of the Left" (Marxists, even), accepted the status quo of ideas, but found themselves carried by the Thatcherite wave over to the Right, having engaged their minds for the first time in years.

The Blair period has seen this "brain drain" halted (I wouldn't go so far as to say it had been reversed, since intellectual activity "to the left of Labour" seems to have entirely stopped), but the Right in Britain is not going to be out of ideas forever. If, having ditched Blair, Labour found itself drifting back into the sort of territory where it would have to courts activists with "traditional" policies and rhetoric, anti-Americanism, and talk of nationalisation, it's likely that a reinvigorated Right - on a robust and consistent (though highly unpleasant) platform of a flat tax, dropping all legal protection for Trade Unions, spreading opt-out vouchers throughout education, the NHS, and local authority services - could roll over the Left once again.

Which is why "Forward, not Back" - designing new policies, not going back to old ones - isn't such a bad slogan after all.