Comrade Alan and his army of Useful Idiots
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Why is it so hard for us to see what is right in front of our noses? Last week, the one-time Trotskyist and perpetual student Alan Milburn (he still hasn’t finished his PhD), in a ‘commission’ set up by Gordon Brown (a student hard Leftist himself), launched an apparently bone-headed assault on the professions and the great universities.
Can Mr Milburn really be as stupid as he sounds? Or is there another motive here? What sort of Government is this really?
Just days ago we learned that the latest Defence Secretary, in his 30s, attended an unknown number of meetings of the secretive, pro-IRA International Marxist Group, an episode he flatly refuses to discuss further.
Given that this Government did in fact grant ‘Victory to the IRA’, as the IMG demanded, it seems relevant to me. One of his forerunners, the menacing ‘Doctor’ John Reid, was an adult member of the pro-Soviet Communist Party.
The most powerful Minister in the Government is Peter Mandelson, once a member of the Young Communist League. Tony Benn, who ought to know, maintains that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was also an active Trotskyist and levels a similar allegation against Stephen Byers, once a prominent member of the Blairite inner circle.
None of these people has ever been frank about his Marxist past or apologised for it or explained it. Almost all of them would have kept it secret if they could (just as Anthony Blair dishonestly denied his membership of that KGB tool, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
None of them, in my view, has given up the radicalism of the past. They have simply discovered that they can use Parliament to achieve a revolution they once thought would need barricades and red flags. And these, I stress, are only the ones we know about.
Who knows how many others – MPs, Ministers, civil servants, judges, BBC executives, even Bishops – still treasure revolutionary aims? Now, there is one other recorded instance of a Marxist government coming to power legally in an advanced, law-governed parliamentary democracy with a strong middle class and independent professions. That is Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The parallels are not, of course, exact. The Czech communists had Russian tanks behind them and could move much faster and much more ruthlessly. But they concentrated their attacks on the police, the armed forces and the professions. And they sought to drive the middle classes out of higher education, by deliberate discrimination against those whose parents were professionals themselves. They also destroyed the savings of the middle class, attacked religion and the married family, used the schools for relentless propaganda and rapidly dismantled the constitutional protections against absolute power.
Remind you of anywhere?
I said back in 1997 that New Labour was engaged in a slow-motion coup d’etat. Speed up the past 12 years (like that wonderful old film London To Brighton In Four Minutes) and you could easily see it for what it is.
But most of the media classes still moronically describe New Labour as ‘Right-wing’. Marxists have a term for them as well. It is ‘Useful Idiots’.
Coco would approve of vanishing cigarettes
The beauteous Audrey Tautou has had her cigarette censored and replaced with a pen in publicity posters for her new film about the fashion designer Coco Chanel. Good.
Miss Chanel was a very intelligent person. If she were alive now, she would not be fool enough to risk her health by smoking. The same goes for Franklin Roosevelt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a lot of other people who have had cigars and cigarettes removed from their portraits by the anti-smoking police.
I doubt, myself, if a picture of FDR or Brunel smoking would influence anybody. But I am certain that Audrey Tautou can. I think it’s time even for the most libertarian to recognise that the anti-smoking campaign is working, and does a lot of good.
A defeatist church worshipping the trivial
The Church of England never sleeps in its efforts to chuck away its own heritage and abandon the principles of Christianity. Plans for a joint ceremony of marriage and baptism beautifully sum up its defeatist view of life and religion.
So far as I know, nobody ever assumed that men and women came to the altar as pure virgins. Nor did the rules demand a confession of past wrongdoing – and a good thing too.
In fact, the proper, beautiful, earthy and tough Prayer Book marriage service (which the CofE is trying to stamp out) actually includes a pledge by both parties to ‘forsake all other’.
It’s perfectly reasonable to use the old service for anyone who wants to start again on a new and different footing. But it’s wrong to pretend that Christianity thinks it is a good idea to have children outside wedlock, because it doesn’t, and anyway it isn’t.
By the way, don’t you love the way these people cling to what they think is Ye Olde Tradition in stupid, trivial matters, while abandoning it in important ones. The unfortunate victims of this new service are handed lighted candles towards the end of the banal, illiterate ceremony.
Why not give them good quality electric torches instead? In the coming days when windmills provide our electrical power, such a gift would at least be useful.
What a great idea it wasn’t to invite IRA murderer Patrick Magee to a 25th anniversary commemoration of the Brighton Bomb. Such a pity we couldn’t have asked Hermann Goering to a commemoration of the London Blitz as well. I’m sure we could have found some drivelling, grief-counselled idiots to make friends with the Reichsmarschall who organised the deaths of their relatives. One thing you have to admit about capital punishment, it spares the organisers of such ceremonies from having to face these awkward social dilemmas, such as ‘can we put the Tebbits next to the man who wrecked their lives?’
The last remaining hereditary peers seem to be doomed. The Tory Party, too greedy for office to have any principles, don’t understand that this is a bad thing. Once the peers are gone, the Throne will be next and what principle will they be able to call on to defend that, having sold this pass? And doesn’t Mr Cameron think inheritance is important, not least when it concerns the property and money he hopes to inherit? Bet he does. Quite right too. Without the right of inheritance, there’s no private property. Without private property, there’s no liberty. That’s why socialist revolutionaries hate the hereditaries.
Is election such a guarantee of quality? Recent events in the Commons don’t seem to suggest so. As for appointed peers, do we really prefer the foul-mouthed Alan Sugar to some decrepit, diffident 19th Earl of somewhere, smelling faintly of old dog, with a crumbling country house and a thousand years of duty and honour behind him?
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