Britannia Radio

16 January 2010 11:30 PM

Our servant has turned into a tyrannical master... just ask Myleene Klass

Do you remember Neil Kinnock, when he was trying to persuade us that the Labour Party was all right really, saying that he wanted a state that was 'beneath our feet, not above our heads'?

Poor old Neil failed to fool the voters - and I'm still glad to say that I helped him to fail. Then, like so many other anti-British socialists, he went off and threw in his lot with the European Superstate, which is certainly way above our heads. But even if he didn't mean what he said, it's a good phrase.

There was a time, not very long ago, when the British State was our servant and not our master. A lot of us still remember town or county halls that had small staffs on modest pay, who emptied the bins and swept the streets, mended the roads, and provided public libraries that were full of books we wanted to read, and schools that taught children how to read, write and count in orderly classrooms.

We also had small local police forces that knew their neighbourhoods and patrolled them on foot. They didn't need CCTV or ASBOs. Despite having no computers, BlackBerries, or even mobile phones, these organisations were surprisingly efficient and comparatively cheap. And they were usually polite to us too.

That, until recently, was the British State; modest, effective, small and our servant. A history should be written of how and why it became our master as it has done. We see the change in the smallest things. Instead of collecting our rubbish, a task it is amazingly bad at, it monitors our bins and fines us for putting the wrong things in them.

Your local council, which couldn't clear the pavements of snow and ice even in town centres, will no doubt employ a small battalion of climate-change compliance officers. And any of you who tried to contact the authorities for help in the recent cold weather will probably have found - as I usually do - that it takes fierce persistence to get anyone to admit responsibility for anything.

The police are just a vast nationalised industry serving the liberal establishment. I really wouldn't mind about the officers caught sledding down a snowy hillside while on duty - it's a sign they're human - if it weren't for the fact that they did so on riot shields, equipment a constable in this country ought never to need, and wouldn't need if it weren't for the long, slow breakdown in order caused by Left-wing social policies.

The only thing that surprises me about their treatment of Myleene Klass - rebuked for waving a knife at some intruders - is that anyone was surprised, or that Miss Klass was fool enough to tell them she had done this.

Are there still people who don't grasp that the police are much more excited about hanging on to their monopoly of force than they are about defeating crime and disorder?

If an ancient, famous, contented and free country were to turn, slowly but definitely, into a spiteful, bureaucratic tyranny, isn't this exactly how it would happen?

And still the futile war in Afghanistan robs us of fine, brave, dedicated men. If we ended it now, we might not have to devastate the Armed Forces with cuts in the years to come. When will a frontbench politician have the bravery to break ranks and call for withdrawal?

A frontal attack on our last good state schools

With the grammar schools all but wiped out, and the direct grant schools a fading memory, the long-expected frontal attack on Church schools has begun.

State Commissars are increasingly telling them they cannot select on the basis of religious commitment, a blow aimed at the heart. The new equality law will soon make it virtually impossible for them to insist on Christian standards among their own staffs. And the leader of the sarcastically named 'Liberal Democrat' Party, Nick Clegg, wants them to be forced to teach PC views on sex.

The new establishment hate them because they aren't ordinary comprehensives, because they offer poor people a way out of their egalitarian trap - but above all because they are Christian. Christianity offers the only serious challenge to the power-worship and pleasure-seeking that seem to be the core of modern Left-wing thought.

Can we expect a robust defence of Church schools from the Tory Party, whose leader and Shadow Education Secretary have both somehow got their children into a heavily oversubscribed CofE primary? What do you think?

Did the right-on Pinter simply pause too long?

Two famous people - one a rather ostentatious Roman Catholic, the other a loudmouthed supporter of right-on causes - cruelly and abruptly dump their spouses. In both cases there are children involved. I should have thought the best thing they could do would be to shut up about it and maintain a decent reticence ever after.

Instead Lady Antonia Fraser treats us to a jolly account of her life and times with the late Harold Pinter. No thanks, all the same. I always thought 'Must you go?' was a polite way of saying 'Thank heaven you're off at last. Now we can put out the milk bottles, stack the plates and get some sleep.'

Maybe that was what Harold Pinter actually meant. Perhaps he just paused too long.

The past will collar cocky Campbell

Alastair Campbell is not as clever as he thinks he is. His obdurate refusal to admit that he did anything wrong in his campaign to stampede Parliament and public into war simply draws attention to the central truth.

And that is that Mr Campbell and Anthony Blair, and other members of the semi-secret cabal that actually ran

Britain behind the smiling public front of 'New Labour', had decided on war, for the purposes of regime change, whatever Saddam Hussein did. Their reasons for this are unclear, since only some of them were stupid, and stupidity has always been the best explanation for the Iraq War. But the fact is beyond doubt. And if Britain were still a global superpower, immune from international courts, they might have got away with it.

But I sense the shadows of nemesis are slowly closing in on the Blair creature. Whether we like it or not (and I'm suspicious of 'international law'), the desire is growing for a reckoning for the Iraq slaughter, and the evidence that the war was unlawful is growing too. And if our former Premier is eventually met off his private jet by a group of polite but firm arresting officers, and taken to The Hague to be indicted, it will be partly because of Alastair Campbell's cocky, unrepentant performance.

When the international law merchants grasp that Alastair was in fact not a Press officer but the real chief executive of the British Government at the time, then he too might be required in The Hague. It took a quarter of a century for the past to catch up with General Pinochet, an event I'm sure Mr Campbell personally approved of. The next time may be a little quicker.

15 January 2010 4:55 PM

The wrong argument

Some of the critics of my position on the Tories repeatedly waste their ammunition, pounding rubble and dust into smaller rubble and finer dust. There are some things that just cannot be resolved in argument. One is the nature of the future. Some of my critics say, and boy do they say it, over and over and over again 'Your plan won't work'. Well, I concede that it may not work. I cannot possibly claim that it will certainly work. But I riposte that it is a proposition of exactly equal value to say that it might work. Nothing important is established by saying that it won't, or even that it might not work. So what, if so?

I simply defy such critics to come up with a better proposal for bringing about the conditions for the creation of a properly conservative political party. If they don't want such a thing, of course, then they have no need to care. But if they do, then I think it's reasonable to ask them. And unreasonable of them to decline to do so. I also challenge them to explain why there is any good reason to vote for Mr Cameron's party at the coming general election. I also ask them what, of any importance, would be lost if enough people followed my advice, and withdrew their votes from the 'Modern Conservatives'.

‘Stephen B’ says the Tories have already lost three elections, so a fourth defeat won't make anything worse, or precipitate a crisis. Here I think he displays a lack of understanding of politics. A fourth successive defeat would I think be unprecedented and devastating. What's more it would follow a period of optimism, and so seem even worse.

The Cameron tactic, of brazenly seeking Liberal Democrat votes while trying by duplicity and charming vagueness to hold on to traditionalist conservative ones at the same time, is rooted in desperation. The core Tory vote is old, and dying. The Tory Party has all but expired in Scotland and Wales and is moribund in the North of England. If this last push cannot work, even with the immense negative charisma radiated personally by Gordon Brown, then financial backers, voters, journalists and all those in one way or another decide the fate of political parties will have to acknowledge that the Tory Party is beyond saving. The coalition involved (and I am not against coalitions as such, only absurd ones) is ridiculous and unsustainable. Only momentum has kept the thing going - the old Harold Wilson trick, where the coach driver keeps his passengers quiet by going so fast that half are too exhilarated to complain, and the other half too nauseated.

I am questioned about our relationship with the EU. I would think it would be akin to the Swiss position in some ways, though definitely not including Schengen. The Swiss negotiate each issue bilaterally. They can therefore choose the point of compromise on each matter in a way that suits them. Personally, I'd be happy to sacrifice an automatic right to live in EU countries (which I'm told is in practice rather more elusive than that ) in return for full control of our own borders, which I regard as one of the great blessings of an island state. If I wanted to go and live in France, I'd be prepared to undergo the necessary residence procedures, just as I would if I sought to live in the USA or any other country. And I feel that anyone who wishes to live here should be ready to do the same. It's not such an imposition.

I certainly don't think (for instance) that an industry which sells goods exclusively to (say) the USA should have to have its products regulated by the EU. Or that the EU should drag our transatlantic trade into disputes between the USA and EU states, which have nothing to do with us. As a global trader, we need this freedom more than most EU nations, whose trade is predominantly continental.

But it simply isn't true that departure from the EU automatically deprives a country of such things. Norway obtains it through the EEA, Switzerland through bilateral agreements.

As for regulations about rubbish, homosexuality, church schools, weights and measures, adoption societies, data protection and a thousand other things now decided by the Commission, I think we should make our own laws about these things.

'Norfolk Al' points out that doing the things I suggest will be difficult, and that my project might fail. I am aware of this. I am not aware of any rule which says that worthwhile actions will always be easy or bound to succeed. Nor do I know of any rule which says that if your objective is good, you should, even so, abandon it because you might run into trouble on the way. I am sorry for him, if this is his attitude to life.

'Yaffle' says I am urging people to vote Labour, by implication. No, I'm not. I recognise that a lot of people still suffer from the idea that a vote is a sort of sacrament of democracy, which has to be exercised with solemnity and seriousness. While I personally think this attitude is silly, and regard the voting choice as no more solemn than the choice between Tesco and Sainsbury (and also regard not voting as a legitimate and often superior method of using the franchise), I know that they take a different view and that I can't currently persuade them otherwise. So I wouldn't dream of urging anyone into this course. They would never do it, and they would probably never pay attention to anything I said, ever again. Humanity is wary (with good reason) of taking things to their logical conclusion.

Humanity knows there are more things in life than logic. Do not read into what I say anything which I don't say. My message is and remains simply this, no more, no less: ‘Please don't vote Tory’. What people do with the vote they don't give to the Tories is not my concern. I am against them giving it to the BNP, whose main purpose is racial bigotry concealed behind a screen of reasonableness. But I have no objection to anyone voting for UKIP, not that UKIP has any chance of winning, or that I like UKIP, but because I would immensely rather they voted for UKIP than for the Modern Conservatives.

I suspect that the party I hope for would oppose liberal interventionist wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conservatives support the use of force in the national interest, not for the sake of utopian fancies. I think it’s also been the case that a very large part of the opposition to the Iraq war came from Conservative voters, not that their party ever asked them. And I suspect that if anyone checked, this would also be increasingly the case over Afghanistan.

However, any party which resulted from this change would have a life of its own, if it were a real party. I cannot predict its detailed development.

14 January 2010 8:52 AM

Manifestos, and replacing the Tories

More in response to 'Mev'. I think Hannan and Carswell's 'manifesto' pretty empty unless we leave the EU. Yet they won't break with the pro-EU Tory Party, so it is really all just airy stuff. Also I'm by no means sure that all this alleged decentralisation is the point, or the right route. The real issue is the family, private life and the rule of law, within an independent nation.

Any manifesto must have two aims – one, to enthuse enough voters to vote for you; two, to provide an initial programme of achievable goals for one parliament. Welfare reform cannot really be at the start of any proper conservative programme, since the real reform to welfare must be achieved over time by recreating the family structures and independent charitable institutions which an over-extended welfare state has supplanted or eviscerated. You also need to educate children so that they can grow up to be free people, good parents and valuable workers. To begin with welfare reform is like beginning to build a house by constructing the roof. In most cases, it's not the fault of the individuals involved that they are dependent on the state. But if you first make them dependent on your help, then propose to cut off their help, don't be surprised if they don't support you.

Some other points

‘Mev' says: ’I still repeat my main questions which these two points to previous articles do not answer:

1. Even IF the Tories did not win AND a new party did emerge – would this not just split the right-wing vote into two parties gaining about 15-20 per cent each and therefore allowing Labour in forever and a day on 30 per cent of the vote?’

A. Once again I wearily roll the same old stone up the same old hill. Please listen, this time. The Tories are not 'right-wing', but thanks to inertia and tribal loyalty they continue to receive an important portion of a much larger potential conservative vote, and to deprive any rival of that tribal vote. They have lost many of their own original supporters, have ceased to exist in Wales and Scotland, and also are repellent to a large number of conservative minded people who are former Labour voters. Their disappearance would remove this obstacle and permit socially and morally conservative voters to unite in a singe voting bloc. The Tories, as a party, are an obstacle to the formation of a voting bloc in the electorate, because they are so loathed, as a part, that people won't vote for policies they like, if the Tories espouse them.

My belief is that the Tories, if defeated again, will cease to exist as a party. They are only kept in being at the moment by government subsidy (Short Money), the BBC's support and by a few millionaires. Once they are clearly shown to be incapable of winning an election, these props will go. If they fail to win an election against this awful government, then it is my belief and hope that they will collapse. Many of their MPs and supporters will leave politics altogether, others will go to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, where they belong. Some will be interested in an entirely new party, which will not be the Conservatives and so will be able to appeal to the many patriotic, law-abiding people abandoned by Labour. Hence the concentration in the 'manifesto of sorts' on the issues of crime, disorder and mass immigration, and education, which affect such people most directly.

‘2. Aren't the biggest supporters of his 'Don't Vote Tory' strategy the Labour Party – due to point one above (he would be better off creating a proper socialist party to split the left-wing vote if he really wants to see right-wing policies in this country. Curiously we have actually seen the creating of multiple right-wing parties – with UKIP/Tory/English Democrats/BNP (although they're now marching into Labour territory, which is why Labour are trying to get them 'banned') all vying for similar(ish) voters – a conspiracy theorist might suspect these parties had been created by socialist for this very purpose. Another one would certainly not help.’

A. No. Why do people keep on trotting out this rubbish? The metropolitan left are perfectly happy with the prospect of a Cameron government (hence the support of the Guardian and the BBC for the Cameroons). The Labour Party leadership is increasingly anxious to lose the next election, as far as I can see. I am sure most of its leading members a) long to enrich themselves in quangos, directorships, speechmaking bureaux, international bodies etc and b) dread being made to stick around and clear up the mess they know they have left behind. Others, ambitious for high office, know that they cannot really begin their campaigns for the leadership until they are in opposition. Further, New Labour are justifiably confident that the Tories, who support all their major policies, will not undo any of their important acts. So when Labour come back (as they will if the Tories win, because nothing revives Labour like a Tory government) they will be able to carry on where they left off.

‘3. Has he any evidence to show that there are any 'notable people' ready to create this New Party? (Telling the rest of 'us' that it's up to us normal working people to create this party is just not going to cut it I'm afraid - you need central and well known people to get the ball rolling, and around whom the rest would gather).’

A. No, I have no evidence at all, and have never claimed to have it. But it makes sense, even so. My case has always been (for the nine millionth time) that there is no chance at all of such a party being created if the Tories win. There is a chance, perhaps a slim one, of it being created if the Tories lose. The precedent is the 'Gang of Four' who created the SDP and would have destroyed Labour if the Tories hadn't stepped in to save it. They didn't emerge until Labour were deep in the mire. Since serious conservatives inside and outside the Tory Party know that they have absolutely nothing to gain from a Cameron government (and probably quite a bit to lose, given the anti-conservative purge he will launch if he wins) , it is therefore an easy calculation to make. The defeat of Mr Cameron is a necessary condition for a new party. It is not a sufficient condition. Only if all those people who rage on about how much they hate the direction this country is taking are prepared to act will such a party be formed. But until the Tory-voting masses realise that they have no friend at Westminster unless they build a new party (which is true at the moment, but they can't see it), they won't build it. And only a fourth successive Tory defeat in a row can persuade them of that. Hence the unique chance available now, but not at the next election.

11 January 2010 5:00 PM

Whatever happened to the Labour Party?

Some contributors last week asked two important, linked questions. One was this from Mr Mulholland: ‘I don't see how Labour's socially conservative wing and the social and cultural conservatives of the Tory party can ever be reconciled to creating a 'proper conservative party'. ’This point is extremely important and I wonder if you or anyone else would care to elaborate on who these groups are. I'd probably find myself in the more economic-populist wing of this party but these divisions won't seem to resolve themselves. Peter Hitchens ignores this salient truth, his 'true conservative' party would probably have some tough economic choices and I wonder how he'd seek to please both groups.’

The other was from 'Steve A' who, like many people, continues to believe that New Labour is a 'right-wing' takeover of the Labour Party by crypto-Tories.

But before I turn to these issues could I refer 'Mev' (and any others still afflicted with doubts about the need to thrust the Conservative Party headfirst down the nearest U-bend and jump on the soles of its feet) to two previous posts? He should be able to locate them by Googling ‘Peter Hitchens’ and ‘The Tories are still useless’ and ‘Peter Hitchens ‘ and ‘What is wrong and how to put some of it right’. In general, these answer all the objections raised against my campaign for the destruction of the Tory Party, and of course the frequent and false claim that I 'never put forward anything positive' and 'have no manifesto of my own'. I really feel I've had these arguments for now (though they'll need to be rehearsed at the election) and they're what archives are for.

Now, to the Labour Party. What was it before Blair, and what is it now? The first question is crucial. And I should say, not just 'before Blair' but also 'Before Callaghan'.

For what is now forgotten, and in many cases not even known to people who write boldly and emphatically about politics, is that the current Labour Party was formed mainly by struggles in the 1980s. These battles were themselves efforts to resolve conflicts that had been going on very much longer. The laziness, stupidity and ignorance with which they are described by most of Fleet Street and the rest of the media still has to be seen to be believed.

Labour had a 'Right Wing' in the pre-Callaghan era. In general this was based not upon economics or social questions but upon those in the Labour Party who opposed the Communist Party and its fellow travellers. It mainly fought on the issue of nuclear weapons, NATO and the American alliance. So it was perfectly possible to be on 'the right' and to be in favour of trades union rights, the nationalisation of the railways (though probably not of the steel industry or of road haulage) and a sizeable welfare state. Some right-wingers, notably Hugh Gaitskell and some of his followers, were also opposed to the Common Market. Others were not. Its importance was not widely understood (though Gaitskell grasped it immediately and so did the pro-Market Roy Jenkins) and its threat to British independence was distant and remote, while the Soviet threat was pressing and urgent. Owing to the time lag between action and effect, several other pivotal issues - the sociological treatment of criminals, easy divorce, the relaxation of restraint in the arts, the great expansion of welfare under Harold Wilson, the destruction of the grammar schools - simply had not assumed the size or shape they have attained now. And we still had an industrial working class, employed in an industrial sector mainly composed of hard-grind jobs for life, performed by men - and in general heavily unionised.

Labour also had a left-wing. This consisted partly of middle class pseudo-intellectuals (and sometimes real ones too), many of them teachers, utopian nuclear disarmers, anti-colonial campaigners, all the usual herbivores, wide-eyed, woolly-hatted, utterly naive about the world; and partly of rock-ribbed Stalinist veterans from the grimmer end of the trade union movement. Some but by no means all of these were actual Communists. The Communist Party in Britain (as I have so often tried to explain) was partly dissolved in the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and the boundaries between them were often very vague. Work still proceeds on uncovering just how many Labour MPs, trade union leaders etc were in fact actively working for Moscow. But it is safe to say that many more of them were doing so than was obvious, and that their actions had huge influence on Labour party policy.

In the background was the Jenkins-Crosland formation, radical social liberals whose case was set out in those two crucial books, 'The Labour Case' written by Jenkins in 1959, and 'The Future of Socialism', penned by Crosland around the same time. Both men correctly grasped that the 1945-51 Labour government had delivered Labour's original 1918 programme in its entirety, and that the party needed a new purpose to survive. They found it in social liberalism, egalitarian education and the sexual revolution. Crosland, like many of its advocates, simply didn't know what he was doing with comprehensive education. (This is plain in 'The Future of Socialism', in which he derided those who said it would lead to mixed ability teaching and a general decline in standards.)

Labour pretended in October 1964 that comprehensive schooling would mean a 'grammar school education for all', when the truth (readily available if anyone had looked at the USA, where it had been pioneered many decades earlier) was that it offered a secondary modern education for all but the rich. Most of these things had to be either misrepresented or hidden to be achieved, or responsibility had to be dodged. Jenkins's 1959 programme was enacted between 1964 and 1970 almost entirely as a series of private members' bills for which the government denied responsibility (though it provided much private help to them). Divorce reform was one of the few major social revolutionary changes that was actually pushed through by the government under its own colours. Hardly anyone seems to have realised that it would lead to difficulties on the scale we were to experience.

By the 1980s several things were happening. One was the 1960s revolution, which had been confined to a very small part of the population when it began, beginning to spread into the whole of society. My own generation began to have political importance. I am actually at the tail end of what used to be known as 'the bulge' and is known in the USA as 'the baby boom', those born from the post-war marriages in that time of optimism and relative prosperity, as the 1939-45 war receded into the past. We were also the generation of first expansion of the universities, thanks to the Robbins report - this greatly enlarged Oxbridge as well as creating the plate-glass universities such as Kent, Sussex, York and Lancaster. Less well-known was the Wilson expansion of teacher training, which greatly widened the profession and changed its character permanently.

By the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of the sixties generation were beginning to fan out into the schools, journalism, the civil service, advertising, the arts. Few had been hard-core revolutionaries. Many had been affected and influenced by the revolutionary ideas taught and generally accepted at their universities and colleges - and also by the cultural revolution then under way on British TV and in publishing. They were also active in the white-collar unions and in the Labour Party.

At the same time, British industry, in fact the entire British economy, was in increasing trouble. The history of how and why the country plunged into a long war between employees and employers has yet to be written. I think there's no doubt that inflation, probably caused by the Vietnam war, the increasing threat to traditional jobs in shipbuilding, mining, railways, steelworks etc, the increasing failure of British car manufacturers to compete with Italian, French, German and Japanese makers, then the rising prices resulting from Common Market membership (and fanned by decimalisation of the currency in 1971), made a lot of people worried about their standards of living, and made it easy for unions to press for what would once have seemed absurd wage-claims.

I've also no doubt that the Communist Party's industrial organisation, a professional and secretive network run by a full-time officer in the CP's then HQ in Covent Garden, took advantage of this. Why? Because the CP cared so much about the working conditions of the British (all far superior to the conditions in which their opposite numbers toiled under Soviet rule)? Or perhaps because of some other reason. I don't know, because we've yet to see the documents. But I can guess. But it was certainly the case that the Labour Party, which could once have relied on the unions to help it into office and cooperate with it when it got there, was no longer on good terms with the union machines and being thoroughly destabilised by their actions.

That led to the breach between Harold Wilson and the unions (in which the left-winger Barbara Castle sought to tame the unions and failed). And it then led on to the second breach when Jim Callaghan, who had sided with the unions against Wilson, was in 1979 destroyed by the monster he himself had helped create. And those union machines had developed an amazing system of near-autonomous shop-floor bargaining, which they could always claim that they could not control. I've never been entirely sure that this was true. But the system certainly made attempts to regulate strikes by law extremely difficult, since there was nobody to whom to serve writs. And it would be years before anyone dreamed up an effective method of regulating this mess. By the time they had, the crisis was largely over, because British industry itself was largely over too. I'm less and less convinced (and I was there) that the Thatcher-Tebbit reforms -clever as they were - were the main thing that crushed union power. I think it was mainly down to the decline of industry.

All this for a bit of background, to show how many currents were flowing through Labour by 1980. I might also add that the Communist Party and its fellow-travellers were still surprisingly willing to show open sympathy for the Soviet bloc. This showed partly in their renewed campaign to commit Labour to scrapping the British nuclear bomb (Gaitskell had defeated this, following his famous ‘fight, fight and fight again' speech in the early 1960s) and partly in the TUC's pitiful refusal to support Polish Solidarity in 1980. My 2009 book 'The Broken Compass' (shortly to be reissued with a new chapter on the Tories, and retitled 'The Cameron Delusion') describes this grisly moment.

By the early 1980s, there were a lot of forces in the Labour Party, operating both through the unions and through the constituencies, which were seriously left-wing. The least important of these was the body known as the 'Militant Tendency', a trivial sect of finger-jabbing Trotskyist dogmatists, based upon a faction called the Revolutionary Socialist League, which probably never numbered above a few hundred members and was mainly concentrated in Liverpool. Most other Trotskyists, notably my own International Socialists, to which I belonged from 1969 to 1975, the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Labour League (all of which later changed their names) preferred to work outside the Labour Party.

But the Media, ever on the look-out for something simple, missed the fact that while Neil Kinnock was noisily 'defeating' the fatuous Militant with bombastic speeches, the party itself was falling into the hands of the broad, namely pro-Communist Left (this tendency, a semiofficial Labour-Communist front, had operated for years in the National Union of Students under the name 'the Broad Left'. Few university-educated Labour politicians can have escaped dealings with it). The organisations involved in this were called the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Coordinating Committee (sometimes ludicrously described as 'moderate' by those political journalists who had heard of it at all). This was particularly felt among Labour MPs, who were purged for any signs of moderation, through the new system of compulsory reselection. The old 'right-wing' Labour, socially conservative, pro-NATO, was virtually wiped out in this period, through the huge constitutional revolution which robbed Labour MPs of the exclusive power to elect the party leader.

If they still had that power, I think Gordon Brown would now be gone. As it is, any new leader must be chosen through that 1980s monstrosity, the union and activist-dominated 'electoral college'. It is fear of what the 'college' might choose that prevents Labour's top table from dethroning Mr Brown. Almost all Labour leaders since it was brought into being have in fact been chosen unopposed.

This in turn led to the (premature) defection of the SDP, which took with it a large chunk of the old Labour 'Right' - notably the least famous of the 'Gang of Four', William Rodgers. Rodgers was the man who had - through an organisation called the Campaign for Democratic Socialism - defeated the nuclear disarmers at constituency level by standing up to them in an organised and well-briefed fashion. Had the Gang of Four only waited a little longer, and allowed Tony Benn to defeat Denis Healey for the Deputy Leadership of the Party, they would probably have taken most of Labour's old right with them, including a number of unions, and Labour would have been shown up for what it is, namely a party of the hard left. Meanwhile it's worth noting that the SDP did not entirely die. I am told that there are more former SDP members in David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet than there are in the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. And some of the loudest journalistic cheerleaders for Mr Cameron are ex SDPers. I'm not quite sure why, since he's way to the Left of David Owen and Bill Rodgers. Maybe they're lonely Jenkinsites, or followers of the delightful but wrong Shirley Williams. But that's another story.

And then the Soviet Union collapsed. This left the Labour Party in a very odd position. The chief aim of many of its members, namely aiding the USSR's foreign policy, was gone. The old model of socialism - state-owned industry in a command economy, was shown to be an utter failure, beyond all doubt. At the same time, the chief reason for voters to turn away from Labour, its willingness to disarm in face of the Red Army, was also gone.

By dropping its plans to strip the country’s defences, and by abandoning what was already an empty pledge of 'common ownership', Labour was able to claim to the dim Nigels in the Golf Clubs of Britain that it had abandoned the Left . Alas for Labour, it could only do this if it gave the same message to the equally dim Kevins in the student unions, the Labour clubs and the comprehensive school staffrooms.

And that's where it's been ever since. And yet we are told that a party is 'Right Wing' which has levied some of the heaviest taxes in history, which has increased the size of the state sector to unprecedented levels, which controls industry through regulation more tightly (and with less accountability) than it ever did in the days of nationalisation, which is wholly devoted to political correctness, known as 'equality' and 'diversity', and has handed over the government to a foreign power; that a party is 'right-wing' which is fanatically dedicated to comprehensive schools (and increasingly to comprehensive universities), to handing over Northern Ireland to gangsters, to stripping the armed forces, to attacking individual liberty, and that a party is 'Right Wing' which has placed every employer, from hairdressers' shops to BP under the authority of employment laws that 1970s shop stewards could only dream of.

This is helped by the belief among a lot of not-very-bright Tories that Margaret Thatcher's economic liberalism (combined with an almost total failure to combat the cultural revolution, worse in many ways, an active pursuit of that revolution especially through Sunday Trading) was a period of triumph, when in many ways it devastated conservative Britain.

I think there are many acres of common ground on which those excluded by this particular sort of 'right-wing' (ha ha ha) government might gather. Since my main desire is to undo harm and to reverse and dismantle wrong, I think we could now agree that mass immigration was an error and should be halted; that integration is better than multiculturalism; that crime should be punished hard from the start, and disorder prevented; that the poor should have access, through merit rather than money, to the best schools and universities in the country; that national independence is essential for proper national debate and for any real change; that council housing was better (and cheaper) than housing benefit; that men need to work; that families need to be married and permanent, that industry needs to be protected from unfair foreign competition. I could go on. I trust some people will get the message. My apologies to any clever Kevins and brilliant Nigels out there, who already have got it.