My heart sank because, once again, Cameron appeared to be facing in two directions at once. Proclaiming his intention to end the ‘big state’, what he actually seemed to be proposing – according to the reports presumably informed by background briefings on his speech – was to a large extent a redirection of state administered funds from centrally delivered to locally administered services. But that doesn’t end the ‘big state’ at all. Instead, it nationalises the voluntary sector and thus extends the size and power of the state. What the state pays for, it controls. The only way to end that control is to end the taxpayer-funded structure of these services. And even if you look at the most radical of the Tories’ public sector proposals, the ‘Swedish model’ school reforms proposed by Michael Gove, these parent-run schools will still be constrained by state regulation. So I was disheartened by what appeared to be another example of over-heated spin. But that was before I read the speech itself and, even more astounding, the Tory party’s own story puffing this speech. At this point I fell off my chair. For the party’s puff trumpeted: The new policies announced as part of the Big Society plan include: His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’. Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors. InFrontPageMagazine.Com John Perazzo writes: These People’s Organizations were to be composed largely of discontented individuals who believed that society was replete with injustices that prevented them from being able to live satisfying lives. Such organizations, Alinsky advised, should not be imported from the outside into a community, but rather should be staffed by locals who, with some guidance from trained radical organizers, could set their own agendas. The installment of local leaders as the top-level officers of People’s Organizations helped give the organizations credibility and authenticity in the eyes of the community. This tactic closely paralleled the longtime Communist Party strategy of creating front organizations that ostensibly were led by non-communist fellow-travelers, but which were in fact controlled by Party members behind the scenes... Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the People’s Organization... Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and decisions of radical organizers and the People’s Organizations they established. The organizer, he said, ‘must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.’[40] The organizer’s function, he added, was ‘to agitate to the point of conflict’[41] and ‘to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ‘[42] ‘The word ‘enemy,’ said Alinsky, ‘is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people’;[43] i.e., to convince members of the community that he is so eager to advocate on their behalf, that he has willingly opened himself up to condemnation and derision. The British Conservative party has signed up to the revolutionary Marxist politics of Saul Alinsky and his seditious strategy of using ‘community organisers’ to turn the people against the state and against the bedrock moral and social values of their country – and it is almost certainly too ignorant, lazy or stupid to realise that this is what it means. Unbelievable.
This man's Big Tory Idea: transformational Marxism
Friday, 2 April 2010
When I read newspaper reports of David Cameron’s ‘big society’ speech, my heart sank. Not because I disapprove of the idea of the ‘big society’ replacing the ‘big state’; on the contrary, I have been banging on about this for years. Having seen the way in which locally administered public services can regenerate a community and its social glue, I am deeply persuaded of the paramount need to get the state out of people’s lives and restore the ‘little platoons’ of civic society.
“Neighbourhood army” of 5,000 full-time, professional community organisers who will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems. This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama (my emphasis).
Ye gods. Rub your eyes, folks. Saul Alinsky?? Followers of this blog will know that I have written many times about Alinsky and his baleful influence over Obama. For Alinsky-ite 'community organisers' are not good-hearted volunteers serving soup to the poor. I wrote here:
The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.
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