Right, Left, Right

I wrote this for another network, though I think it's worth preserving here also.

B, this is my response to your remarks to me on D's Rabid Righties and Loony Lefties...Which Are You? post. It's turned out to be so prodigiously long, the longest reply that I have ever lodged here, that I have turned it into a separate blog. Anyway, for the sake of others, here is your reply to my comment that the BNP was objectively a party of the left;

Anastasia ... the BNP is a party of the far right, not the left. It knows that; its supporters and fellow travellers all over the world know that (as I said to Badger before ... tell a Polish neonazi skinhead that he's a leftie and see the reaction).

Of course right/left definitions vary, and your 'statist' criterion is useful for your purposes. The fact remains that the BNP is essentially a one-issue party (the issue being race/immigration) that has found it expedient to produce a wider painting-by-numbers 'manifesto'.

No movement whose philosophy is based entirely on race and extreme nationalism (fundamentally on 'difference' between people and peoples) can sensibly be called left-wing, in my view. Left-wing philosophies are based on internationalism and essential 'sameness' of people and peoples, though of course they have often been perverted away from those ideals. This is more fundamental than the 'statism'/'libertarianism' spectrum you posit.

The same applies to the Nazis, of course - conventionally and correctly, in my view, seen as a movement of the extreme right no matter what ostensibly 'socialist' policies they may have had.

The far right hates 'difference'; the left loves it but its love is often blind and stupid. This is why I'm careful to remain in the pragmatic centre.


Alas, B, I fear you and I are destined to stare forever at one another from the opposite sides of an argument, retreating into our respective corners by a process of mutual exhaustion. :-)

Yes, I understand the classic divisions between 'right' and 'left' as you've laid them out here; I just don't think they are meaningful any longer. Indeed, I wonder if they were ever meaningful beyond the realms of pure theory. Lenin, for example, in State and Revolution advocated the withering away of the state, a doctrine I can identify with, only to increase its power tenfold. As for your Polish skinhead I feel sure that he has at best the haziest concepts of ideology; he's just in it for the 'bovver': one day a Communist, the next a Nazi, paying no mind to the fact that these ideologies inflicted terrible harm on his country. I'm sure you know that the closest political collaborators within and without the Russian Duma after the fall of the Soviet Union were the Nationalists and the Communists, both united by hatred of democracy, both sharing new forms of xenophobia.

At the risk of getting bogged down in semantics I will tell you what I understand by the politics of the right, the things that make me right wing. I believe in classic laissez-faire capitalism; I believe in liberty, taken as far as it can within the bounds of the law; I want to minimise the role of the state, I want to reduce it to the point where it exists simply as a guarantor of liberty, no more than that. I think welfarism is corrosive, corrosive of liberty and corrosive of self-respect. I want taxation reduced to an absolute minimum, allowing people to be free to spend their earnings as they wish. I distrust and despise collectivist and statist ideologies of all kinds. My libertarianism even pushes to the frontiers of anarchism; so does that make me 'left-wing'? I could go on like this, but I'm sure you take my point.

The BNP, you say, is of the right. Have you read its programme? The policies it embraces would have been clearly understood and accepted by the likes of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. It is certainly presented as a single issue party, but not by its own devising; for it is so much more. Do you honestly believe that close on a million English people voted in the European elections for the BNP simply because they hate immigrants? No, most of these people, at my best guess, are Old Labour, people taken for granted for so long by the Socialist establishment. Well, no longer.

Might I draw your attention to Lenin's Century, one of the earliest blogs I posted here. In this I made the point that Fascism and Nazism, in political style and technique, were the bastard children of Communism. In other words they are simply not conceivable as movements without Lenin and Lenin's Revolution. Yes, the scapegoat of Nazism (though not Fascism, at least to begin with) was the Jewish community. But the technique of the scapegoat was again something it inherited from Communism. Their bête noirs may have been different (again to begin with), ranging through the bourgeois, the kulaks, to 'wreckers' and other political phantoms, but ending up, in the case of Stalin, with the Jews. Indeed most of the victims of Stalin's purges were minorities and foreigners of one kind or another.

So, what then of the 'sameness' of people, what then of internationalism? Do you believe that Pol Pot entertained such a concept when he authorised the massacre of Cambodia's Vietnamese minority simply because they were Vietnamese? Do you believe that the Chinese government thinks of the Uyghur people are the 'same' as the Han? Do you think that Colombia's FARC guerillas are operating on 'internationalist' principles when they buy weapons from the proceeds of cocaine? All rhetorical questions, of course, but I'm sure you see the problems emerging in your notions of ideological purity.

There you have it, B. For me the Nazis, the BNP, Jobbik and the rest are indeed parties of the left, standing in objective opposition to the liberty, the desire for liberty and freedom, embraced by the right, the true right, my right.

Corporal Clegg

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, Corporal Clegg, as I like to think of him, is on a charm offensive. Clearly keeping his eye on those wobbly opinion polls, he is praying for a hung parliament; for that is the only way that he will get the scent of power, as king-maker for a day. Hoping to appeal to wavering Tories, he is donning the garb of the German Free Democrats, calling for tax cuts and smaller government. He even says that Margaret Thatcher is an inspiration to him

All I can say is that Corporal Clegg is no inspiration to me, and that I would trust Greeks bearing gifts more than I would trust him bearing blue roses. Keep politics out of politics, that really should be the motto of the Liberal Democrats, who stand for nothing, so far as I am concerned, but the shabbiest and shallowest forms of opportunism. In The Spectator Bruce Anderson quotes from a handbook for party workers: “You can secure support from voters who normally vote Tory by being effectively anti-Labour and similarly in a Tory area secure Labour votes by being anti-Tory.”

Oh, they do stand for one thing, Clegg stands for one thing – Europe. This was the party brought the Europe show to these islands, a melodrama in one-act which will run and run. Clegg himself does not like to bark too loudly about this, because he knows how unpopular it is with the voters, but he is in favour of going the whole way to a federal Europe. I personally find it difficult to imagine anything worse. Europe may be his country; it most certainly is not mine; it will never be mine.

When it comes to Europe, when it came to the question of the Lisbon Treaty the Corporal and his party proved just hypocritical as Labour. In their 2005 Manifesto they made clear their support for the proposed Constitution, with the caveat that ratification must be subject to a referendum. But when Constitution became the Treaty, as treacherous a piece of political chicanery as is possible to conceive, they supported its passage through Parliament, something worth remembering when their canvassers come calling.

I suppose I am the worst person to offer any comment on the Liberal Democrats for the simple reason that I have never made the effort to get beneath the surface of the party. To me it’s all surface and no substance. I hate Labour; I’m indifferent to the Liberal Democrats. It’s not a party; it’s a kind glee club for all sorts of woolly-minded people, neither one thing nor the other; bloodless, insipid, worthless. Sorry, that’s wrong-they are the European Party. That surely counts for something.

Les Rois Maudits

I cannot think of a dynasty more deserving of the honour of being known as Les Rois Maudits, the Accursed Kings, than the Scottish Stuarts. Now, I'm probably exaggerating slightly- and I certainly do not want to hurt Scottish feelings -but the family was notorious for its bad luck and ill-fortune, leaving Scotland with one troublesome minority after another.

Even James IV, in some ways the brightest star in the Stuart heavens, was to lead his country into arguably the most unnecessary war in its history, where no Scottish interest was threatened and none served; the occasion for the most devastating defeat. In the end even the French, most consistent in the support of the exiled Stuarts after the Glorious Revolution had enough of them. Louis XVI described them as an 'unlucky family' and refused to extend them any further political support.


Yes, they were a burden to Scotland both before and after the the Union of the Crowns in 1603. James VI, probably the last of the Stuarts who really understood his native land, left for London in that year, promising to come back at regular intervals. He returned just once. Scotland could be safely 'governed by pen', as he put it, which meant that he could impose unpopular religious policies, like the Five Articles of Perth, without any real degree of consensus; a policy that was to be a serious source of future trouble.


Though Charles I, James's son and successor, was born in Scotland, and spent the first few years of his life there, he understood almost nothing about the country. Indeed, he troubled himself so little about his northern kingdom that his Scottish coronation only came in 1633, some eight years after that in England. His arrogance towards the Scots became particularly pronounced in his religious policy. Heeding no advice, he insisted on certain Anglican-style 'reforms' in the Scottish Church which lead in the Covenanter Movement to a national revolution, a crisis that proceeded through the Bishops' Wars to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.


Under Charles II the Scots fared even worse. He came to Scotland in 1650 with the clear intention of using the country to recover the English throne. In the end he led another disastrous and ill-advised invasion of England, like that of James IV, which crashed to defeat at the Battle of Worcester. Charles managed to escape but Scotland was, for the first time in its history, thoroughly and completely conquered, prior to absorption into the English Protectorate.


Though nominal independence was recovered on Charles' Restoration in 1660 he showed very little gratitude for the Scots' former sacrifices. Once again a policy of religious coercion was introduced, the cause years of trouble and oppression in the Lowlands, punctuated by sudden bursts of violence, like that at Rullion Green in 1666 and Bothwell Bridge in 1679. The repression continued through the so-called Killing Time.


Though the Stuarts had never shown any great sympathy for the Highland clans, their support for the exiled James VII and the whole Jacobite cause was, in the end, to contribute directly towards the destruction of their whole way of life. For the later Stuarts Scotland was nothing more than the backdoor into England; never more so than for Charles Edward Stuart, James' grandson, who was the cause of the 1745 rebellion, a military and political adventure of the worst kind, which ended at Culloden in 1746. Charles got away, but the consequences for the Highlands were considerably worse than that which followed his grand-uncle's gamble in 1651. The romance later associated with 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' has always seemed to me to be astonishingly misplaced; as if a comforting fiction is felt to be somehow better than a rather sordid reality.


To the above I would add one further 'burden': the reign of William of Orange, partially Stuart and married to a Stuart. His was the time of the Glencoe Massacre, the Darien Disaster; a time of famine; a time of deep national self-doubt. One could, indeed, wish for a better set of princes!

Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt could certainly draw on some strong authorities for her model of totalitarianism; for none other than Leon Trotsky had said that there was little to separate Stalin and Hitler one from the other, judging by the political techniques that they favoured. And he should know, should he not?

There were similarities, of course there were similarities: both presided over one-party states; both favoured terror and both made fulsome use of propaganda and forms of mass mobilisation. But the analysis of Arendt-and of Trotsky-only serves to confuse more than it enlightens. In terms of both theory and of practice there were real and abiding differences between Hitlerism and Stalinism; between, what might be described as irrational and rational forms of dictatorship.

So, how is this essential difference to be defined? I can put it no better than this: when Martin Bormann's son asked what National Socialism was, he was told quite simply that it was "The will of the Führer." In other words, National Socialism, as a form of political practice, and as a style of government, is inconceivable without Hitler. The system of administration Hitler favoured was devoid of all structure and method; of all lines of bureaucratic authority. At root, it was little better than a form of Social Darwinism, without any discernable rational order. At one point, for example, no less than three separate agencies had an input into foreign policy, all with contradictory aims, and all with equal access to the Führer. As Ian Kershaw has expressed it, "Hitler's leadership was utterly incompatible with a rational decision-making process, or with a coherent, unified administration and the attainment of limited goals...its self-destructive capacity unmistakeable, its eventual demise certain."

If Hitler was Nazism, Stalin was most definitely not Communism. In other words, he did not create the system, nor did he shape it to match the ends of his own ambition. He worked within the existing structures of Soviet power, its ideology and its administrative procedures. This defined both the nature, and, let me stress this, the limitations of his power. There were some things, in other words, that even the great Stalin could not do: he always had to operate within, and pay homage to, a system established by Lenin, a system that went well beyond his authority and presence.

Stalin did not destroy or pervert Leninism: he was its most perfect expression, the superlative bureaucrat, and the greatest of political managers. He worked, above all, to a rational and to a given set of ends, because that was what was expected. There was a degree of stability and predictability to the Soviet dictatorship which simply did not exist in Nazi Germany. It was the nature, the transcendent nature, if you like, of the Communist ideal that enabled Stalin's successor to condemn his 'mismanagement'. No Nazi version of Khrushchev would ever come to accuse Hitler in such terms. The very idea of such a thing is inconceivable.

Remembrance of things past

I'm about to enter into something of a political minefield. I shall have to be careful, to move on tiptoes, to stand in carefully prepared positions. Do try to bear with me as I make my way towards the end and-please-no sudden movements!

For Eastern Europe the Second World War did not end in 1945, something we are increasingly coming to terms with in the West. No, one form of occupation was simply substituted for another. It was an occupation that was to last for almost fifty years, bringing all sort of personal and national traumas. It was an occupation in the case of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the three Baltic States, that entailed the long term prospect of cultural extinction. So there are demons that have to be exorcised in these places, places where the brief Nazi occupation was replaced by a lengthy Soviet one; places where the Russians are hated even more than the Germans.

David Cameron came in for some criticism from the likes of Edward McMillan-Scott, a former Tory MEP, now a Liberal Democrat, for aligning the Conservative Party in the European Parliament with such organisations as Latvia's Fatherland and Freedom Party. I should pause and say I have no idea what a euro wet like McMillan-Scott was doing in the Conservative party in the first place, but that only makes my passage all the more difficult. Cameron has also been criticised by David Miliband, Banana Man himself, our benighted and incompetent Foreign Secretary, describing his association with Fatherland and Freedom as "sickening". Why? Because Fatherland and Freedom in Riga today commemorated the men who fought and died in the Latvian SS Legion.

This is the part of the field where the mines are packed most closely together; so I have to be highly cautious, highly careful, watching each step as I go. The commemoration was for those Latvians, teenagers mostly, who fought, not for the Germans, but to prevent the return of the Soviets, who in a brief occupation of 1940-41 deported thousands of people to Siberia. Still, those who know the history of the Legion will also know it was not only made up of selfless patriots and fighters. No, some of its recruits came from the police, men who were more involved in killing Jews than in fighting Russians. But those who were not, those who served in the fighting battalions, continue to be honoured by many Latvians as defenders of their freedom in some of the darkest days in the nation's history.

It's almost impossible to imagine what it would be like to be forced into this kind of choice; of serving alongside one opponent in countering another. I'm working my way through Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown quartet of novels about the final years of the British Raj. In A Division of the Spoils, the last of the four, he touches on the officers and men, serving in the British Indian Army and captured by the Japanese in the Malaya and Burma campaigns, men who subsequently went on to enrol in the so-called Indian National Army. This collaborationist force was set up under the guidance of Subhas Chandra Bose, an extreme member of the Indian National Congress. The aim was supposedly to serve alongside the Japanese in the 'liberation' of India, though a deeper aim was to prevent the substitution of one Raj for another. These men, the memory of these men, is not without honour in modern India.

And so it was, it might very well be argued, with the men of the Latvian SS, who served only as soldiers and died only as soldiers. But the very acronym 'SS' carries such a burden of horror that it's almost impossible to be objective, almost impossible to see things in dispassionate terms. Perhaps it is wrong for the Latvian Freedom Party to make this a political focus for an emergent nation; perhaps there are some things best forgotten. But for a long time Latvians had no choice but to forget. This recovery of memory, even an unhappy memory, is part of a process of coming to terms with a sublimated past.

There, I'm through. :-)

Young, Right and Proud

Politically I’m right-wing, not hard right-wing, not soft right-wing; just right-wing. I’m proud to be right-wing, proud to make this declaration, though I’m sure it’s no secret to those who have read my posts here. However, I think there is still a lot of confusion over exactly what it means to be on the political right.

For me the answer is simple. I follow in the footsteps of Edmund Burke; I think the French Revolution and all that followed was a catastrophe, a disastrous mess that introduced dictatorship, terror and collectivist abstractions into the modern political lexicon. I follow in the footsteps of Friedrich von Hayek, believing that The Road to Serfdom is one of the most important books ever written, a kind of Anti-Collectivist Manifesto, a book that exposed the intellectual fictions of the left, seeing that both the Communist and Nazi states had exactly the same roots.

I am right-wing in the way that Ayn Rand was right wing, believing in laissez-faire capitalism, limited government, low taxation and minimal welfare. I believe in libertarianism and what Rand called ethical egoism. I believe the individual should take pre-eminence and I wholly agree with the sentiments behind Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society, another misunderstood statement.

I believe welfarism, almost any form of state intervention, to be corrosive of self-respect and individual liberty, to be corrosive of individual identity itself. There was an anxious piece in the hyper-liberal Guardian newspaper recently about the growing influence among Conservatives of the Young Britons Foundation, whose chairman Donal Blaney has had the temerity to call for a scrapping of the National Health Service. My goodness, what a suggestion; what kind of right-wing devil could conceive of such a thing? Well, I could, for the simple reason that the ‘beloved’ NHS is a bloated, inefficient and wasteful monster, a view that I have made clear before. I hate the bogus consensus over this issue, the fear induced in the minds of ordinary people by the political left, a fear that prevents the long-overdue issue of reform even being discussed.

I am right-wing because I believe not just in personal responsibility but liberty, liberty as the guiding principle of my life, liberty within the reasonable limits of law, liberty guaranteed by a night watchman state. Looking over the past I think we, as a nation, took the wrong path in 1945, buying decorations and furniture for a house that was in effectively in ruins. We introduced a welfare culture that did much to destroy personal initiative; a Dracula that only existed by sucking the life out of the economy. A serious attempt was made to change direction after 1979 but not nearly enough, not enough to prevent us settling back into the bad old ways, ways that produced cities like Liverpool and Glasgow, those reservations of deprivation and dependence.

Right is right and left is wrong and never the twain should meet. :-)

Stands Scotland where it did?

I do try to keep abreast of Scottish politics though it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so, given the amount of press coverage there is in England on Scottish matters. One really does get the impression sometimes that Washington or Moscow are closer than Edinburgh; one gets the impression that Scotland is only in the most nominal sense part of the United Kingdom.

Still, Scotland is largely a self-governing country and I don't suppose that too many stories about Boris Johnson and London appear in the Herald or the Scotsman. But devolution, for all its promise, has not brought a new Golden Age, not even a Gilded Age; just a Tawdry Age. An editorial in last week's Spectator (The Scandal of Scotland) drew my attention to some uncomfortable developments, well, uncomfortable for the people of Scotland.

Because the Labour Party had such a grip on northern affairs, especially in urban centres like Glasgow, corrupt Tammy Hall-style politics became rather the fashion for such a long time. But then came the new face on an old body; then came Steven Purcell, the leader of Glasgow District Council, a moderniser, something of a Blairite, I suppose, rather an oddity in Mad Gordon's fiefdom. He was the man to watch, says The Spectator, the politician who could take back the Scottish Parliament for Labour, a sign that the old-style cronyism and corruption was dying.

Well, not any longer, he's not. He was unmasked recently as a cocaine addict. What makes the story even more lurid is the suggestion that his habit made him vulnerable to blackmail by the city's cocaine-driven underworld. In a bizarre twist a teenage boy, a close friend of Purcell's, collapsed and died close to the ex-councillor's former office on Friday. It's an astonishing tale of which I had previously heard nothing, neither a twitter nor a tweet. Just imagine if this had been Boris. The story would run and run. The Spectator says that Purcell's rise and fall is "a grim allegory for the tragedy of devolution." It also seems to to me emphasise the depth of Scotland's marginalisation, both in Britain and the wider world, the deep parochialism into which the country has sunk.

Yes, the implosion of Purcell's career does indeed illustrate that nothing much has changed; that the old corrupt Adam is still very much in place. The devolved Parliament is not the confident voice of a nation reborn but Glasgow District Council writ large. Scotland wanted freedom; what it got was politicians; politicians of the calibre of Henry McLeish, a former First Minister, who resigned in an expenses scandal before the Expenses Scandal. Politicians like Lord, yes, Lord Mike Watson, who was charged and convicted with drunkenly setting fire to hotel curtains at the conclusion of the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards in November 2004. Why? Because the waiters refused to give him any more to drink.

There seems to me to be a deep shabbiness and mediocrity to the whole spectacle of Scottish politics post-devolution. Interestingly enough, the best people still avoid Edinburgh, preferring to come down to Westminster, leaving so many second-raters in the Scottish pond. There is Alex Salmond, of course, First Minister in the Scottish National Party minority government, the one big beast, the one Nessie in the Loch. But he can't take comfort in the misfortunes of Labour because his own government has proved naive and inept. He found himself accused recently of abusing the privilege of his office by auctioning lunches in the Scottish Parliament in aid of party funds. Nicola Sturgeon, his deputy, has been struggling to explain why she wrote to the courts on behalf of a serious fraudster, one of her constituents, asking that he be excused a prison sentence. There is no suggestion of venality or personal involvement here, no, just unbelievable levels of political incompetence. And then there is Addul-baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan bomber. Do you remember him? Well, he's not dead yet. :-)

When one adds to this laughable political carnival all of the serious problems from which Scotland still suffers, add to this problems like Purcell's Glasgow, where cocaine usage is among the highest and life expectancy among the lowest in the developed world, then one can indeed see that devolution was simply the wrong solution. The country looked for hope, a fresh beginning, new horizons, what you will. Instead it got old faces in new limousines. For a country that once stood on the frontier of the Enlightenment, a country that gave Adam Smith and David Hume to the world, its a wretched terminus.