Friday 16 December 2011

Don't Get Hitched

There is a Good Left, and there is a Bad Left. There is a Good Right, and there is a Bad Right. Both Hitchens brothers started out on the Bad Left, but Christopher moved to the Bad Right, whereas Peter moved to the Good Right.

Several years ago, I told Peter to his face that he had really become a sort of Old Labour. He did not deny it, he has since moved even further in that direction, and he has more or less said so in print, both in The Broken Compass (reissued as The Cameron Delusion), and in numerous newspaper columns and blog posts. He sees the Labour Party of Ed Miliband and Maurice Glasman as potentially the vehicle for patriotism and social conservatism, if it can only rid itself once and for all of the Blairite poison that is now the only thing remaining in the Conservative Party. He is right.

Whereas Christopher, as he told Anne McElvoy in the interview replayed in part on today's World At One, stopped being a Socialist but never stopped being a Marxist. He continued to hold that "the materialist conception of history is valid". He merely changed the ending so that victory belonged to the bourgeoisie, and thus to the most bourgeois of countries, to which, thus conceived, he duly transferred his allegiance, like the Canadian David Frum and the Australian Danielle Pletka, not to say Rupert Murdoch.

Their wildly ahistorical version of the American Republic simply took over where the Soviet Union had left off, spreading the dictatorship of the victorious class throughout the world, including by force of arms, while the vanguard elites in other countries owed allegiance to Washington, as once to Moscow, rather than to their own respective countries. But Hitchens, among others, was really a Trotskyist, so the entryism and the permanent revolution also remained.

Peter Hitchens's column, which reaches an otherwise untouched section of opinion and which contributes very considerably to the Mail on Sunday's market lead, probably cost the Conservative Party a hung Parliament in 2005, and as certainly as we can ever know cost that party an overall majority in 2010. What did Christopher Hitchens ever do that had anything remotely approaching that sort of influence?

21 comments:

  1. When did you tell PH that to his face? You are a very regular poster of comments on his blg but I didn't know that you had ever met.

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  2. A couple of times, some years ago, at Durham. This was one of those occasions.

    I hope that he reviews my next book somewhere. It ties in very well with aspects of his own work on Thatcher, Churchill, the Liberal takeover of the Tory party, British-American relations, and so on. He won't agree with all of it, but even so.

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  3. Just read your superb comment on Toby Young's blog replying to some pillock who said that Justin Biber also had influence so who cares if Peter Hitchens does. Any chance you could reprint it here, or do I have to?

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  4. Sooner Justin Bieber than Christopher Hitchens.

    In a recent interview, the finer of those two minds not only expressed himself against abortion, but also opined: "Canada's the best country in the world, We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you're broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard's baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby's premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home."

    A blue-collar pro-lifer whose support for social democracy in general and for universal public healthcare in particular is the basis of his patriotic allegiance to one of Her Majesty's Commonwealth Realms. That'll do nicely.

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  5. Good Left, Bad Left, Good Right, Bad Right - any chance of some definitions.

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  6. Broadly speaking:

    Good Left – the universal and comprehensive Welfare State; the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment; fair taxation; full employment; the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government; co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies and similar bodies; and every household to enjoy a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

    Bad Left – Marxism, whether economic or cultural.

    Good Right – provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business, prepared to be critical of America and Israel.

    Bad Right – metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew, uncritically pro-Israeli, uncritically pro-American in those terms.

    Good Left and Good Right are wholly compatible with each other. Bad Left and Bad Right deserve each other.

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  7. They certainly are. Coffee House is running a fulsome tribute from Douglas Murray and they don't come any Worse Right than him.

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  8. I 'discovered' Peter Hitchens about a year or so ago (via this blog if I remember correctly.)

    He is easily one of the most intelligent, honest and independent journalist in the mainstream media.

    This is praise indeed coming from someone who entered adulthood as typical soft left-liberal Guardian reader.

    That doesn't mean he is always right of course (who is?) but he's worth a read even when he's wrong.

    I just found out about his brother's death from P. Hitchen's own blog-- a rather moving post which shows him at his best.

    PS: I was interested to see that Hitchen's concluded his post with a quotation from Hilaire Belloc. If you do get the chance to speak to him in the future, could you do a loyal reader (and fellow North-Eastener) a favour and ask him what the thinks of Distributism?

    Thanks.

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  9. Unrepentant Blairite17 December 2011 at 02:01

    Labour lost because some disenfranchised Blue Labour/Gillian Duffy tendency stayed at home.

    The Tories failed to win because the devoted readers of Peter Hitchens either stayed at home or, against his advice, voted for Ukip.

    Those two tendencies, partly overlapping and definitely in agreement about the EU, disliking America and Israel, much of social policy and so on, are where Elections are won and lost.

    Yeah, right.

    The danger is that this view is increasingly taken seriously in both parties, but especially at the very top of Labour. I want my party back. David Miliband for Leader.

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  10. Everyone on Peter Hitchens's blog calls you Mr Lindsay. You seem to get that a lot. Even the Coffee House lot do it quite a bit.

    Anyhoo, isn't your next book, after the forthcoming one, supposed to be a collection of book reviews? Any chance of reviews of Peter Hitchens's remarkable productions over the last 15 years?

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  11. Oh, depend on it. I did think of him to write the preface to Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, since it tied in so well with so much of his own work, and since it was likely to provoke a similar across-the-spectrum reaction to The Abolition of Britain.

    But, well, he said no, although I have to say he replied absolutely immediately and that he was very kind. But he disagreed as much as he agreed, which was of course exactly what I wanted, by no means only from him. Whereas Rod comes out of exactly the same Old Labour stable, and had in fact been preparing to come and campaign for me for Parliament before I took ill again.

    Though I say so myself, I am really rather looking forward to the book after that, which is expected to appear around this time next year. One or the other of my 2012 books will go down as my magnum opus, but even I am not sure which one it will be. Rather like Peter, in fact: The Abolition of Britain, or The Broken Compass/The Cameron Delusion?

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  12. A devastating indictment of what British journalism has become. A Savile Row clad resident of one of the richest wards in the North can spend his evenings swanning around Durham high tables, his afternoons posting comments on blogs and his mornings presumably sleeping off the nights before.

    On no more basis than that he can become well enough known that a major journalist will reply immediately to his emails and another will risk expulsion from the Labour party in order to campaign for him for Parliament. A leading think tank prepares to publish his book, something else to add to a very thin CV that claims he has been a freelance journalist since the day he left school. Yes, I have done my homework. I am a trained hack, unlike you.

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  13. Bitterness and envy do not make for a good look, sweetie.

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  14. "A trained hack" means "a student hack and embittered former Lindsay tutee who cannot get a break on a grown up paper and has decided to blame you for it."

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  15. Under various names, that deeply tragic individual tries to post here between 20 and 30 times per days, sometimes more. Bless.

    But on topic, please.

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  16. Who is the "trained hack" at 1606?

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  17. There isn't one.

    Now, on topic, please.

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  18. Precisely. “Trained” in this case means “wrote for a student rag, probably wrote for something even further down the food chain at school, amazed at total lack of interest from grown ups, need someone to blame, fastened on the evil David Lindsay, an undeniably well-connected man whom I was once stupid enough to cross and who got me taught one hell of a lesson for it.” Nothing to do with having a previous record as a college crook, obviously.

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  19. You agreed with him about the Kennedys and the Clintons.

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  20. A lot of pieces in print and online saying that Hitch had no obvious successor. But he wouldn't have had, would he? There is a generational shift in play. People who were never Tankies or Trots in the aftermath of 1968 can never be neocons in middle age. The next wave is Red Tory/Blue Labour/Crunchy Con. Your next couple of books and the reactions to them should confirm that, in Britain if not farther afield, the leader of that pack is David Lindsay.

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  21. It was in fact Gore Vidal who named him (pre-9/11, of course) as "my dauphin or delfino". But Gore Vidal is still alive.

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