Monday 28 October 2013

A Strange Bedfellow?


It is worth pondering how some forms of ‘discrimination’ are still  all right, and others not. Killing baby girls because they aren’t boys is one.

Now here’s another. Aric Sigman, a psychologist and biologist, points out that women who raise their own children can be sneered at without fear as ‘self-lobotomised’, servile and sexually unattractive.

Dr Sigman has spotted the modern Stalin-Hitler pact that unites huge, supposedly incompatible forces against this defenceless group.

‘The older feminism, liberal-Left feminism, has ended up a strange bedfellow with Right-wing capitalism.’ Almost there. But why does he think capitalism is ‘Right-wing’?  If Leftism pays, that’s fine.

This shows his increasing tendency to define "the Left" as whatever he himself happens to be against. That kind of thing, on both sides of the divide, occurs a lot below the line. But one expects better of a prominent, paid columnist.

Peter Hitchens it was who used the Question Time panel on Thursday to call for the renationalisation of energy, the reopening of the pits (along with a massive expansion of nuclear power, but not under Chinese suzerainty), and the restoration of the Central Electricity Generating Board. He also supports renationalising the railways and the Royal Mail. He opposes wars of intervention, the erosion of civil liberties, and the "renewal" of Trident.

All of these views are the same as those of his fellow-panellist, Owen Jones. If the allegedly left-wing producers had allowed it to come up, then they would have said exactly the same things about Grangemouth. If anything, Hitchens would have out-Lefted Jones, and sounded like the Old Labourite that he once was, when people like that were just called Labour people. From that point of view, Grangemouth is the story that has it all.

It will not do to reply that "the Left means radical feminism and that kind of thing". If they ally so well with the present capitalist model, and they do, then they are obviously not on the Left at all. No, not even if Peter Hitchens says that they are.

Whereas his views on public ownership, on coal (also expressed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and by the Trident-sceptical Sir Nick Harvey on The Westminster Hour), on transport, on electricity generation, on war, on civil liberties and on Trident all either ally him almost entirely with the Left or, especially in the first case, place him objectively on it. His reasons for wanting these things also locate him within the Labour mainstream at any time before 1997 or since 2010.

Only on nuclear power did he differ from the opinions rapturously received by the "Turnip Taliban" of Thetford when Bob Crow expressed them on Any Questions the following evening. But the unions representing that industry's workers, unions that are much larger than the RMT and which unlike it are affiliated to the Labour Party, are among this county's staunchest advocates of nuclear power.

The last Government was passionately committed to it, more so than any other in a generation, so to speak. It was David Cameron who at that time called it "a last resort", before he had realised that the State action that has always been necessary in order to deliver it, and which always will be, might come from the Chinese rather than from the British State.

Hitchens's views on the EU have much deeper Labour than Conservative roots, as is increasingly apparent on parliamentary floors from Westminster to Brussels and Strasbourg. On abortion and on the definition of marriage, Hitchens concurs with several of the most left-wing Labour MPs, including figures who after the recent votes on the latter, and numerous votes on the former over the years, were prominent on the platform of the Durham Miners' Gala this year, as they always are. On Europe, Hitchens concurs with all of the most left-wing Labour MPs.

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