Scribo Ergo Sum

So I stopped by Squander Two’s excellent blog and got myself engaged in the same fight I do every time I share a comment section with a libertarian, the NHS Fight. The reason this always happens, without fail, is that for the most part I tend to find that crowd (besides the Guido Fawkes, Devil’s Kitchen, etc. faction) fairly agreeable & to find them wanting to cause more carnage than the Tories over something is always fairly jarring. Healthcare is an area where the market has proven utterly inadequate, indeed it’s hard to find any pure market approach outside of the Third World (company insurance is decided by CEO boards and unions, state insurance by governments), although I’d imagine that those who have died in America owing to lack of insurance didn’t rate the distinction that much. As it happens the last time I was in Squander’s comments the same thing happened, and on that occasion he handed me my head on a plate, but that’s just because I played it fancy and got tripped up for it.

This time around I play it nice and conventional and when he says it costs a lot I reply:

You’re supporting people who didn’t get as lucky.

Which is the basic argument, right? I could justify that to myself in my head for a few minutes, well enough: jobs are about fortune, not skill alone. Even leaving aside the fact that the most capable are largely those from the most advantaged backgrounds (which they got into by luck) this country doesn’t have full employment & it hasn’t had for a long time. Getting a job is a matter of chance.

Thank you, right-wingers.

So then my mind travels to Labour, or more specifically the New kind (is there any other sort that doesn’t exist outside of the history books and John McDonnell, now?). And initially my continuation is: and perhaps full employment would have existed, if the Labour Party had any left-wingers interested in job creation left, instead of just a bunch of Thatcher infused twats who were prepared to twiddle their thumbs crafting the crapper kind of statist crap that didn’t help anyone (police allowed to pretend nice old ladies are terrorists, an endless attempt to implement ID cards that don’t work, et al…) while waiting for the financial wankers to fuck up the nation with their incompetence twinned with centality.

But that’s when I realised that the poison runs just a tad deeper than that. Because when I said his money had gone to people who weren’t lucky I wasn’t exactly telling the truth, now was I? What I should have said was that most of the money, perhaps even part of it would have been safer, was going to those less lucky than him and the rest was going to those who were a lot more. The rest was going to big businesses lucky enough to land themselves involvement with a PFI scheme.

They’d get a massive amount of taxpayer cash, in return offering the efficiency which all of the private sector of course inevitably displays (hence the need to nationalise banks to stop the financial sector from disappearing) and then getting to maintain ownership of the hospitals which they’d built to fulfill their contract. They’d use poor Squander’s cash to help themselves, in short.

Which, as any socialist will tell you, is a daft and far from left-wing idea. But there haven’t been left-wingers in charge of Labour for a long time.

Which is fine for me operating upon the ideological level, that I can cope with: things aren’t meant to work out that way, but it’s the other sides fault, right? Well internally, all’s well. But on a national level, if you are looking for a reason why the left is flat on it’s back when it should be seizing the nation’s throat then beyond its instrinsic uselessness (which you should never underestimate, of course) then this is is.

Labour purports to be the left. Here’s Prescott championing the NHS and using someone who thinks of it as a mistake as a bogey-man (quite rightly). That’s a good political move, something which Political Betting have said that it would make sense for Labour to shift to, instead of going for Cameron in his own right (after the recent Smeargate bullshit, who’s going to argue otherwise?).

But the irony of New Labour is that presentation alone is the worst thing possible for the left. You get people depicting themselves as some sort of non-scary version of socialism, reaching power and ruining the country with their useless centralism and then Bevan getting the blame instead of Aristotle. They despoil that they’re claiming themselves to be the idolizers of and making it impossible to stage a proper defence. How am I meant to argue in favour of the NHS against right-wingers when most of the problems it suffers from are caused by the right-wing of the Labour Party?

But of course, I’m meant to be stuck here, on one side of the wedge. That’s the entire point. The entire notion of New Labour is keeping me stuck here ranting ineffectually, the Tories blustering on the other side and them shoved into power. The sole problem with this is that it’s prosperity politics: they could splash money at undeserving companies that were not going to benefit the public all they wanted during boomtime. Now we’re on the verge of the “Age of Austerity” the cunt Purnell’s foul plans to pay Walmart to wipe up the poor fell through pretty damn sharpish (& thank fuck for that). I doubt the loathsome little rightist oik will be able to afford his beloved lie detectors, either.

Just as New Labour looked like the right call during times of big spend (& in its original & true incarnation seemed best for the construction of the Welfare State and the implementation of the Beveridge Report, although the difference is that they stuck to their manifesto pledges and managed some actual achievements instead of flailing around outlawing setting off nuclear devices on British soil) it’s going to be the Tories that look right during times of cutting. Which would be fine: it’ll be a recession, the Conservatives will have a terrible time.

But the damage is done: socialist institutions have been severely damaged by non-socialist policies implemented by politicians who successfully attempted to depict all opposed to their idiot centrism as a frothing-mouthed extremist nutjob semi-Leninist extremist. They’ve not only fostered that image of the left, but done so much harm that they’ve diluted the successes of actual socialists to the extent that they’re difficult to defend properly in terms that don’t reinforce the image. How are you meant to convince people who read blogs raging about “ZaNu Labour” that Tony & Co were a bunch of right-wing wreckers? Am I honestly going to be able to argue in favour of institutions already ruined by the Labour right with a straight face? Even arguing in favour of the tear-it-down-burn-the-corpse crowd I’m starting to struggle.

See here the now thankfully fully reconstructed Bensix tell the delightful story of his political metamorphosis. His trajectory was actually eerily similar to my own. I don’t talk about it a huge amount, but at one stage I was quite the Decent. Or a Decent sympathetic, at least. I slipped into it at the strangest of possible times, many years after the war had begun, and it never quite stuck. To my eternal gratitude no writings of such sentiments remain.

The nadir was when I endured a placement with a Labour MP of such little consequence that his name at this stage actually escapes me. It was originally a Polish one, but he modified it to sell better. A born Blairite, in other words. I spent most of the week wasting my time: filing pro-life postcards his local Catholic Church had had members send him, watching him give pro-EU speeches in a debate, looking through Mein Kamph for anti-semitic comments (of which there were quite a few) for a report he’d later issue that smeared anti-Zionists as anti-semites (very original).

I just googled “anti-semitism mp report” and it came up with his name, incidentally. Denis MacShane. Dr. Denis MacShane, actually. The towering parliamentary figure, as a Spectator sketcher waspishly sneered.

Anyway: as I mentioned I never really took well to Decency. It wasn’t something that quite set in me. I can remember even then flicking through a new copy of the recently published What’s Left? and, despite my budding inner Kremlinologist being deeply thrilled by the endless pouring over of far-leftist minutiae as if it actually mattered or meant anything, I realised that claiming leftwing opposition to Paul Wolfowitz was based around his name sounding like both a wolf and “a scary Jew”, rather than him being a realpoliticking warmonger, was somewhat suspect. Even then I met MacShane’s claim that the disaster of the Iraq War was the fault of the French for not going along with America and scaring Saddam into surrendering with a healthy degree of quizicalness.

It was an introduction of some benefit, I suppose. The peculiar, base pathetic nature of the lefthawks was exposed to me first hand. I expressed some surprise that MacShane was a very close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In hindsight this is hardly a shock.

But I am sparing myself in mentioning the ideology which never really gripped me. There were others, perhaps even more preposterous, which I was truly and deeply committed. I was a communist before I was a teen. Thankfully it was no Leninism, instead a genuine desire for mass uprising (my grasp on class politics was, perhaps, a tad weak) and an overturning of the capitalist system in preference for something vaguer but a good deal more pleasant.

This overlapped with, then faded into, my eco-nihilism. This I have mentioned before you, and you may remember that it was a strain of environmentalism so black and distorted that I would read headlines reporting disasters in which a dozen had been killed and not even cheer, but instead coldly note that it was a good start, but simply not enough. Humanity was a cancer, our extinction was the only way in which the ravaged Earth could survive; I was the misanthropic epitome of everything the right desires their opponents over climate change to be. This reigned for a very long time until I degenerated suddenly into the form of being I am today: the kind who will argue with his earnest green sister that leaving a laptop on standby is fine.

Perhaps the blackest episode, though, was my brush with libertarianism. In fairness I did it a lot more damage than it did me, devising some bastard hybrid I dubbed “Large Government Libertarianism”. I took losses as well, though: courtesy of Andrew Sullivan I for a time subscribed to the view that the best kind of a tax was a flat tax, because they simplified matters and refused to punish success. It was, of all people, a pair of Tories who talked me out of this, pointing out that the rich extracted far more benefit from the state and could also afford to pay a good deal more. To have been persuaded the merits of progressive taxation by a belligerent Thatcherite and an American rightwinger who once told me that free state heroin was something he could accept only if all if one hundredth of the junkies, randomly selected, were executed was a strange twist of fortune, but a merry one which I am grateful for all the same.

As humiliating as it is to admit that I was once a teenage internet libertarian, the most hackneyed being in existence, it should be stated that the experience left me with an understanding of the appeal which lies behind that ideology: like so many, it is permeated with the desire for purity, above all things.

Which of course, was what attracted me most to Bentham, as is a matter for another essay. A good deal of this, though, was his rigid adherence to the class ambivalent scale of pleasure and pain, as opposed to the heretic Mill’s later deviation into snobbish distortion, which left an aristocrat’s utilitarianism all too blatantly shaped by his prejudices. By contrast Bentham’s vision is filled with clarity, simplicity yet not over-simplification. It is far from reductionistic: the diversity of human desires and values is embraced, but it is simply emphasised that all of these are expressions of one thing or the other. Of pleasure or of pain. Much like Hinduism can be seen as a monotheistic faith with endless aspects, human behaviour is both hugely varied and understandable as everyone seeking one thing and attempting to avoid another. Both in my ethics and my politics Bentham has proven deeply influential.

As has Sullivan, indeed. Interestingly he failed to win me around to the Iraq War, despite having been perhaps the most prominent of all the world’s warbloggers, approaching the impending catastrophe much as Melanie Phillips approached the recent massacre of Gaza. I always saw this as his greatest defect, as peculiar given his obvious intelligence, and his admission that he had been incorrect to back it strikes me as a model for the remnant rump of the hawks to follow, humble and transformative. He also triggered my vehement opposition to male genital mutilation (a term he quite rightly uses) which still remains despite my having abandoned intactivism.

I can’t say that I feel a great degree of contempt for my former selves, indeed I suspect that it was this strain of emotion that drives both Cohen and either Hitchens, Phillips and a good many other besides. I would not, however, place any large bets on staying where I am now. Much as I enjoy it. I can but hope that my degeneration does not end with me utilising a Conservative Home account to vent my views on why David Cameron is being a big softie on the European Union.

Just don’t be surprised.

My friend Liam has an excellent new blog called the Roe Valley Socialist. A common topic for the moment is nationalism, which he tackles again here. His point on nationalist exploitation on history is well supported, with an example which I think is worthy of further consideration being this. This matter has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

As an admirer of the Anglo-Saxons it was with some disgust that I came to discover that Nick Griffin has Alfred the Great to be his “favourite historical person”, despite him being a character who spent most of his life battling his fellow Northern Europeans. I suppose you could argue that Alfred was a fine Christian king fending off foul pagans, but given that Griffin’s favourite book was Atlas Shrugged (a text that ends in a “Speech” by the enigmatic protagonist John Galt that lasts for multiple hours and lambasts religion fiercely for encouraging the dreaded Objectivist vice of altruism) that would be rather curious. (Indeed, there’s nothing much about Griffin being a Rand fan that isn’t curious, seeing as she was an anti-racist, anti-theist immigrant who would be deemed a Jew by the Nuremburg laws. I suppose that they share absolutism & virulent anti-socialism, but the former would surely convince each to despise the other despite the latter. There is black & there is white, there is dark & there is light & and there is nothing, nothing in between, after all…)

That aside, the perversion of the past gets worse: you can read the BNP version of early pre-British history here. I especially like the part where they claim that England was founded as a “Nation”, instead of a kingdom. Additionally, they mistake a gafol for a geld, but I suppose that they can be forgiven since near enough everyone does.

But what galls me most about this account is that this flawed version of history being wielded by racist nationalists is most likely the first that the average reader of the website will have encountered. Ignorance of the early history of England is endemic throughout the land: most in this country can not name its first king. I’m no chauvinist, I’m not even any kind of patriot, but I don’t find the argument that this doesn’t matter persuasive. The thought of this account of our history being the first and most likely only one that people encounter is deeply worrying, and that this a twisted education advances the nationalist cause troubles me deeply. This is the most popular political party’s website in the country, according to Alexa. There is a distinct possibility that it is the most common source for information on this era. Which means that this page will both misinform the public & further their agenda.

As Liam puts it:

History, or more precisely a selective reading of history, is thus used by nationalists in all parts of the world to give justification for their desire for states that are congruent with their own conception of the ‘nation’. The ‘nation’ is viewed, almost always genuinely although I would argue wrongly, as perennial and ever-existing. The struggle for a nation-state is seen as the ‘rebirth’ or ‘reawakening’ of the sleeping consciousness of historic nations that have been denied their natural place by the usurpation of foreign and malign influences.

But a proper grounding in history demonstrates the absurdity of this: Alfred was one king amongst many in England. The Vikings did not introduce a threat to unity, they were simply a novel example of it: the English kingdoms were perfectly content warring amongst themselves for centuries before their arrival. It was because they were weakened from persistent conflict in which they were the losers that the East Anglians were so easily conquered by the Vikings. The notion that it was a “tradition for these major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to take turns in designating a supreme king, or Bretwalda (Britain Wielder), to serve for a while as overlord of Anglo-Saxon Britain” rather than supremacy being a matter of overpowering the local kingdoms via force, upon the battlefield is a nonsense. The closest Nick Griffin has ever come to acting in the traditional manner of the Anglo Saxons was during his nasty spat with the Yorkshire column of his own party, during which that region of the country was apparently one it would have been unsafe for him to step foot in. If he wanted to really get in touch with the Old English he should have donned armour, taken up a sword and claimed Northumbria for the West Saxons.

Even someone as lightly educated (A level standard) in early (pre-)English history as myself can see through the unconvincing sham artifice of the BNP’s edifice of history. But most have far less. Indeed, the OCR exam board is doing its best to ensure that when it comes to pre-1066 history nobody gets anything at all. And as ever, ignorance is something which nationalists are both capable of and all too willing to exploit. Education is vital to salting the ground which such ideologies can flourish. And we should not imagine that there is any era which they are incapable of harnessing for their malign purposes.

Tony Blair says: talk to Hamas.

So which apologism trumps which?

From: The Yorkshire Gob.