October 2024
Once a hard left Labour Trotskyite, the now uncompromising conservative journalist, author and broadcaster effectively provides a summary explanation as to how "Russia's errors" have come to permeate Britain's governing class:s bringing us to the current state of moral and social breakdown, contrived insanity and chaos. Interview posted 15/8/24 at johnanderson.net.au. Our transcipt. Original emphases.
Keir Starmer and the Communist Roots of 'New Labour'
New Labour came out of a strand of politics called eurocommunism, which is the complete revision of the left in Europe after 1968. And two things happened. Colossal things happened in 1968 which I remember very clearly. The first was the May events in Paris which were actually the politicisation of sex and drugs and rock 'n roll, the beginning of cultural-revolution. Fundamentally the origins of the '68 events in Paris were actually about sex, about male access to female dormitories, at the Nanterre branch of the University of Paris believe it or not. But it was wordless in a way. You heard the shouts and you saw the cobblestones flying, and the clever little slogans and the posters. But it was also unstated what it was about. But really, it was a cultural revolution.
Then later in that same year the much grimmer, much more ferocious, much more significant, to me, rolling of the Warsaw Pact tanks into Prague and the crushing of a very, rather naive, extremely modest attempt by Alexander Duchek to alter Soviet-style Communism to something more intelligent. And that was the thing which made many people on the left in Europe who had previously been sympathetic or at least defensive towards Moscow, revolt. They sent tanks to crush intelligence and the left began to think we can't go on with this and that was the death really of the old Soviet communism, of the old belief in nationalising everything and the old belief of the total Soviet state.
And the left began to look for other solutions. And that current found its way into Britain. Oddly enough, the theoretical magazine of Blairism in the '90s was a magazine called Marxism Today which was actually an official journal of the British Communist Party. But it was so eurocommunist in terms of being culturally and morally left that it didn't look like a communist magazine at all. And then this was also the moment at which my generation, the '60s, early '70s student generation, who'd been on our long march through the institutions ever since really '68, were beginning to rise to positions of prominence in the professions we'd adopted.
So the whole country was ready for a government with much much more leftwing instincts. But not the instincts of the old Soviet Union of the ghastly men in suits and trilby hats who stood on Lenin's tomb. But the instincts of anti-colonialism, the instincts of sexual revolution, the instincts of moral revolution, the things which would become the green movement. These were the things which came to power in Britain in 1997. And I think Keir Starmer comes very much from that tradition.
Any government with radical intentions will try to be careful in its first term, and save its biggest events for the second. I mean the major redistribution of the Blair government came in the second term. The Equality Act, which was the great social and moral revolutionary action of the Blair government, wasn't actually passed till 2010, just before they left office. So a lot of the stuff was kept till later. And indeed the major constitutional change, the creation of the Supreme Court, and the Judicial Appointments Commission, which totally revolutionised judiciary and the way in which the law operates, were late flowering things. So we can probably expect that this time.
There is also a major constitutional plan which Gordon Brown, the former prime minister and Keir Starmer jointly launched, actually in 2022, which is fascinating and complex, but which would make a lot of the constitutional changes up till now irreversible, and actually suck an enormous amount of power out of the House of Commons, permanently. These are there but they're very faintly mentioned in the Labour Manifesto for this last election. So they may again be a second term project with other things between. Now I can't tell, they wouldn't tell me.
On the other hand, of course, remember that some of the really big things which the Blair government did — abandoning control over interest rates by giving independence to the Bank of England, and the gigantic raid on private pension funds, crippling for many people, and one of the worst actions of the Blair government, and the extraordinary de-neutralisation of the Civil Service by appointing Alastair Campbell and Johnathan Powell to give orders to civil servants, although they weren't responsible to either house of parliament — these really big things were not announced by the Blair government in their Manifesto and came as great shocks in the weeks immediately afterwards, to most people, when they happened.
So we don't know. They've only just got their knees under the table. I'm prepared for any number of surprises. They don't have to tell you what they're going to do.