Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the
Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 197
23rd September 2010
Linking url:
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc197.htm
Available for debate on
LA Blog
David Miliband and the Labour Party:
A Suicide Pact Made in Heaven?
by Sean Gabb
I have written very little this year on politics. This is not a product of idleness. Nor does it show any fading of interest. The reason is that I have been hard at work on two other projects. These will, I hope, advance the cultural agenda of our Movement. I hope they will also help save my daughter from the trouble of having to work for a living. But they are now finished. Next week, or the week after, I must begin another, and this will again take me partly out of immediate circulation. For the moment, though, I have both time and inclination to write about politics.
Who Should Lead the Labour Party?
I will begin by looking at the election of a
new leader for the Labour Party. The voting came to an end late yesterday
afternoon, the 22nd September 2010. The result will be declared on
Saturday the 25th. I am too late, therefore, to try influencing the outcome –
not, of course, that my recommendations would have had any influence on those
able to vote. What I can do is to explain which of the five candidates is most
likely to serve the interests of England. To be specific, which of the five is
most likely to diminish the chance that Labour will ever win another general
election?
I will dismiss Ed Balls and Andy Burham out of hand. There is no point in denouncing them as sordid apparatchiks – as principals and as willing accomplices in treason and tyranny. All five are that. No one who has sat steaming for any length of time on the dung heap that is New Labour can be regarded as other than a beast in human form. Their disqualification from our point of view is that they are both white and English. This means that, with careful presentation, they can be dressed up as champions of the common man. Since, even with a better government than we currently have, the next few years will be difficult, we cannot afford a credible Labour response to the inflation and unemployment that are the results of the artificial boom engineered by Gordon Brown.
I will also dismiss Diane Abbott. Many people tell me that a black woman cannot become Prime Minister in England. I am not too sure of this. There is, I have no doubt, much more colour prejudice in this country than fear of the law and fear of informal penalties will allow to be expressed. At the same time, I doubt if there is enough colour prejudice to stop her from being an effective party leader. We must consider that, unlike all the other candidates, she does look like a normal human being. Her opinions may be both stupid and malevolent. But she always manages to look good on television. At the same time, she could count on the undivided support of non-white voters that Mr Obama found so useful in America. And there are just as many middle class fools in this country as in America who would think that supporting a black politician was atonement for the past five billion years of white racism. We cannot afford Diane Abbott. She may be less dangerous than Messrs Balls and Burnham. Still, she is, in terms of her own abilities, and in terms of the coalition of forces that would gather round her, too dangerous to consider.
This leaves us with the two Miliband brothers. And these are certainly worth considering. They have the great advantage for us of being Jewish. Now, while there are Jewish organisations that get money and support by insisting that England is two steps from our own Kristallnacht, I doubt if many English people have even noticed the shape of the Miliband noses. Of those who have noticed, I doubt if more than a few thousand think ill of it. Native anti-semitism is so rare that it has to be hunted out, where not actually fabricated. And do bear in mind that the British National Party, which is our largest white nationalist organisation, welcomes Jewish members and is vaguely pro-Israel in its foreign policy. However, the non-white population is solidly anti-semitic. Moslems, black Christians, whatever – they largely hate Jews with a ferocity not known in England since the middle ages.
It may be disagreeable that we must share a country with such people. But it would be rather funny to see Labour hoist by its own petard. After 1997, Labour Governments knowingly encouraged the immigration of between seven and ten million non-whites into this country. They did so because it accelerated the upward redistribution of wealth to which modern ruling classes are all committed. They did so because it helped break up the solidarity of the ruled that is another ruling class project. They also did so because they believed that the new arrivals, once they had been waved through the citizenship formalities, would mostly vote Labour. And they will – so long as an English or a Scotch man or a black woman is in charge. They will not vote, I think, for a Labour Party led by a Jew. And this is regardless of how seldom either Miliband goes into a synagogue, and regardless of how little public enthusiasm either has shown for Israel.
This will be still more the case if the Liberals get the electoral reform that the Conservatives may not be able to deny them. So far, the two main parties have been held together by the iron logic of the first past the post system. I, for example, voted Conservative in this year’s election not because I thought David Cameron would be a good Prime Minister – but because the Conservatives were the only force able to get Labour out of office. I normally vote for the UK Independence Party. I would, in other than general elections, and if a candidate were to stand where I live, vote for the Libertarian Party. But I voted Conservative in the general election because not to vote Conservative would have risked another Labour Government.
It is the same with non-white electors. They might swallow their prejudices and vote for a Labour Party led by a Jew if the alternative was to let in a Conservative Government. But the alternative vote system will allow them to give their first preferences to Islamic and black nationalist parties. Their second preferences might be enough for Labour. But the loss of first preferences might be enough to keep Labour from ever winning a majority of the English seats. And the accompanying redistribution of seats would make Scotch votes far less important than they have been.
And so, my prayers are with the Milibands. I should now say, though, which of the two brothers I prefer. My preference is for David. His brother, Ed, has several disadvantages from our point of view. He was not in Parliament when his Party voted to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has distanced himself from these atrocities. He has also accepted that identity cards and other police state laws were not entirely good things. Worse, he was Environment Secretary in the Brown Government, and always gave the impression of believing the drivel he was given to read out in public. He looks thick – but a visible lack of intelligence has never been a disadvantage in English politics. Apparent sincerity has always weighed more than cleverness.
David Miliband, however, is irremediably tainted with all the horrors of the Blair and Brown regime. He supported those wars. He supported every police state law that was brought forward. And he has all the commitment in his speaking manner of a Kremlin teleprinter. He looks thick. If we leave aside his ability to crawl nearly to the top of the Labour dung heap, he probably is thick. But, where his brother does not, he also manages to look like a supercilious fraud. I do hope he wins. Indeed, I am so convinced he would be the right man for the job, that I did briefly think of handing over a £1 joining fee to the Labour Party in order to vote for him. With David Miliband in charge, we might hope for a repeat at the next election of Labour’s 1983 performance.
The Worthless Conservatives
Now, here I must say, as clearly as I can,
that, I do not want a melt-down of Labour support because it might give a clear
run to the Conservatives. The reason I want the Labour Party to vanish up its
own bottom is because this enables our own attack on the Conservative Party.
I welcomed the present Coalition Government in May because it was not Labour. I am grateful for the limited return since then to constitutional government. Of course, I was pleased when the new Home Secretary told the police that they could not stop people at random in the street for searches and questions. I am delighted that the Government has abolished identity cards and shut down the National Identity Register that was supposed ultimately to store every last details of our lives – including DNA samples – so we could never again live privately in freedom, and never again remake ourselves. I hope that the unequal extradition treaty with America will be amended, and that the European Arrest Warrants will be made harder to enforce that has so far been the case. I look forward to many other retreats from the Labour police state.
Even so, David Cameron does not preside over a government of reaction. Unlike in 1660, there will be no legislative voiding of the previous revolution. The multicultural agenda has been left untouched, and natives will continue to suffer official discrimination and censorship. The most malevolent agencies of the Labour State will not be closed down. There is no chance that we shall leave the European Union. As for the cuts in government spending we have been promised, these will not abolish the clientage to which millions of people have been reduced. I cannot be bothered to go through the numbers. I am, however, assured that, in real terms, the British State will spend more next year – after the Osborne “cuts” have begun – than it did in 2005, when Gordon Brown was bribing us with our own money to keep him and Tony Blair in office. If there are cuts, these will be felt by ordinary people, who will not get the state healthcare and pensions and education they were promised. The bureaucracies that meddle in the smallest details of our lives will be left mostly intact. Above all, perhaps, the new Ministers are at least as committed as the old to the “climate change" hoax. While enriching and legitimising the ruling class, this threatens ordinary people with impoverishment and slavery on a scale that makes the totalitarianisms of the last century almost benevolent.
Conservative Members of Parliament have told me, in private, that this is not a purely Conservative Government, and that nothing can be done without the consent of their Liberal Democrat partners. There is something in what they say. Like most other people, I had never paid much attention to our third party. Since it was never likely to get into government, there was no point investigating its stated or actual beliefs. I did think, nevertheless, that its economics were broadly mutualist, or even Georgist, with a dash of Keynes. I was wrong. I am not sure who does vote Liberal Democrat. But its Ministers are behaving in office as if they were just as much the representatives of public sector employees as the Labour Party. They are state socialists without New Labour’s stiffening of ex-Communists.
But, if there is something in what my Conservative friends tell me, it is also true that a purely Conservative Government would have been hardly any different to what we have. I never believed that a Cameron majority would result in a government of reaction. I did believe that withdrawal from the European Union would be firmly ruled out by Mr Cameron, and that he would buy off most complaints from within his party by keeping identity cards. At least this has not been necessary. It is, however, undeniable that the Government we have is committed to working within the terms set by Tony Blair before he went barking mad.
I repeat – I welcome many things that have been done, and that are yet to be done, by the Coalition. This does not make me a supporter of the Coalition. The lesser of two evils is less evil – but it is also still evil.
Do you remember the Thermidore Reaction? That was when the French Jacobins were rounded up and sent to their own guillotine or packed off somewhere nasty to die of yellow fever. Do you remember the Soviet de-Stalinisation of the 1950s? That was when the Gulag was slimmed down a little, and there were private mutterings that Stalin himself had gone a little too far. Well, to speak in these terms about England may seem hyperbolic. But we really are living through our own equivalent of these reactions. Labour’s revolutionary terror is being wound down. But the revolution itself remains the governing consensus. No one presently in or near office has the slightest inclination to return us to a situation where we can call ourselves the free citizens of an independent country.
I do not believe there is any chance in the short term or a genuine reaction. One of the commenters on the LA Blog tells me of his plan for a violent overthrow of the Establishment, to be followed by the trial and execution of perhaps ten thousand traitors and other class enemies. But I am not at all persuaded that violence is either desirable or possible. Other people tell me that we should give all assistance to some other party that may then get elected. But I am hardly more persuaded that any of the alternative parties currently on offer is up to winning a general election. If we are to get out of our present mess, it must be after a process of delegitimisation that will include destroying the Conservative Party. Only then will some other force emerge that may restore something like the old order – or create a new order that will serve something like the same purpose.
What Do We Want?
Oh – I see I have just used the phrase “new
order”. I could change this to avoid the pointing of Marxoid fingers. Instead, I
will make it an excuse to spell out what I actually want. I want to live in a
country where everyone has freedom of speech and association, and where
justly-acquired property is secure from confiscation and can be freely enjoyed.
In such a country, such government as remains is limited in every exercise of
power. It is limited, by a bill of rights, in the laws it can make. It is
limited, by strict procedural safeguards, in its enforcement of the laws. There
is a clear division between state and voluntary activity, and state activity is
small in both nature and extent. In such a country, furthermore, every official
is accountable, at one or two legal removes, to the people who pay his salary;
and the nation as a whole is free from outside control.
We do not live in such a country. To what extent the old order – the mixed Constitution of Church and State, the hegemony of the landed interest, and so forth – secured these things is worth arguing about elsewhere. It is undeniable that the present order of things, that emerged during the twentieth century, does not. This order is one of growing administrative despotism – a despotism sometimes directed by those holding the traditional offices of state, but just as often by those whose names and even functions are unknown to the people. It is also an order, as said, where wealth is systematically redistributed upwards to those public and formally private interest groups that exist because of state privilege.
The new order that I want – and that I largely believe is wanted across our Movement – is one in which most state agencies will have been shut down, and in which the legal and administrative privileges that maintain big business, the credentialed professions, the centralised media, and all other sinister interests, in existence will have been revoked. This does involve a revolution of one kind or another – a revolution, or a counter-revolution, or just a reaction: call it what you will. But, if the people ever take to the streets to demand change, this will have been preceded by a delegitimisation of the present order of things – just as the ancient régime in France withered after the 1770s, and the traditional autocracy in Russia withered after the 1880s. Long before a visible blow can have been landed against it, this present order of things will have been made incapable of defending itself. Of course, it must - as will every order founded on a denial of human nature - perish from within. But this inevitable fall will have been hastened by our own relentless critique.
I want to live in this kind of new order. If I cannot have it for myself, I want it for my daughter. And if someone important wants to construe my definition of “new order” as evidence that I am a neo-nazi terrorist, that only shows how far we currently stand from achieving any of it
Certainly, though, no escape from the present order of things can be easily urged so long as the Labour Party remains a credible danger to what freedom we still have. I can already see the Ministers and their smug Tory boy assistants go about their business, challenging every objection by asking “You wouldn’t want Labour back – would you?” And my own answer is “No, I do not.” I do not want Labour back. Life under Khrushchev is better than life under Stalin. The jeunesse dorée are better than the sight of those hags knitting under the guillotine. Better the Stupid Party than the Evil Party. And so, while another Labour Government remains more than an outside possibility, the work of counter-revolution cannot be pressed on. It is not to be put on hold, least of all forgotten. But it cannot reasonably claim all our effort.
That is why David Miliband must be our man. I think the worst choice the Labour Party could make – from our point of view – is Ed Balls or Andy Burnham. The best choice really is David Miliband, with his invisible moustache and jerky movements and his inability to do other than defend every monstrous act of the Blair and Brown Regime. Bearing in mind how we have shambled through the past thousand years of our history, England has been an astonishingly lucky nation. Let us hope, this coming Saturday, that our luck will hold.
NB—Sean Gabb's book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/ya4pzuh