News from the New Party

Simple, really

Melanie Phillips delivers an astounding analysis of Britain's state of civilisational collapse:

The Labour party is coming close to forcing out not one but two sitting Prime Ministers; wise heads within it are warning that if it does so it will also be in the wilderness for several terms; some are even suggesting that Labour would finally implode altogether.
 
Although the ‘end of Labour’ has been foretold before, just as the ‘end of Conservatism’ has also been confidently predicted in the past, this is not an altogether fanciful thought. Why, after all, did the Tories fall apart after the defenestration of Mrs Thatcher – and why are Labour in such a terrible state now?  I think it’s because Britain itself has been falling apart for the past half century, a fact briefly disguised by the fizzing stars of a couple of Prime Ministers who in their very different ways seemed to offer the prospect of turning that trajectory round. Mrs Thatcher took the country by the scruff of its neck, shook it until its teeth rattled and said: ‘You WILL be great again.’ As a result, she gave the Tories a coherent cause to fight for and a story about what Conservatism was. Tony Blair came along and said: ‘I will lay my hands on the country’s wounds and heal them’; the country felt better about itself for at least five minutes and the Labour party swallowed its distaste for this non-comrade and went along with it while Tony kept winning elections.
 
But the astounding political success of both these iconic leaders and their tremendous impact masked the fact that behind them their parties had become Potemkin parties, standing for nothing. New Labour was a spirited attempt to construct a fresh purpose for the Labour party after the collapse of socialism, by grafting a kind of Gladstonian liberalism (Blair) onto statist social engineering (the rest of the party). The resulting incoherence finally brought the NewLab ‘Project’ to a sputtering halt; when Blair was finally turfed out, there was nothing left except, er, class war.
 
In turn, the collapse of socialism meant that the Conservatives no longer knew what they were for because they thought there was no longer anything for them to be against.  Obsessed by ‘the market’ and thinking only in terms of economics (aka money) they were altogether oblivious to Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’, which steadily achieved its ends over four decades and which was (and is) what conservatism should be against. (Mrs T herself, who was not quite the seer that her quivering disciples thought she was, delivered one of many death blows to British greatness and indeed to British anything at all when she was bamboozled into signing Britain up to the Single European Act.) So when they pushed out their Iron Lady, the Tories no longer had any coherent purpose in life; nothing to be against, nothing to be for.
 
It is now increasingly obvious that both Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, in their very different ways, were the only things standing between their parties and the edge of the cliff. The way back from that precipice is to analyse the state of the country correctly, thus overturning several decades of the soggy, soppy consensus of civilisational decline and decay, and have the courage and vision to start putting it right.
 
Simple, really.

In fact, it is not just Britain which is suffering the effects of the Gramscian "long march".  Most Western countries are in one way or another surrendering the values of western civilisation and liberal democracy to a new totalitarianism made more palatable only by relative economic affluence and libertinism masquerading as libertarianism.  The chickens are coming home to roost.