News from the New Party

Strange bedfellows

James Delingpole is perplexed, and not without reason:

Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’...

I looked her up on Google to see what she was about and discovered that for 20 years she had been a core activist of the Revolutionary Communist Party and once published a magazine called Living Marxism. Marxist is how she still describes herself. ‘Gosh,’ I thought to myself. ‘How can this possibly be?’ I’d always imagined that anyone as far left as Fox would be mad keen, come the revolution, to have people like me put up against the wall and shot. Yet here I was, agreeing with almost every word she said.

Not just about schools either. On Islamism, on eco-fascist hysteria, on multiculturalism (a disaster), on GM crops (the dangers much overrated), and on hunting (rescind the ban) her position is very much what I would have once considered the sound Tory one. My one. In fact, about the only areas I can find where we seriously disagree are immigration, the monarchy and the war on terror.

Indeed, the Living Marxism crowd are lively, if erratic, allies in the Battle for the Enlightenment. LM magazine itself (successor to Living Marxism) came unstuck after losing a libel action against ITN after suggesting that the atrocities of the Bosnian war may not have been all they seemed. But there are other, less exotic, battlers for freedom on the Left. Readers of this site will be acquainted with Oliver Kamm, for example. Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch are others. The Euston Manifesto group also represent a fiercely pro-liberal tendency on the progressive left.

So if these are the allies, who is the enemy? Here's Delingpole again:

Far more important is the way that global capitalism has won the political argument, rendering the old distinction between left and right almost meaningless. Today, the divisions that count are the ones between
libertarianism and statism; between the hard-headed empiricism of the Enlightenment and the (currently more fashionable) touchy-feely romanticism of the New Age.

‘Enlightenment values’ is a phrase you hear being used a lot by Claire Fox and her colleagues at the Institute of Ideas. And also by many of her ideological soulmates, among them Mick Hume (the Times columnist), Brendan O’Neill (editor of the online journal Spiked), Frank Furedi (the academic and columnist)
and Josie Appleton (founder of the Manifesto Club).

What they mean by this is what others among us might call ‘good old-fashioned common sense’: looking at the world as it really is, rather than as it ought to be; forming policies on the basis of what will actually work, rather than by trying to force square pegs into round holes; working with human nature, not against
it. As far as Fox and her crew are concerned — most of them either met at the Revolutionary Communist Party or were taught by its founder Furedi — this is a Marxist position. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a traditional Tory position. Whichever is true, doesn’t much matter. What counts is that we’re engaging with the big ideas about truth, liberty and the role of the state in our lives, in a way that our main political parties are not.

It follows from the above that the enemies of the Enlightenment are those who deny the truth in order to maintain a distorted view of reality which fits a particular ideology; those who will condone the use of state power or any other form of power to enforce such a worldview; and those who know the score but lack the courage to stand up and be counted. In our view the default position of those on the pseudo-liberal left lines up most frequently with the enemies of the Enlightenment rather than its friends: those who would defend gay rights against Catholic adoption agencies, but traduce them in the face of a favoured Islamic “scholar”; those who deplore racism wherever they see it, except in the guise of their own anti-semitism; those who witlessly denounce western governments as “fascist”, when they have no conception of the true reality of fascism.

Delingpole is correct: the political battle-lines are no longer drawn between left and right. Political life is now much more complicated – friends and foes are to be found at all points on the political spectrum. We await and dedicate ourselves towards the establishment of a new progressive movement to encompass all those who cherish freedom and democracy, and who venerate the values of the Enlightenment on which our freedom and progress is predicated, and we will work with any who share these goals.