Breaking my silence?

‘It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' – Alice in Wonderland

I’ve always felt an affinity with French-Moroccan author Marcel Benabou, who wrote a book-length treatise on why he hadn’t written more books: Pourquoi je n'ai écrit aucun de mes livres. In the same spirit, this is a blog post about why I haven’t written any blog posts recently – well, nowhere near as many as I used to write (only 20 posts in the past three years, whereas in 2009 alone I wrote more than 200).

My principal excuse for inactivity is that this is primarily a political blog – and my political beliefs are currently in a state of extreme flux. So what’s new, you may ask? Hasn’t this blog charted repeatedly (and probably tediously) my movement from youthful Tribunite Labour left-wingery, through Gramscian Marxism, to critical support for New Labour? Didn’t I once claim, in my normblog profile no less, that I started this blog ‘to help me work out what I think’? And wasn’t it precisely the experience of writing this blog that helped me to clarify the anti-totalitarian liberal-social-democratic politics that has characterised my thinking for most of the blog’s life?

Yes, but this feels different. The change in my political outlook feels more seismic this time. I’m reluctant to articulate the change too precisely, for fear that the sands may have shifted again in a few months, and I’ll have to recant any positions I espouse here. So how to characterise the change? Maybe it’s enough to say that these days I find myself reading Standpoint and The Spectator more frequently, and with more pleasure, than The New Statesman; that I tend to haunt websites such as Front Porch Republic and Ethika Politika; that having hero-worshipped Thomas Paine for years I’m much more sympathetic to his nemesis Edmund Burke; and that I now find Chestertonian distributism more attractive than any form of socialism. 

That last item is a partial clue as to why my views have changed. My re-engagement with religious faith in the past year or two has certainly made me more 'conservative' on some social issues, and while my re-awakened faith has helped to keep my passion for social justice alive, it has also made me more open to different ways of imagining and achieving it. But it’s not just about religion. Another way of describing the change in my politics is to say that my growing disillusionment with certain aspects of contemporary leftism – whether it be kneejerk anti-westernism in foreign affairs or ‘big state’ paternalism at home – has led over time to a questioning of the foundations of progressivism per se.

To put it another way, and please forgive this brief philosophical excursion by someone who’s by no means an expert in these matters: it’s partly about questioning the adequacy of the Enlightenment tradition. Like many others who have featured in my blogroll sidebar over the years, I began blogging partly out of a sense of alarm at the rising tide of irrationalism and moral relativism in contemporary political discourse, particularly on the Left – manifested in contorted attempts to ‘understand’ terrorism, a refusal to condemn misogyny and racism if espoused by non-westerners, and the abandonment of a sense of universal human rights. In this context, post-Rushdie, post-9/11 and post-Danish cartoons, it seemed important to rush to the barricades (or at least, the blogs) to defend the gains of the Enlightenment. Indeed, it became something of a badge of honour when, in a burst of tortuous illogicality, Madeleine Bunting (‘Our Maddy of the Sorrows’, to quote the late great Norm), one of the torchbearers for the anti-rationalists, condemned writers of our stripe as ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’.

But what if an appeal to Enlightenment principles is not enough to roll back the tide of postmodern relativism? And going further: what if the Enlightenment, rather than being the solution, was itself the genesis of the problem? On the first point: it could be argued that the Enlightenment, for all that it began as a critique of religious thinking, actually depended on unspoken but deeply shared religious foundations. For example, its defence of reason, liberty and progress was founded on certain assumptions – that history has a purpose, that every human life is of value – that are inexplicable outside a Judaeo-Christian worldview. It could also be argued that, as those shared religious assumptions have weakened in the last two centuries, so the Enlightenment principles that were (implicitly if not explicitly) founded on them have also been shaken. In a post-religious world, and in the postmodern marketplace of ideas, the principles of the Enlightenment appear no more and no less ‘universal’ than any others. Bunting is not alone in her critique: plenty of more serious postmodern thinkers have argued (spuriously, of course) that Enlightenment ideas are 'merely' a reflection of the interests of a particular group of privileged, white and probably imperialist men belonging to a particular (and particularly oppressive) society and culture.

Which bring us on to the second point: that the Enlightenment may actually share some of the blame for this descent into the slough of moral relativism. How so? Well, once again, I’m not a philosopher, but I was struck by this paragraph in Rodney Howsare’s brief introduction to the ideas of the modern Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar:

For Kant, and the moderns in general, the notion that the unifying center of a thing really does appear in the individual thing was denied. When I see this particular tree, therefore, all I see is the appearance of this particular tree. If any generalisations are to be made about it, they will have to come from the side of the subject. This means that the classical transcendental properties of Being—unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—must no longer be conceived as properties of Being, but as characteristics attributed to Being from the side of universal subjectivity. All postmodernity has to do to achieve nihilism, it would seem, is to deny any universal subjectivity. Postmodernism is not so much an alternative to modernism as its reductio.

We’ve strayed somewhat from our discussion of the direction of contemporary politics. But what I take Howsare to be arguing is that it was the Enlightenment’s denial of transcendence and objectivity that paved the way for the postmodernist critique that eventually sank its claims to universality: in other words, Enlightenment thinkers sowed the seeds of their own destruction. This makes it increasingly difficult to ground a critique of the creeping relativism and irrationalism of much contemporary political thinking in a call for a return to Enlightenment principles. What is needed instead, perhaps, is a deeper kind of return: to a way of thinking grounded in a sense of the sacred and of an objective moral order. (I can imagine the objections already being tapped out on the keyboards of my more secular-minded readers...)

These are the kinds of issues I find myself wrestling with these days, as I struggle to find new foundations for my political thinking, and an alternative to the Enlightenment rationalism that has been the source of my politics for so long. I’m going to make a determined effort to use this blog, once again, as a vehicle for working out what I think. You may notice some changes – in the kinds of themes and issues I discuss, the sources I turn to, and the links that appear in my sidebar. If you were a fan of the ‘old’ Martin In The Margins, you may not find the new incarnation quite to your taste, in which case you should feel free to move on and I shan't be offended. But I rather hope you’ll stick around and share the next stage of the journey.

Understanding the new Christian anti-Zionism: Part 1

Now that I’ve resumed more or less regular posting, I can keep a longstanding promise. A few years ago I wrote about Greenbelt, the annual Christian music festival, its obsession with the situation in Gaza, and what I saw as its worryingly one-sided representation of that issue. In the course of the debate that followed in the 'comments', I undertook to write something that would try to explain the increasing hostility to Israel among some Christian groups. I felt I was in a good position to do this, both because of my own Christian background, and because I used to be fairly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel myself. This is the first post in a two-part series in which I'll try to fulfil that commitment.

In the period since I wrote that post, attitudes have, if anything, hardened, with anti-Israel campaigning migrating from fringe groups to the mainstream churches. A recent example of this was the Methodist Church seriously debating whether to boycott Israeli goods and institutions – something that particularly aggrieved me, as someone brought up in the Methodist tradition but who is also a critical friend and supporter of Israel.

As I was casting about for a text on which to base this post, the latest issue of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, dropped fortuitously through the letter box, bearing this front cover:

The cover image promoted a major story inside the magazine by Elena Curti, describing the sufferings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Taken together, it seems to me that the image and the story exemplify many of the key components of recent Christian attitudes to the issue of Israel/Palestine. Let’s start with that photo, which is typical of a certain kind of pro-Palestinian iconography. The whole complicated and intractable conflict is reduced to, and symbolised by, two figures: Israel is represented by an armed soldier, the Palestinians by a young child. Not only that, but the child is foregrounded and looking at the camera, as if making a direct appeal to the reader, while the soldier is lurking in the background, hand-in-pocket, nonchalant and impersonal. 

It’s pretty clear what this is supposed to tell us: the Israelis are the aggressors, while Palestinians are simply innocent victims. It’s not that the image is necessarily ‘untrue’, but it’s obviously partial and selective. Think, for example, of the very different meanings that might have been conveyed by a photograph of Israeli children cowering under school desks during a Palestinian rocket attack. Or imagine if, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a magazine had carried a picture on its cover of a Catholic child walking past a British soldier. Readers might justifiably have felt that the image represented a simplistic and one-sided view of the conflict, sidelining IRA atrocities and the reasons why British soldiers were present in the first place.

Similarly, my problem with Curti’s article in The Tablet is not that what she writes - about the everyday sufferings of Palestinians as a result of the separation fence and the occupation - is necessarily a lie. I’m not qualified to dispute the substance of the piece, and indeed that’s not really the point of this post. But there are a number of things that are remarkable about the article, and I think they are typical of much recent Christian coverage of the issue. Firstly, there's an exclusive focus on the sufferings of the Palestinians. There's not a word about the sufferings inflicted on innocent Israelis by the aforementioned rocket attacks from Gaza, or by suicide bombers targeting restaurants and buses – the very actions that prompted the need for the security fence and the restrictions on goods entering Gaza in the first place. Nor is the mainstream Israeli point of view given any space in the article: the only Israelis whose voices get represented are a fringe group who oppose their government’s policy. Curti makes not the slightest attempt to provide a balanced perspective, or to put the suffering of Palestinians in any kind of wider context. You’ll search in vain here, not only for any reference to the ongoing campaign of aggression against Israel by Hamas, but also for any mention of the tons of supplies allowed into Gaza by Israel every day, or to the blockade of Gaza by its other neighbour, Egypt, or indeed to the sufferings inflicted on ordinary Palestinians by the increasingly authoritarian regime of Hamas.

And then there’s the underlying question: why choose to put Gaza on the front cover and make it your lead story at this particular time? I suppose one explanation is that Christians have an understandable interest in the Holy Land, especially at this time of year, and stories that try to find parallels between the Nativity story and the current situation there have become a staple of Christmas coverage – often, it has to be said, with a simplistic anti-Israel inflection. The more immediate pretext for the Tablet story is that Gaza is the focus of this year’s Christmas campaign by Christian Aid. If you follow the link to the charity's website, you’ll find further evidence of Christian obsession with the issue, and yet more one-sided treatment of it. On the day that I read this article in The Tablet, the television news was dominated by images of the desperate plight of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, as winter temperatures begin to plummet. One wonders why this urgent issue, or the continuing need of the victims of the floods in the Philippines, or any of the other myriad and more pressing needs around the world, are not the concern of Christian Aid this Christmas – rather than yet another campaign focused on Gaza, in which a complex conflict is reduced to a cartoon in which Israel is the only bad guy?

How are we to explain this current Christian obsession with Israel/Palestine, often to the exclusion of other more urgent issues? I’ve already suggested one reason – the natural concern of Christians with the land which gave birth to their faith – but this hardly accounts for the increasingly partial and one-sided attitude to the issue shown by Christian churches, charities and campaigning organisations. In the next post, I’ll share my personal analysis of the reasons for this emerging Christian anti-Zionism.

(You can find Part 2 of this post here)

Close encounters with New Left luminaries

This is a kind of footnote to my post about Stuart Hall and the Kilburn Manifesto. It prompted a couple of friends to share their memories of accidental meetings with Hall and other leading lights of the New Left.

First Tom Deveson:

A memory from about March 1967. I am invited out to lunch by Raymond Williams' son who lives on my staircase in Trinity. We arrive in the restaurant and the other people at the table are Raymond, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall who are writing and proofreading the May Day Manifesto (first-ever version). I feel very young in their company - I was not yet nineteen. 

And from a different decade, Damian Counsell:

Weirdly, long before I met Norm, and completely by chance, I lived in NW6, first as a physics postgrad at Imperial, but also for some years afterwards, in a flat above Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who were both intellectual foes of Norm and personal mates with Stuart Hall. It was only when I first answered the door to Stuart Hall (a frequent visitor) with the immortal words: 'You're Stuart Hall, aren't you?' that I had any real idea who the people downstairs were.

Tom claims that Damian has the better punchline, but I think he's being modest. Tom's experience was surely equivalent to walking into the Red Lion in Great Windmill Street on an evening in 1848 and coming across Marx and Engels arguing over the wording of the Communist Manifesto. Or finding yourself, some time in April 1917, on the 3.15 to the Finland Station and watching an intense, goateed man in the seat opposite putting to the finishing touches to the speech he would make on his arrival.

A political journey of marginal importance

I thought I’d write something about the evolution of my political opinions. Not because I’m immodest enough to think that my views are of the remotest interest to anyone but myself. But, as I said in answer to one of Norm’s profile questions, I started blogging to help me work out what I think - and right now I feel a need to take stock of where I’ve got to, and how I got here. On the other hand, if this blog still has the occasional reader, I think I owe it to you to explain where I’m coming from, so to speak, and to update you on how my thinking has changed since I began blogging half a dozen years or so ago. And maybe some of you might recognise aspects of your own political journey in this account.

Mind you, in case you’re tempted to take the ideas expressed here at all seriously, you should bear in mind that the extent of my political activism, apart from voting, has been my work in adult education, subscribing and donating to the odd cause or campaign, and  -  well, blogging actually. On a similar cautionary note, I should add that I feel some empathy with Andrew Marr who, when asked why he hadn’t gone into politics, explained that he tended to agree with the last person he’d been talking to.  I’m not quite so fickle, but I kind of know what he means. I set great store by Keats’ notion of negative capability – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. You could describe this as the would-be creative writer’s capacity to understand the other person’s position – or you could just call me indecisive.

I was born into an East End working-class family, and I’m fairly sure that my grandparents were Labour voters. My paternal grandfather, a council worker, was a NUPE shop steward, and I remember my mother saying (this was some time in the Seventies or Eighties) that today’s Labour party was no longer the party her late father had supported. We moved out of London to suburban Essex when I was a few years old. Despite their background, my aspiring parents were Daily Mail-reading Conservative voters for most of my childhood, and I thought this the most natural thing in the world. Even in my first year at grammar school, I remember walking home with friends, and two of us taunting a third, the son of a Labour local councillor. How on earth, we wondered, could anybody even think of supporting that lot? Needless to say, within a few years, my fellow-taunter and I would be among the most dedicated Leftists in our class.

What changed? Well, my parents, as well as being upwardly mobile, were also devout Methodists (their faith would later lead them to doubt their Toryism and go so far as voting Liberal), and I suppose it was the emphasis on compassion for the poor and the ‘developing world’, not to mention Methodism’s close ties and structural similarities with the Labour movement, that rubbed off on me. By the time I began to think about these things, it seemed obvious that, since both Christians and socialists cared about the poor, then Christians should also be socialists. And of course, I was a child of the Sixties, excited by the social and cultural changes happening around me as I reached puberty. At the age of 12, I remember being deeply affected by media coverage of the Vietnam war, and feeling a wave of solidarity with the demonstrators outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. In the quiet of my bedroom, I strummed my guitar and wrote countless unsent letters to world leaders, begging them to give peace a chance.

This hippyish yearning for peace ‘n’ love was given shape and rigour as sixth form beckoned, and I began to study history and politics with more interest. I came under the influence of Dave Roberts, our diminutive Liverpudlian British Constitution teacher, who converted much of the class to his brand of Tribunite democratic socialism. I began to spend lunchtimes in the school library, devouring the Guardian and New Statesman. Dave organised a school trip to the Houses of Parliament, where we gasped to see one of our heroes, Michael Foot, striding across the entrance hall in front of our eyes.

When I went up to Cambridge to study English Literature, my democratic socialist outlook deepened as I was introduced to the writings of Ruskin and Morris, and attended lectures by Raymond Williams. But Cambridge was also the place where, having lost my youthful evangelical faith, I began to be attracted to Catholicism. The discovery of liberation theology, not to mention the Catholic Marxism of Terry Eagleton, Herbert McCabe et al, made it possible to find some kind of accommodation between my quest for spiritual meaning and my political principles. Meanwhile, my inner monk battled with my outer punk, as I became a regular at new wave gigs down at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, with a distinct preference for the more earnestly political bands like the Clash.

My intertwining religious and political beliefs inspired a year’s voluntary work with ex-prisoners in Worcester, and then postgraduate studies in Manchester, exploring the social and political dimensions of 20^th century Christian poetry.  Here, after a brief burst of enthusiasm for my new faith, my attachment to Catholicism began to wane, and I launched into another period of hectic intellectual exploration, as I read my way through Nietzsche, Marcuse, Norman O. Brown et al., to a soundtrack of the Doors and Joy Division.

Then my grant ran out and I found myself back home in Essex with an unfinished PhD and a need to earn some money. I began to do bits of adult education teaching, including a spell with the WEA, before landing my first full-time job running an education project for ex-offenders in Basildon. Around this time I read Marx properly for the first time – nerd that I am, I remember being bowled over by ‘The German Ideology’ – and motivated myself for work by absorbing Freire and Illich. By the time I moved on to my next job, running another NACRO project in North London, I was a regular reader of Marxism Today and Red Letters. I spent my lunchtimes in the Centerprise Bookshop in Stoke Newington High Street, where I bought my copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and browsed the publications from Stuart Hall’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was now the mid-80s, the time of the miners’ strike and the high-water mark of the GLC, who part-funded our project. If asked to define my politics at this time, I’d probably have said I was a wet marxist, or a soft eurocommunist, with a dash of pro-feminism and vigorous anti-racism.

I took this outlook with me to my next job, as a community education organiser on a depressed estate in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside. Here, my metropolitan Marxian idealism ran up against political apathy, a moribund rural Labour Party, and a working-class community where the most dynamic wanted to move up and out to the middle-class villages, not to stay and foment political change, and where the unemployed adults I was teaching wanted skills for jobs, rather than Freirean consciousness-raising.

And then 1989 happened. Of course, the collapse of the sclerotic Stalinism that most of us on the Left had defined ourselves against shouldn’t have shaken our basic faith in socialism – but somehow it did. It felt rather churlish to carry on calling for socialist revolution, when the people of Eastern Europe were rejoicing in free markets and running away from any form of collectivism. There were domestic repercussion here, too, as the Communist Party fractured and then disappeared, Marxism Today went under, and the machinations of the Bennite left made Labour seem increasingly out of touch and unelectable. Britain, and the world, had changed, but the Left had failed to keep up.

From Oxfordshire I moved to an adult literacy project in Milton Keynes, and thence to a job at the Open University, developing access courses. Long conversations about pedagogy with my colleague Andy Northedge (the person who effected a personal introduction to my erstwhile political hero, Stuart Hall) put more dents in my already wobbly faith in the knowledge-lite Freirean educational methods that I’d begun to doubt as a community educator. Meanwhile, Labour was changing: I supported Kinnock’s reforms and when Blair was elected leader, I renewed my long-lapsed party membership. I saw myself as a critical friend of New Labour, liking the attempt to modernise the message, sometimes critical of the dogma of ‘choice’, but generally in favour. 

And then came 9/11. What was it about that cataclysmic event that changed so many political minds? In part, the shock of this violent assault by the forces of apocalyptic unreason on a liberal, plural, open society helped to crystallise what it was that I valued about that kind of society. And in part it was another kind of shock – of watching as many on the Left, supposedly on ‘our’ side of the political aisle, rushed to explain, excuse, and apologise for that violent assault, to see it as ‘understandable’.  There were other arenas, too, in which this Left, which seemed to have become mainstream and acceptable, ‘understood’ terror, repression, authoritarianism, as long as it was ‘anti-imperialist’ and directed against us, the West. Something else happened to my thinking as a result of 9/11. I’d become fairly pro-Palestinian in recent years, an admirer of Edward Said’s writings, and had even joined the Palestine Solidarity Campaign - at the time, it had seemed like just another of the worthy solidarity campaigns, like those for Chile and Nicaragua, that concerned Leftists should sign up to. But I’d begun to have doubts about one-sided accounts of the Middle East conflict, and the events of September 2001 helped to confirm them. I began to feel rather more sympathy for what ordinary Israelis had been suffering for years, at the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and started to see Israel not so much as as a neo-colonial oppressor, as it was characterised in the simplistic anti-imperialist playbook, but as the only liberal democracy in the region, surrounded by illiberal and aggressive opponents who desired its destruction.

These new strains in my thinking were nourished by my introduction to the world of blogging, beginning with my discovery of Normblog and then moving on to other sites associated with the Euston Manifesto and the broader anti-totalitarian democratic left. I was broadly supportive of New Labour’s endorsement of US intervention in Afghanistan, maybe more dubious about the liberation of Iraq, though instinctively more sympathetic to those who made a moral case for war than to the ragbag of ‘anti-imperialists’ and apologists for tyranny and theocracy who made up the 'Stop the War' movement.

As the first decade of the 21^st century wore on, the old political boundaries of left and right seemed more blurred and porous than before. Often, whether supporting women’s rights in the Muslim world, standing up for Israel, or fighting to defend freedom of expression at home, one found more allies on the right than in some sections of the left. Inevitably, once you’ve discovered common ground with former enemies on one issue, then you become more open to listening to their opinions on other matters. And of course, I was now a middle-aged man, a homeowner with a growing family, so there was the inevitable gravitation away from youthful radicalism and towards the political centre.

But in the last few years there’s been another influence at work too. Religion had never really gone away, and there had been a number of periods of renewed if fleeting attraction. However, these had faltered, due to what I saw as irreconcilable contradictions with my socialist-feminist principles. No, in my 50s, I’ve found myself more seriously and consistently drawn back to belief, and those objections seem less of an obstacle. At this stage, I’m only prepared to say that I’m ‘exploring’ faith, but it doesn’t seem to want go away. Inevitably, it’s having an impact on my political thinking, so that issues such as abortion assume a greater importance - another area in which, sadly, one is more likely to find allies on the right than the left. At the same time, my renewed faith, if that’s what it turns out to be, also prevents me from making a full-scale tilt to the right. In Catholic social teaching, a consistent ethic of life also means opposition to the death penalty, compassion for the poor, and resisting monopolies of power, whether governmental or corporate.

If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of 9/11 led to a shift in my thinking on international affairs, then the riots of summer 2011 helped to unsettle some of my ideas about domestic politics. I watched the unfolding scenes that night, as crowds with the merest sliver of an excuse about a possible police shooting in another part of town, callously vandalised, burned and looted, destroying the homes and livelihoods of their neighbours, built up over years of hard work. Like many others that night, I was angry and in despair at the sheer greed and mindless violence, and at the inaction of the police. The official Left response was slower and more reticent than after 9/11, as if sensing that the usual explanations wouldn’t work this time. Nevertheless, there were one or two attempts to pin the blame on police brutality, poverty, the cuts. However, my sympathies were completely with the victims – those who lost their homes or businesses, or saw their neighbourhood go up in flames – and with those public-spirited residents who volunteered to clean up the mess made by others the next day.

I also found myself wondering about those who chose not to riot – the people in the affected areas, also living in inadequate housing, maybe unemployed, victims of the same cuts to local services. Why didn’t they join in? Maybe social conservatives were right when they talked about the importance of individual responsibility, about the positive influences of good parenting, stable families, even religious upbringing and values? And maybe, just maybe, there was even something in the argument that a skewed welfare system, combined with a rampant consumerism, had bred a sense of entitlement – so that many of the rioters thought there was nothing wrong with grabbing what they could and appeared surprised when they had to face the consequences in court.

So where does all of this leave me? Perhaps it’s easier to answer that question in relation to real-life political situations.  For the past decade or so, I’ve been a devoted follower of US politics.We were in San Francisco at the time of the 2008 campaign, and if I’d had a vote, it would definitely have been for Obama. My disillusionment with him has been slower than for some, and probably has as much to with the changes in my own thinking as in his performance as President. As a liberal interventionist, I’ve been deeply disappointed by the administration’s lukewarm support for democratic reform movements in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, its tendency to blame Israel for the failure of the peace process, and its abject humiliation by Russia over Syria. On the domestic front, I supported healthcare reform but I’ve become concerned about the authoritarian requirement on religious healthcare providers to act against their own principles in relation to abortion and contraception. On abortion, too, I gave Obama the benefit of the doubt initially, believing him sincere when he said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions, but I was disgusted by the Democrats' cynical use of the issue to scare voters in 2012. In short, if I were American, I’m not sure which way I’d vote in 2016: I’d like to see a President who shares Obama’s desire to reform healthcare and immigration, but who is also pro-life and willing to stand up to tyrants and defend democratic values abroad.

As for British politics, as a loyal-ish Blairite (and, it would appear, like a majority of Labour Party members) I voted for the Other Miliband, was disappointed by the use of union power to deny him victory, and have been irritated by union-backed attempts to cleanse Blarites from positions of influence in the party. As an admirer of Michael Gove, not only for his writings on terrorism but also for his continuation of the Blair-Adonis educational reforms, I’m irritated by the kneejerk opposition to him from the Labour front bench. I dislike Ed M’s disavowal of the New Labour policies that won three general elections, and find it hard to forgive the two Eds for their part in the Brownite cabal that plotted against Blair. On the other hand, I quite like the idea of One Nation Labour, admire some of the work that Jon Cruddas is doing, and am more sympathetic these days to Blue Labour, though I think Maurice Glasman, for all his undoubted qualities, overestimates its appeal beyond the inner-city enclaves, where ties of faith and community are weaker. Also, I’m not sure he really ‘gets’ working-class aspiration…

Which is kind of where I began.

That's about it, for now. The journey continues...