THE period of post-Thatcher consensus is not an era characterised by ideological politicians; both the hard left and the hard right have long lacked a substantial figurehead of the intellectual depth and popular appeal once personified by the likes of Tony Benn and Enoch Powell.
This is an important reason why politics today is less political than politics 20 or 30 years ago. Without any real clash of ideas, managerialism is triumphant and apathy replaces polarisation. Same shit, different sock puppet.
Surveying the contemporary British socialist scene, I don't see anybody with the capacity to step up to the plate. Indeed, no one to my mind comes even close.
But an increasingly obvious choice for the serious right has is now emerging in the shape of MEP Daniel Hannan, who last night stepped down from the Tory frontbench in the European Parliament.
Resignations of this kind are rarely interesting in and of themselves. ‘Tory bust-up over EU, world keeps turning’ is scarcely a sexy headline. What I do think is significant is the reason Hannan is proffering for this action. Hannan has overtly declared his intention of building a neo-Poujadist faction with the Tory Party.
We need a broad movement within the Conservative Party that will push for referendums, citizens’ initiatives and the rest of the paraphernalia of direct democracy. I don’t just mean a referendum on Europe - though, naturally, that is the obvious place to start. I mean full-on Helvetic people power … I have returned to the back benches in order to concentrate on building such a movement.
Now, as a leftist, I don’t have any problem with direct democracy. The subjection of elected representatives to the right of recall is a textbook Leninist demand. As a clever bloke who litters his speeches with quotations from Edmund Burke and Dr Seuss alike, such irony will scarcely be lost on Hannan.
But note that Hannan doesn’t want direct democracy; he simply wants the paraphernalia of direct democracy. This Freudian slip is of the highest importance. What that paraphernalia will mask, we are not told.
My reading of his agenda is that full-on Helvetic people power equates to something like full-on Daily Mail-style Dacre democracy, with the system geared to pushing demands currently confined to the more colourful newspaper column fulminations of the free market space cadet squad.
If the left got its act together – stop sniggering, you at the back! – referenda on the renationalisation of the railway network or a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses could probably be won.
But the right has the organisation, not too mention the dosh, to ensure that such mechanisms are dominated by calls for tough curbs on immigration, the return of hanging, and perhaps even the abolition of what Hannan famously derides as the ‘Marxist’ NHS.
If such questions ultimately boil down to a wrestling match between Mad Mel and Polly Toynbee, there could be only one winner.
Forget Griffin, forget Farrage. Hannan – a man who has made his admiration for Enoch Powell abundantly clear – may yet prove to be his hero's clear successor.
Posted at 14:04, 5 November 2009
Comments (14)
Don't overestimate the power of the press, it dominates the agenda by exclusion not persuasion, check the deliberate silencing of socialist/prole voices on Fleet Street/television...but what goes down in the polling booth, given genuine options, is a different story.
I suspect the equally joyless poles of narrow-eyed Mailite spite and the domestic colonialism of class-based Guardianista entitlement would take a savage beating under direct democracy.
I'd recommend the fullest direct democracy imaginable to anyone, especially if the only alternative, as it is in this case, is to allow an entrenched political class to run amok.
I thought Pierre Poujade only had one policy, and one that resonates today :
"Throw the rascals out !"
Surely this is an editorial error: you really mean 'Danial Hannan, building a base for Proto-Posadism - Crop Circles, Post modernism and Trotskyst eschatology in contemporary conservatism.
Poujadism started off as defence organisation for small shopkeepers.It would not be a bad idea to preserve whats left of small shops over here.
The simplest method is to re-introduce Resale Price Maintenance, a system by which manufacturers insisted that retailers did not discount their prices,so small shops were not undercut.The Tories got shot of this in 1964 ,alienating some of their core support.RPM could keep some small village /estate post offices going by allowing them to diversify into selling groceries.
The USA re-legalised RPM in 2007 with a landmark Supreme Court ruling.Needless to say,it was n't much reported over here where the mortgage-car-supermarket way of life is entrenched , especially amongst those who thought post-1964 that personal liberty was there for the taking.
before the anti-eu stuff, daniel, we’ll need parliament hosed down and deep cleaned after y’all have left in may 2010. your dodgy nationalist populism will end up fuelling the far-right and its ilk rather than creating a debate – and i know that’s NOT your aim.
get real, loads of uk voters feel as distant from uk institutions and their workings as they feel distant from brussels and strasbourg.
Daniel Hannan: the man who talks a good deal about "freedom", but in practice is advocating a return to Victorian-style poverty and wage slavery. Is this "freedom"?
So is this guy to socialists as Tony Benn was to Middle Englanders in the 80s?
This Hannan character seems like a fairly superficial thinker to me. The idea that this guy has "intellectual depth and popular appeal" is quite laughable, at least on the evidence I have seen. His attacks on the NHS were typical of todays lunatic propagandist right and if you asked the average man on the street who he was they would probably say 'that German who used to play for Man City'.
Even with the paraphernalia of direct democracy, even though we might win a battle or two, the potential for gross manipulations through the media - witness Ireland's EU referendum, where the pro-side outspent the anti-side by 4 to 1 without including EU and Irish gov't money spent, completely out of proportion to the 'real' balance of the two sides - is frightening.
It's not just Dan Hannan who is pushing for this sort of thing either. It is in fact part of the dominant ethos within the Tory Party leadership, as exemplified by http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2009/10/15/post-bureaucracy-the-state-and-the-conservative-party/">Ken Clarke's work.
I suspect that Dave may be right about Daniel Hannan and the rise of a neo-Poujadist militant petty bourgeois anti-EU faction - maybe linking up with UKIP.
But the serious left cannot counter this sort of stuff when too many leftists actually hold to an essentially nationalist and reactionary anti-EU stance themselves. It's pathetic, for instance, the way the Graun's resident public school Stalinist bleats about Cameron not *really* being anti-EU:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/04/cameron-osborne-european-union-sovereignty
Hannan has been over to the US supporting the opponents of the introdution of universal health care. Seems like a very nice man to me! Why help the poor and unworthy. The reason the likes of Hannan gets away with this is entirely down to the so called Left. The Left is a joke. They are still preaching their interpretation of Marx. Marx did not ask for universal acceptance. The LEFT have to accept they will not win all, all the time. They have to unite for what they have in common. I assume the common factor is to obtain equality for all. Maybe.
It's the lefts fault for a wanker like Hannan? Catch yourself on.
Hannan likes to turn up on the Glen Beck show from time to time. He comes across on the screen as little more than Beck's pet Brit.
If anybody wants to flag Hannan for the creep that he is, just dig out his little performances on the Beck show where he's more than happy to go along with Beck's latest inanities.
"…the hard right have long lacked a substantial figurehead of the intellectual depth and popular appeal once personified by the likes of Tony Benn and Enoch Powell."
David, I thought you said (previous post) that you no longer "did drugs" or smoked compost? "Intellectual depth" (sic) Benn and Powell? Really? Benn the magpie and Powell, the Latin "scholar" so beloved by the Mail and the fore-lock tugging middle classes. "A deep and serious man, he certainly can’t be racist scum like Colin Jordan because, well, he quotes Virgil". Paul Foot nailed that one a long time ago.
So, Hannan is clever yes, but it’s a superficial cleverness and positioning that mixes Hayek, Von Mises and a self- publicising populism into an ill cooked stew flavoured by one media friendly gimmick after another. He’s about as "intellectual" as Dennis Mcshane, Actually, he’s a lot like him.
The term "Intellectual" (which never sat well with the English) has now ironically been debased in the same way as "academic". Academic now being applied to any passing "Rent a Prof" willing to provide a catchy headline, open a shopping centre re-development or consecrate a new branch of Safeways. Take a look at the LSE.
Let's face it. Hannan is just another Tory boy baby face. They must have a factory somewhere producing these types.
Yes, I saw him on Glenn Beck and elsewhere on US cable crap. He slags off one of the best British institutions in his prissy Thatcherite school boy way. It is common to encounter these characters in the narrow confines of sixth form education. Some of these bleeders never grow up.