… is trending on Twitter, thanks to the appalling UK Daily Mail, which ran a full length attack on the late Ralph Miliband, socialist academic and father of Opposition Leader Ed Miliband. On the strength of a scathing diary entry Miliband wrote as a 17-year old refugee, and his opposition to the Falklands War, the Mail claimed that Miliband “hated Britain”. Illustrating the proverb about glass houses, the attack only served to draw attention to the fact that whereas Miliband served in the Navy in World War II, the Mail backed Hitler and the Blackshirts throughout the 1930s, and has continued to push racist hatred ever since (unsurprisingly, it has seized on the spurious notion of “political correctness.” [1]
The Mail’s attack on Miliband has divided the UK right into three groups (google x+Mail+miliband)
* Those who have condemned this appalling and dishonest slur, including Michael Heseltine and Nick Clegg
* Those who have stuck to a weaselly line scripted by Tory minders that “of course Miliband should defend his father” such as David Cameron, William Hague and Boris Johnson
* Those who have backed the Mail all the way, notably including James Delingpole, Rod Liddle and Michael Gove[2]
It’s notable that all those I’ve listed in the third group are prominent climate delusionists. As we’ve seen again recently, the Mail is the source for many of the lies about climate change that are reproduced in the Murdoch press[3]. This is, as they say, no coincidence. Climate delusionism isn’t a mistaken belief about the world, it’s an expression of tribal hatred, all the more effective because most of those who push it know, at some level, that their arguments are false. Putting forth such arguments is an expression of tribal solidarity, like asserting that Obama was born in Kenya. Naturally, the tribal haters love the kind of stuff that the Mail dishes out.
Hopes are often disappointed, but it does seem as if the global party of stupid is starting to reap the whirlwind it has sown. The continued publication of delusional nonsense has produced a rightwing base that embraces delusional strategies like the US shutdown, or attacks on a man’s dead father, in the belief that everyone else will share their positive reaction.
fn1. It’s also being claimed that the father of Mail editor Paul Dacre didn’t serve, but this (sauce for the gander) claim hasn’t been verified AFAIK. Another tidbit is that the Mail was the target of Churchill’s Stanley Baldwin’s famous jibe that it sought “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.
fn2. Gove hasn’t stated this, but he has tried to stop schools teaching anything about climate change. He has the additional motive that his wife has a highly paid job with the Mail.
fn3. It’s a striking commentary on the weakness of people like Bolt and Oz “environment reporter” Graeme Lloyd that, as well as being incapable of telling the truth, they also seem to be unable to come up with original lies.
John Quiggin 
“Power without responsibility” was another Tory prime minister: Stanley Baldwin.
Shows the peril of quoting from memory. I’ll fix this.
Having just visited “Australia’s leading centre-right blog” for the first time in many months, I now think it is clear that the internet and blogs are central to the creation of a weird right wing parallel universe. It is a little unsettling to think that many right wing pollies and “intellectuals” read a blog that airs a range of bizarre conspiracy theories, the latest being that Obama and the US military fabricated the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Sadly there is also plenty of weirdness on the Left as well, altho it is of a lower order. At Larvatus Prodeo for instance Brain and Mark Bahnisch keep trying to revive the zombie corpse of socialism.
Many on the Left still think that the types of programs one found scribbled on the back of the dunny door at the Melbourne uni cafe in the early 1970s represents a fresh and and vital alternative to what we currently have.
@Mel
Mel, I think fingering Brian and Mark Bahnisch for trying to “revive socialism” is a bit much. I’d describe Mark as a pretty standard Labor-voting social democrat. As for Brian, he mostly posts on climate change. There are certainly a few die-hard, old school socialists who post comments at LP, but I don’t see any reason to count Mark or Brian among them.
Mel, I have several reasons to disagree with Mark Bahnisch’s analysis of currently Australian politics, but a) I don’t think he’s doing much effective to revive socialism in Australia, and b) that’s an ideological stance that I don’t have overwhelming problems with, that at least tries to grapple with the observed facts of the world, unlike the Daily Fail and Bolta, who consistently fabricate history and make stuff up. Quite a different set of problems.
Oh and Brian basically writes eloquently about climate change science, one hardly sees anything from him outside that sphere.
The Right detached themselves from common decency a long time ago – a sad irony since they are the ones harking back to a mythical age of polite discourse (as long as you were an old white male who went to the right school). They are far far nastier than anything you see on the moderate left blogs. Spittle flecked invective is mostly what you get if you dare question their consensus.
James Delingpole manages to be simultaneously supercilious and smarmy, which is no small achievement.
Going after the family is common in politics. Thatcher’s view is you have no choice over who your relatives are so you should not be judged by what they did or stand for.
The only thing that will get Red Ed into No. 10 is the continued rise of the UK independence party. They take most of their votes from the Tory party.
I don’t claim to follow UK politics that closely, but I don’t think that’s true. I thought that Labour were in a commanding position in the polls.
Oh and “Red Ed”? Puh-leese.
“Climate delusionism isn’t a mistaken belief about the world, it’s an expression of tribal hatred,”
Yes, but it’s probably more than tribal hatred, there’s a lot of investment in CO2 production.
@Mel,
The ideology seems to be often imported indiscriminately from the US, like the current “concern” over “corrupt”voting practices which is more appropriate to the system in America than here.
@Uncle Milton ,
I’m sure Delingpole is the result of an experiment to create a living version of Withnail from “Withnail and I”.
Aaaand predictably cue the right-wing nutjobbery!
The Guardian and Left-wing mass murderers: a love story
OK, the paper said some nice things about Lenin in 1919. Therefore, Stalin and 30 million dead. I’m not joking.
The comments are the nadir laying beneath this journalistic nadir. Read if you want to see every single tiresome paranoid right-wing persecution fantasy laid out.
About a week or two ago (if I remember correctly) Boris Johnson had an opinion piece in the AFR proclaiming that Ed Miliband has a ‘socialist’ plan for the UK.
He had pushed it in August and again September.
These days if you hear “Socialist” it is almost invariably being thrown around by right-wing ideologues trying to use it in a scary way.
Dacre didn’t like appearing before Levison – although that’s hardly Miliband’s fault.
Miliband is about as socialist as Rudd or Gillard or Obama.
@Mel
Is it not self-evident that your comment is as shallow as the dunny door level of analysis? How about providing some intellectual content to your critique, as it relates to Mark Bahnisch?
@Will
Yeah, better add Harold Macmillan to the secret Reds since in “The Life of Harold Macmillan”, DR Thorpe says he “claimed in 1936 that ‘Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism’.’
I also liked this from the Sean Thomas article you linked to:
“the Guardian gently reminded its readers that the Mail used to support the blackshirts in the 1930s. And this is true. The Mail did publish some odious bilge back in the day. But is the Guardian completely blemish-free when it comes to Dubious Opinions From The Past?”
So, The Guardian is not “COMPLETELY (emphasis added) blemish free” therefore is as guilty as sin (to the rest of us, being The Mail.)
Mr Thomas, have you no moral compass? Concentrate on the mote in your own eye (Matthew 7:3-5), or just shut up!
Sometimes I’m embarrassed and ashamed to be Australian . Blind patriotism is destructive and dangerous .
Pr Q said:
Naturally, given his stated opposition to journalists who “can’t quote, can’t link” Pr Q will provide us with something more substantial than knee-jerk “point-and-splutter” and the tired script for a witch hunt trial to support the enormity of this accusation.
A search of the Press Complaints Council website failed to show up any adverse findings against the DM on the subject of its coverage of race. There was one complaint lodged by someone or other over the DMs coverage of the London race riots but the DM was vindicated.
Let the DM be as bad as you like denying global warming and speaking ill of the Marxist academic dead. It is the one press organ that refuses to be intimidated by Left-liberal ideological thuggery and unimpressed by Left-liberal anthropological ignorance on the taboo subject of race relations.
For that, and for its excellent pictures of celebrities in bikinis, it deserves the undying gratitude of the much despised Man in the Street.
Pr Q said:
Naturally, given his stated opposition to journalists who “can’t quote, can’t link” Pr Q will provide us with something more substantial than knee-jerk “point-and-splutter” and the tired script for a witch hunt trial to support the enormity of this accusation.
A search of the Press Complaints Council website failed to show up any adverse findings against the DM on the subject of its coverage of race. There was one complaint lodged by someone or other over the DMs coverage of the London race riots but the DM was vindicated.
Let the DM be as bad as you like denying global warming and speaking ill of the Marxist academic dead. It is the one press organ that refuses to be intimidated by Left-liberal ideological thuggery and unimpressed by Left-liberal anthropological ignorance on the taboo subject of race relations.
For that, and for its excellent pictures of celebrities in bikinis, it deserves the undying gratitude of the much despised Man in the Street.
@kevin1
Brian B suggesting progressives take on Melanie Klein’s silliness.
I’m absolutely certain that I saw the demand that corporations be stripped of personhood on the back of the dunny door at my almer mater.
Younger B is mostly on the same page (to the extent that his less than clear prose may be understood) altho unlike Older B he doesn’t call himself a zocializt.
I’d like to add a word and change a word in one of JQ’s sentences, just to make it even more apt. New words are capitalised.
Climate delusionism isn’t JUST a mistaken belief about the world, it’s an expression of tribal hatred, all the more DEPLORABLE because most of those who push it know, at some level, that their arguments are false.”
Pr Q said:
No doubt Rights reaped whirlwind is true in some moral metaphysical sense, but it has not yet gone through the formality of actually occurring in our actual and existing world, the US as usual excepted.
In fact the Right particularly the “tribal hatred” embracing Far Right, has been resurgent in the EU for more than a decade. The EU Right helps its own cause by mostly embraces climate science and sanity in fiscal policy. And of course the Right has an across the board triumph in AUS, despite foolish talk of “Last Liberal”.
Every so often Pr Q pronounces that the Right has lost some vital battle (“What if they gave a Culture War and nobody turned up”) or that a golden opportunity has emerged for the Left (“the hole in the political landscape”). Yet everywhere I look, ex-US, the Right seems firmly in the box seat.
Maybe a little more circumspection is called for in political prognostication? More generally, “the global party of stupid” seems like the perfect moniker for politically correct media-academia. People in glass houses…
@jack strocchi
Happy to oblige. Here’s the Mail backing Marine Le Pen
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2132611/French-elections-2012-Marine-Le-Pen-responsible-vote-France.html
@jack strocchi
So, except for the US, climate change in the EU and equal marriage+declining religiosity everywhere, the right is winning the culture wars.
@Mel
Do you mean Naomi Klein? I think Melanie Klein was a pscyhoanalyst. In any case, I agree with others that you are drawing a very long bow to justify a silly bit of false equivalence.
That Sean Thomas fellow is a total nutter. It seems to be par for the course today that if the establishment line and the experts in the field don’t mesh with your personal belief system then it’s perfectly acceptable to find a self-described “expert” with a spin on facts that better suits your ideology. The comments are full of self-appointed experts! For example: “lefties want to tell everyone how to live, therefore all murderous dictators are lefties” is an atrocious argument that continues to persist in the face of stubborn facts. It is so brazenly false, but it’s thrown around so often it makes one’s skin crawl.
Pr Q said @ #23
I bothered to read the linked article and it did not even mention the issue of race or religion, let alone promote any discriminatory policy. A lone, half-hearted op-ed in support of a much moderated nationalist candidate in one foreign election. And this in an era when terrorist cells and and ghettos of rioting “youth” are carving a trail of destruction through the cities that host the world’s most respected national culture. So call me unpersuaded.
If this is what passes for a generations worth of “pushing racist hatred” then the professional anti-“racist” and anti-“fascist” warriors of Left-liberalism will soon be trudging down to Centrelink. Oh wait a minute, they mostly are, which perhaps explains the incessant need to define racism down.
The DM is a populist national rag, much needed in an age when post modern liberal elites have more or less dropped the ball on policy and openly despise the general populus in politics. TBS it deserves to be castigated for its delusionism on the Climate Wars. But its campaign against the global bankers show that it has some sound instincts on the Class War. And of course its campaign against tribal gangstas running riot in urban Britain puts it on the side of reason and common sense in the Culture War.
In short, its a mixed bag and a fair-minded academic would recognize that.
We pay intellectuals to make critical distinctions and not join in the general tribal war-mongering. Or is that too much to ask?
Marine Le Pen is a racist and the Daily Mail backs her. Enough said.
I’ve let this slide until now, but I’m reimposing the ban on anything from you relating in any way to race, genetics, migration, nationalism, or any associated topic.
@John Quiggin the winning of the cultural war may have more to do with demographics. older populations tend to be more conservative on most things.
the economics of religion spends a lot of time on the rise of strict religions these days.
Laurence Iannaccone writes lots of interesting stuff on why strict religious behavior is rational in terms of piety and also club goods in the here and now.
He attributes the explosive growth of conservative Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and the slow decline of more genteel denominations as the result of forming a small community of people deeply involved in one another’s lives and more willing than most to come to one another’s aid. Strictness makes a church stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding.
expressive voting on social issues would be one of the prices of admission to a small church full of passionate members
rising incomes changes the demand for the quanitity and quality of children. the fewer children per couple receive more attention and more worry about outside temptations to go off the rails.
@John Quiggin
I said “Sadly there is also plenty of weirdness on the Left as well, altho it is of a lower order.”
That isn’t false equivalence.
Surely you must have noticed the continued left leaning social scientist and intellectual infatuation with socialism. I find that depressing.
ps. Brian said Malenie Klein and I assumed he had that right. Turns out he meant Naomi Klein.
Deleted, as advised. Nothing more from you on race or any topic remotely related to it. This is a permanent ban
@Mel
“Surely you must have noticed the continued left leaning social scientist and intellectual infatuation with socialism”
I haven’t noticed anything of the kind. I made a conscious decision to use the term “social democrat” when I started this blog, and it seems to me that I was in line with the zeitgeist on this. Social democracy refers to a concrete set of policiies and achievements whereas socialism (given the failure of “actually existing socialism” in the USSR) means whatever you want it to.
In this context, the capitulation of a number of European social democratic parties in the face of austerity may lead to the revival of “socialist” as a self-description, but for practical purposes it now means “social democrat with spine”. Note that, despite the absence of anything resembling a socialist movement in the US, a plurality of young Americans say they prefer socialism to capitalism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/29/young-people-socialism_n_1175218.html
@jack strocchi
Common sense and reason are rarely good friends and often cross the street to avoid each other.
The notion that the Daily Mail (commonly known as the Daily Fail) purveys reason is of course ludicrous. I recall not all that long ago (2011?) thinking Queensland was a country run by Bob Katter, or some such silliness. It’s a damned shame this aspect of the culture war failed to make it to Blot or Grahame Lloyd’s columns …
I’m not against the stupid and the ignorant having a paper that offers back to them the most outrageous of their intellectual shortcomings. I also defend the right to sell junk food.
But if someone calls it gourmet reading, or even bread and butter, what can one do but laugh out loud, either at the cant involved, or the spruiker’s admission of arrant stupidity.
Sidebar: I note that Strocchii, despite persistent correction, continues to spell populace as “populus”. I’m not sure if this is some Latinesque affectation, or some gap in his education, but it is amusing.
@John Quiggin
Well John, you are an economist and I think the best thinkers on the Left are very often economists. I’m a sociology graduate but a rather depressed one who thinks most sociologists have nothing interesting to say.
BTW, I think Marx did have some genuinely profound insights but these could easily be explained on a single A4 size typed page.
Also thanks for that survey. Very interesting.
Pr Q said:
The DM should be ashamed of itself for traducing the memory of a good serviceman, penetrating intellectual and a progressive activist whose sons are a credit to their up-bringer. They are obviously trying to get at the Labour Party leaders in much the same way as REPs tried to get at Obama by attacking his Marxist father.
Ralph Miliband was one of the better sort of post-war British Marxists, sort of pommie version of C. Wright Mills. He was one of the founders of the somewhat misleadingly named British “New Left” (others included John Saville & E P Thonpson). So called because they criticised Stalinist communism after Kruschevs “Secret Speech”. In fact there was nothing ” New” about their Leftism, they held fast to the original worker traditions of the Old Left.
Not coincidentally they all had good War records – Saville was a Marxist RSM. I’d would have given anything to be a fly on the wall in his Sergeants Mess!
In the early eighties I remember feeling a wave of relief washing over me when I came across Milibands “State in a Capitalist society”. We poor conscripted Arts elective students were being force fed a diet of “cultural Marxist” hogwash that was being piped out of the academic slums of Continental Europe and Bi-coastal USA. How reassuring it was to finally find a Leftist intellectual who wrote comprehensible English and did not come across as stark raving mad.
The same could not be said for his intellectual rivals on the academic Left. Does anyone now remember the leading lights of the real New Left at the time – Poulantzas, Althusser & Foucault? What a gruesome crew. Miliband made mincemeat of Poulantzas in a debate on the bourgeois state. As did EP Thompson with Althusser.
You would think that these thrashings would have been enough to bury the Continental New Left in the Anglo sphere. But not a bit of it, the post-modernist tsunami carried the Continental Left onto bigger and better things. Post-modern Left-liberalism is now in its Brezhnev stage, 53,000 tanks parked on Uni campuses right the world over, menacing dissidents with with no independent souls believing a word of what they say. Which only goes to show how little intellectual validity has to do with political potency.
Although Poulantzas et al actually did get put six feet under, finding various unpleasant ways to physically self-destruct. Perhaps they re-read their own works and could no longer look at themselves in the mirror.
Just a general question for the commenters who go on about “socialism”:
I just watched “Iraq For Sale” – the salient points are that Haliburton (thanks to its former CEO Cheney) got billions of dollars from US taxpayers (more correctly – on their credit via Wall Street and the Federal Reserve) in “no bid” contracts which were “cost plus” (meaning that the more taxpayers money they wasted, the more profit they made).
That is the “free-market” championed by the people who throw around “socialism” as an epithet. You own that form of free-market fundamentalism.
So, what exactly is your argument again?
Why would Jack Strocchi imagine that anyone who had read and understood Milliband, Poulantzas, Althusser, Foucault or indeed E.P. Thompson want to talk to him about it? That is self delusion in an extreme form. I spent many years reading and discussing them and others but I would not dream of discussing them with him. Why would anyone? If you want to have a serious conversation about 20th century Marxism just do it.
Say what? This is so far off the mark as to suggest you haven’t been near a university for decades. BTW, the 1990s called and want their culture wars back.
john, The Daily Mail is a polarizing paper and a voice of old-fashioned British values and of opposition to meddling bureaucrats and political correctness. The Mail is powerful because it is delivers swinging votes – the working class which has middle-class aspirations
as for racism, the Daily Mail led a 15-year campaign to bring justice for the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence when in 1997, the paper named 5 men as his murderers and dared them to sue.
The Daily Mail campaign led to the documenting extensive institutional racism across virtually all the ranks the police. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2080159/Stephen-Lawrence-case-How-killers-finally-brought-justice.html
Two of the men the Mail named on its front page in 1997 were convicted in 2012 when the laws on double jeopardy were amended.
Stephen Lawrence’s mother was recently raised to the House of Lords as a working peer specialising in race and diversity.
It is routine for London newspapers to have a strong political stance in news coverage as well as editorials. Is the Guardian any more biased than the Daily Mail?
It is routine for London newspapers to have a strong political stance in news coverage as well as editorials. Is the Guardian any more biased than the Daily Mail?
@Jim Rose
I rather doubt Edmund Burke would have read the Daily Mail with approval. The Daily Mail is a populist tabloid pitched at the values of people who are indifferent to anything but their own comfort.
OT, but I wonder what proportion of each countries population thinks that they are the greatest country on earth? And does it vary with political persuasion?
Jack Strocchi is quite right about Miliband pere. He was a left power elite theorist who demonstrated how self-perpetuating ruling elites in Britain captured the institutions of the state and defined the ‘national interest’ in terms of their own interests. He even counted among the ruling elites various groups such as professionals and even labour leaders to the extent they pursued elite interests at the expense of their constituents.
This analysis was tantamount to heresy in the circles of dogmatic communists from Trots to Maoists to Moscow-liners. For these folk class analysis explained all social and economic phenomena – talk of elites was trivial tinkering with the superstructure. Moreover, the last thing Moscow or Beijing wanted was someone noticing their own self-perpetuating elites.
At any event, trying to paint Ralph as some sort of traitor beholden to the ukases of Moscow is at best McCarthyist hysteria. Trying to tie son Ed to this rhetorical house of cards is worse than pathetic and reminds me of the paranoid nonsense found in the publications of the Citizens Electoral Council.
@jack strocchi
Jack Strocchi: “And this in an era when terrorist cells and and ghettos of rioting “youth” are carving a trail of destruction through the cities that host the world’s most respected national culture.” Please explain?
The best comments on the Daily Mail (for those on Twitter) can be found at #18thCenturyDailyMail
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