Andrew Constantine

AJC note - this copy article from today's 'The Times' is worth reading in full. But what I found especially interesting were his thoughts towards the end of the article which discuss what government should be about. Parris' thinking in some respects is similar to that of the FEP on the sort of challenges to be faced by the first government of an Independent England.

From The Times September 13, 2008 - The Labour Party should dump compassion

Christianity has not done socialism any favours. The Left must embrace progress and winners, not the workshy and the weakMatthew Parris

It's time to ask not who should lead the Left in Britain, but where they should be led. Does socialism have a future? Little seems to be coming from the old warhorses of the left-wing intelligentsia these days, so, as the party conference season gets under way today, I thought I'd have a bash myself.

Socialism was never set in stone. In postwar Britain it has been evolving, and a powerful influence on this evolution, especially under the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been something called “Christian socialism”: the belief that the democratic and liberal Left may have something to learn from, and contribute to, New Testament morality: the working out of God's purpose on Earth. After all, didn't Jesus say “sell all that thou hast and give to the poor”?

I'm not suggesting that most politicians on the Left are consciously motivated by biblical injunction, or are even active believers. It's more subliminal. Ours remains a predominantly Christian culture, with Gospel beliefs about fairness, mercy and helping the poor, sick and weak, embedded deeply among our values; as is a tendency to ennoble suffering, and a guilt about wealth.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us have drunk deep at this well. It does not take the subtlest of minds to make a connection between these values, and the socialist political imperative to redistribute wealth, and care for all classes. Both aim, in their outcomes, for humanitarian goals.

But this apparent convergence of purposes is a deception. Far from reinforcing true socialism, Christian socialism has ambushed it, subverting its original message and wrecking it as a viable philosophy of government in a market-driven age.

Marx is about power. Christianity is about charity. Marx is about the authority of the collective. Christian liberalism is about the individual conscience. Marx is about justice. Christian humanitarianism is about mercy. The common causes in which Christians, liberals and socialists have tried to reconcile their differences - personal freedom, the redistribution of wealth and the beneficent State - have in Christian hands proved ruinous to the socialist idea: softening its head, picking its pocket, throwing good money after bad, nursing the weak and neglecting the winners, hearkening to disability and turning away from ability, and leaching its energies into a welter of simpering charitable causes. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Western socialism has hovered around the bedside of the victim, the loser and the marginalised. To win, it should have been outdoors, exhorting the strong.

This wheelchair socialism has sucked the Centre Left into spending people's taxes on unproductive causes, and associating itself with failure rather than success. Nietzsche characterised the driving Christian ethic thus: “It lived on distress...” H.L.Mencken added: “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.”

It's not for me, here, to defend or attack the Church's absorption with the Prodigal Son rather than his industrious brother, the single lost sheep rather than the rest of the flock; or the way Christianity has made victimhood on the Cross both its mascot and its guiding light. I simply observe that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx was trying to say. Socialism was a most unsqueamish creed. If it wished to redistribute wealth, that was not for reasons of mercy but because Marx saw capitalism as a machine doomed to seize up: whereas mankind would fire on all cylinders if labour realised and exercised its potential muscle, and all men pulled together.

A socialist true to these roots, sitting in a modern British Cabinet, and faced with a decision whether to channel Treasury money into (a) scientific research; (b) transport infrastructure; (c) free bus passes for pensioners; or (d) a subsidised national paternity-leave scheme, could weigh socialist arguments for any or all of these purposes; but Christian charity, compassion, or a human-rights-based notion of “fairness” would not be among them.

Properly understood, socialist priorities should never be divorced from considerations of how most effectively to motivate citizens, oil the cogs and drive the pistons. Marx would have been contemptuous of the workshy and mildly uninterested in the disabled.

Nor would he have shared Christian socialism's tenderness for the outcast, for individual conscience, and for liberty. Socialism should see little value in personal freedom except in so far as it contributes to the collective good.

Central to socialism is the power of the collective (for the moment, the State): the power to improve the common lot, overriding the individual where necessary. This case for muscular government has always been stronger than we free-market liberals have wanted to acknowledge. Perversely, as socialist movements flounder everywhere, the case for muscular government is actually getting stronger.

This is not an ideological movement I would join, and in a post-industrial age its fixation with organised labour is redundant, but in other ways it remains a perfectly modern if brutal idea that deserves a confident voice in the century ahead.

Not that you would know it from the state of the Labour Party. I'm not in the business of advising Gordon Brown on how to save his skin; that battle is lost. The next election is lost. The election may come sooner than we think - how many more Siobhain McDonaghs wait to fall on their swords?

AJC - The Free England Party should ponder the following:

After that election, a Left Opposition will need to find a voice. It will not hear it from the Manse. It needs to find a crowd. They will not be discovered sleeping rough. It needs to find a class. They will not be the underclass. It needs to find a national purpose. Fairness and Equality will not suffice; Sure Start is not enough.

There's no point trying to out-smooth David Cameron or out-compassion Nick Clegg. Away (the socialist should say) with caring and diversity: let's hear about investment, not subsidy; progress, not equality; about Crossrail (what's the betting Mr Brown cancels it?); about how Britain generates its own power, how we rescue our rail network from impending insolvency, how we get from London to Scotland by train in two hours, and how we stop the planning system throttling every big project; about how we develop a global positioning system that the Americans don't control, how we pay for better highways and uncongested streets with proper road pricing, and how we research and market carbon-free transport, heat and power.

Unless you believe in big, costly, muscular and intrusive government, your voice in all such national causes must be muted. There's a damn good case to be made for strong-arming by the State, and only the Left can make it. This is not a time for Bonhoeffer and playgroups, but for a Left which believes unashamedly in taking command.

[AJC - When Independence comes, we will need a stong and capable English government to restore England. Matthew Parris attempts above to explain why effective government needs purpose and resouces. Does he make a compelling case?]

__________________
Andrew Constantine says: The EU is a French-German racket and is incompatible with democracy. An independent England will quit the EU forthwith.

Free England Party - Independence for England
http://www.freeengland.com

Signatory to The English Claim of Right
http://englishclaimofright.com

david H

If this current move to totalitarianism is not taking command I don't know what is! Paris is a fool.

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"You think you are combatting prejudice but you are at war with nature". Edmund Burke.

http://www.buchanan.org/pa-98-1127.html

SilverFalcon

Paris is stating a fact in muscular terms. He is correct in revealing the difference between religion (Christianity in this particular case) and philosophy (Marxism in this particular case). Marx was a theorist not a philosopher and so Marxism, as such, in his context, is a theory not a philosophy although one does study Marxism within the general discipline of Philosophy.

There are ramifications and evolution within the Marxist model and these can be dialectic and compassionless, relying in historicism and economics, or based on humanist principles in the manner of some of the other philosophers of Marx's time. These influences should be viewed in context. He is often dismissed as a "Jew" by the far right but in fact he was greatly influenced by the German early socialists of his time and was quite European in much of his socialist ideology.

One should think of social writers like Charles Dickens too and how the context of the factory system and the Victorian age urged them to give their opinions in fictional form to the masses. The opinions of someone like George Bernard Shaw or George Orwell are also significant as all had socialist ideology, but not all viewed their own in some exact "Marxian" mode. Just a few points to consider in terms of Parris's thinking in this regard.

If Christianity, in this case, is to be compared, or even linked, to socialism as such then one should think about the much older influence of the Judaeo-Christian model on the socialist model of, say, Marx (not forgetting the other socialist thinkers). The older, more entrenched religious view of equality before the Lord, and not the law, (or more properly, the law of the Lord) is pertinent to the breaking of the links between religion, political theory and social theory. The overriding authority of the religious view militates against the democratic authority of the socialist view.

Those who love and obey some religious authority have to find correspondences between this obedience and service and the mass directed democratic ideal of power to the people through conscious choice, in order to be able to function as true Marxist socialists.

A character like Tony Blair is not in this context as he takes authority from the people and places it in the sphere of a deity, then shifts it back to the people when he wants an election. He goes to war on the authority and sanction of God, delivered through him to the people as a personal communication between himself, his conscience and the deity in the way George Bush does. What the people think or want isn't really much of an an issue to a leader whose behaviour is motivated ostensibly by his religious leanings. The fact that such a leader may be a bare faced liar about this is not the point. This kind of justification for political motivation cannot be validated because its workings lie in the workings of unearthly directives and ancient religious canon. Democracy simply lies with the people and functions on their power to choose. (When it ceases to do this it is no longer what it claims to be and is continuing to exist by the illegitimate abstraction of the definition of its ideology.)

The modern socialist who has left God behind and is rowing his little boat out toward the power invested in the people is aware that he must be one of them as well as be a leader or he will be jeered at as a supremacist. Tony Blair took the high road of quasi priest to get around the fact that the last thing he wanted to do was identify himself with the mob. A cannier politician of the left may present himself as an "equal", one of the blokes, a "worker", etc and lever his creed of power over to the promise of strength in numbers, prosperity as a function of hard work and equality as a reward for work done and not for indulgence in special group status or privilege that is the norm for the semi-religious social democrat who has a plethora of special interest groups to appease in order to retain his integrity as a humanist and a universalist and a "good person". Here Parris has understood the dilemma of the avaricious priest very well. What he may have misunderstood is the dilemma of the godfather of the socialist mob.

Perhaps what fledgling twenty-first century nationalists and new era socialists have to deal with is the inheritance factor from these two camps. The burden of guilt and responsibility that is the legacy of the Christian view and the threat of mob rule that is the constant assassin waiting to pounce in the purely socialist view. How to get these two legacies to increase one's fortunes and not deplete the coffers of the elite is a constant juggling act. This is because there is always going to be a State, or an elite, and Parris has recognised this too, and been brutally honest about it, which is admirable and vulnerable at the same time.

It is difficult to solve the problem of socialism without some form of moral imperative. The question of where this morality should originate from is the greatest obstacle to a socialism that is both functional and ethical. If one is obsessed with the socialist model that is, and one has not considered other models for human communal existence. It is perhaps a fatal flaw in the whole argument of politics from ethics if one has only one context in which to work, when there are other contexts, other political galaxies in the theoretical cosmos of ideas on the subject of human cohesion and interaction within sets of laws. The problem of whether these laws will be wholly human oriented or whether they will be semi divinely delivered and applied through a network of priestly spokesmen is part and parcel of the failure or success of any system based on concepts that do not wholly relate to experience or nature.

An important aspect of the dilemma is whether or not God is part of nature in a socialist theory or philosophy. Many see him as part of eternity and causeless and others see him as directly involved with the minute workings of individual human lives. He's down there with the sewage pipe workers and bee keepers as well as up there with the priestly politicians. The presence or absence of this factor can alter a political perspective quite drastically. As Tony Blair now knows.

Matthew Parris in this article seems to be proposing strong medicine for a serious disease. But the outcome and the outlook contains that typically socialist heartlessness and dedication to worker icons and symbols of strength that characterises the classic national socialist as well as Marxist model of a well oiled machine running smoothly and firing on all cylinders because undesired weaknesses have been removed.

Socialism of this kind tends to be a very mechanical philosophy. The kind that posits an ethic of care and compassion, of noble labour and noble savages, of spiritual progress by means of physical work, etc is firmly in the hermetic creed and Christian camp of the diligent humble saint in the vineyard of his Lord, giving without thought of reward except unto eternal life and putting up with adversity by continually turning the other cheek. This dangerous, unnatural and mind consuming philosophy of victim-based socialism as an allegory of divine will is the ironic benefactor of both the harshness of feudalism and the inanity of the modern socialist welfare, or "nanny" state.

In view of the lessons that history and experience should have taught us, one would hope that neither of these two aspects of socialism will be taken into the twenty-first century as both contain dangerous pitfalls, neither is particularly conducive to a harmonious existence within the natural world and when the two aspects combine to form social democracy, as it is presently manifested, humans are subjected to an existence of legislated goodwill and happiness based entirely on a set of rules originating in the idea that everyone is equal and that work is in itself a form of worship and therefore divine, whether this divinity is played out in a religious context or an emotionless theoretical one. One worships God by one's inclusion in the commune or one worships the mob. A difference of focus not of context.

Both systems rely on control mechanisms that enslave both the individual and the group and reduce survival to a belief in the perpetuation of an ideal rather than in the constant ebb and flow of competitive forces, adaptation to challenges and natural evolution.

There is much in Parris's article for debate on a number of topics.