The Paul Richards Column
* UPDATE: At the end of the first paragraph of this piece, it is stated that John Harris of the Guardian "orbited" around Militant in the 1980s. We have now published a retraction of this, which is not right, and an apology to John for the error. John in fact was a staunch and active opponent of Militant.
Political parties have always had an uneasy relationship with their young members. The naivety and exuberance of youth can easily combine into a cocktail of extremism and embarrassment for party leaders keen to appear sensible and centrist. There are those who seek to exploit the enthusiasm of the young. The Revolutionary Socialist League took Lenin’s slogan ‘who has the youth has the future’ to heart when it sent its cadres into the Labour Party’s youth and student sections. For over two decades any young person wanting to get involved with the Labour Party was met by people selling Militant, spouting transitional demands lifted straight from Trotsky, offering a Marxist perspective on the failings of the party leaders of the day, and bearing invitations to study circles, seminars and summer camps. Some were recruited, and joined the Militant Tendency. After a few months, they were chewed up and spat out, their idealism sucked dry and their pockets emptied. Others didn’t join, but orbited around them, and never really recovered from the early taste of fanciful left-wingery. Step forward the Guardian’s John Harris. (* See above).
It was as late as 1989 that the Labour Party got round to fixing the election for the youth rep of the NEC, which for 20 years had put a member of Militant onto the party’s ruling executive. When the official trade union candidate was revealed, just days before the election, to not be a member of the Labour Party, an alternative was swiftly identified. Alun Parry, an unassuming lad from Merseyside who knew all the verses of the Red Flag, was elected as the first youth rep on the Labour NEC for years to actually support the Labour Party. I recall the line changing from the debarred candidate to Mr Parry with Orwellian efficiency.
Today, Labour’s young people are in the mainstream of the party. Not blindly loyal, nor blatantly troublesome. Rebellion finds its outlet in nothing more extreme than a subscription to Compass. The hard work put in by the Kinnockites in the 1980s has paid off with a youth section today which actually helps Labour to win elections.
Which brings me to the Young Britons’ Foundation, which Alex Ross covered yesterday, the unofficial Conservative grouping for young people which this week has been denounced by the party chairman Eric Pickles.
Pickles is not the first Tory chairman to have trouble with the young people. Norman Tebbit had to close down the Federation of Conservative Students (FSC) in 1985 following an incident at Loughborough University involving too much beer and the police. This was the period which gave the world the legendary ‘hang Nelson Mandela’ badge, although I’ve never actually seen one. It was only a short step from Thatcher’s own public view that Mandela was a ‘terrorist’. The national chairman of the Young Conservatives the following year was the thoroughly respectable Nick Robinson, who no-one could accuse of extremism.
Unlike Tebbit, Eric Pickles has not sought to bar official links with the Young Britons’ Foundation, with its loopy ideas about gun control and detestation of the National Health Service. I am sure founder Donal Blaney will come to regret describing the YBF as the ‘Tory Madrasa’. A madrasa is a training camp where young people are indoctrinated into extremist views and actions. The word serves as an amusing metaphor for what goes on at these events. I don’t have a problem with that. It is the linking of ‘madrasa’ with ‘Tory’ that gives the game away. It shows that behind Cameron’s detoxification programme, there still lurks the libertarian right, waiting for their moment. These are sons and daughters of the ideologues who backed apartheid, funded the Contras in Nicaragua, wanted to legalise heroin, and sang the Nazi anthem from Cabaret ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ at their conferences. They were to the right of today’s BNP, and for years they were an official organ of the Conservative Party.
Unlike the Labour Party, which took tough action to place a clear line between its own ideology of democratic socialism, and the far-left ideologies of Marxism-Leninism, the Conservatives see right-wing libertarianism as a legitimate strand of their ‘conservative movement.’ And be clear: David Cameron is content for this situation to continue. This tells you a great deal about his own willingness to modernise the Conservative Party. Pickles has shown all the toughness of a wet haddock in his dealings with the YBF. Instead of distancing himself, he has spoken to the YBF parliamentary rally as recently as this year. For Labour, it would be like Roy Hattersley turning up to support the Militant summer camp in 1985. Eric Pickles, of course, is a veteran of Conservative libertarian politics from the 1980s, when he was a Thatcherite Young Conservative chairman and councillor.
The YBF is well-funded by rich backers. It has swanky offices in central London. It has ‘trained’ over 2,000 Tory activists including many of the parliamentary candidates hoping to be MPs after May. But its politics and methods are a throw-back to the extremist days of the FCS. The YBF is proof that Cameron is merely the front-man for a party which still venerates Thatcher and Reagan, and wants to turn the clock back to the 1980s.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Since I'm in a playful, postmodernist humour this morning, this is totally irrelevant to the serious points here (and, again, congratulations to Emirates for reflecting so carefully about his voting intention), Ecole might be considered, but the point about English is that is is basically a Teutonic language (Old English - West Germanic) with Romance accretions, so Schule would be even more appropriate. Perhaps a more germane point would be: don't try to bamboozle people here; there is considerable knowledge on this list (myself excluded).
I don't know why the Tories seem so keen to remove themselves from Major. He seems a more appealing figure than some of the figures who have come since.
I don't understand some of the neo-liberal arguments. Magna Carta for instance comes here and tends to make points that just won't appeal on yout average doorstep in a margial constituency. Boasting that you have private healthcare/schooling tends not to be well received where I have grown up. It is the Tories that seem to be making this argument most - yet it seems to be something Nick Clegg or Peter Mandelson might do as well. I can't understand it as most of the population despises such class/financial elitism. It seems depressing to me that so many Liberatarians think this is an acceptable argument.
Mandela seems to me an example of some of the hysteria on the right in the 80s. So much bile against him yet from what I've heard and seen from him (bearing in mind this is only the last decade or so) he seems more like an old-fashioned one nation conservative rather than the far-left radical some used to portray him as. Perhaps a South African version of Harold MacMillan rather than a Lenin. It just steems stange to me - but perhaps that is a genrational thing. I equally find it strange that some Labour people would have forced people to join unions or be sacked in the 1970s - they both seem very out-of-odds with modern times.
I just wish there were options on my ballot paper vote Labour but now New Labour or vote Conservative but not Thachterite. Sadly there won't be (and I don't much fancy the smaller parties either). As I live in a three-way marginal I feel a duty to vote for one of the major parties. But which?
Wish I could tell you, I would focus if I were you on the person, so you may wish to check out the candiates/meet them and assess for yourself. They will all be charming and nice (unless they really are stupid) so you will have to tie them down with a question which requires a substantive answer, additionally ignore all that "charity work" crap. As that can be used as a platform.
Don't get me wrong charity work can be a noble thing and I worked with them when I was a councillor. But you are trying to findout about the ulterior motives of the candidiates so asthem them the tough ones.
I will be asking mine about Government contracts ;) as I like to cut to the chase.
An excellent point. I must admit, having been a Labour supporter since my youth, there was a point during the worst of Blairism that I actually contemplated voting Tory when David Cameron first appeared. He made a good impression on Desert Island Discs, talking about his son, the NHS (he even used the word 'epiphanous'). For the first time in my life there seemed a One Nation tory in the MacMillan mode I could almost vote for.
The last year on Labour List dealing with Tories and Libertarians have completely ruined any chance of that. The ones I meet here want to leave to EU (not all, but the majority) and seem obsessed with immigration and demonising Muslims and foreigners. They also seem to be intent on dismantling the NHS and replacing it with an insurance model. As for their attitude to Universal state education: well, like Gove they want to move towards the 6 per cent of independent private schooling (though they hide this with talk of vouchers). Most hate comprehensive education and the equality it stands for.
Sorry guys. But you remind me of the right wing of the Tory Party in the 80s, without the mitigating figures like Ken Clarke who held some residual One Nation values. Tories here claim sometimes to be One Nation. But they don't seem to live in the same country I do, and by any ideological valuation must be considered dry Thatcherites.
I don't even know where Cameron really stands on these issues. Some say he is as dry as they are, but will adopt green or 'community' issues as part of the optical illusion of moving to the centre ground. Others seem to say he is genuine, but always having to manoeuvre the Hannanite/Powellite majority of his party. Which is true? I have no idea. And with no defining showdown such a Labour had with Clause 4, it seems to me the Tories have returned to their old ways as 'a conspiracy to gain power'. Only this time, they seek to finish the Thatcherite Project betrayed by Heseltine and Major.
That's the fear - the very real fear. The risks of returning to the 80s, where social division and crime was rife, where our Prime Minister branded Nelson Mandela a 'terrorist', and where city traders would flaunt their money as the sole repository of value in our culture, is too horrible to contemplate, and with a heavy heart (and a hope for new Labour leadership and a refreshed agenda) I have no alternative to vote tactically to prevent the Tories coming to power.
If this leads to a Lib Lab alliance I won't be that unhappy. If it leads to Labour regaining power, but with a sufficient slap in its face to rethink its policies on civil liberties, equality, our dependence on financial services, and the renovation of the idea of public service, then I will be happy too.
Add to that a consistent and actionable code of conduct for all elected reps and NEC reform and I am with you 100%.
"Now, like a real madrassa, YBF has added firearms training in a remote overseas outpost to its arsenal of programmes."
but any mainstream party would disassociate them selves straightaway from a group whose CEO says this, the meanong for me is clear.
In economic terms, maybe. Nationalist parties have always had a 'social' element. They usually sought to restrain capitalism in some way. The old N.F. went through 'Strasserite' and syndicalist phases in the 1980s. The BNP more recently used the slogan 'Owners must work, and workers must own'. Attacks on Big Business were (and are) common.
So yes, economically the BNP, BPP, EFP and NF nationalists are to the 'left' of the libertarian right, in economic terms. But the libertarian right detests the racial-nationalist 'right'. This was true of the old FCS and is true today. Libertarians are not Nazis and never could be. Nazis favour an active, interventionist state, and libertarian rightists do not.
we got rid of our extremists, you have not, easy to see why
Maybe the truth does hurt.
Sometimes the truth hurts.
I also think Paul is intending to be entertaining also?
A very good read, and has panache.
Jo.
You are a wag for publishing this utter nonsense.
Yes compare to millitant and Kinnock got rid of them, Pickles is closely tied in ,no difference.
Well, so he says, but Ed Vaizey has blabbered again that the real Cameron is far more to the right than he pretends.
In so much as say the Fabians and their former policies on eugenics perhaps....
Who's EU friends include nutjobs that think 9/11 was a US conspiracy?
"
In so much as say the Fabians and their former policies on eugenics perhaps"
I have no idea about this, please say when this policy was active and links ?
But we can talk about NOW and I and others have said for a while the real Tory party is being masked by Cameron the YBF is as extreme to the right as millitant was to the left
We kicked out millitant, Hannan is a Conservative blogger and MEP, go figure
Read the utter crap about the 'sons and daughters' of those that backed the contras and the rest of this useless utterly trite bilge!
O.k., nothing about Maggie T. How about her offspring, Mark T. and Carol T. - still with us and testament? to the ideological legacy of that family? I could imagine Mark T. as a member of the YBF.
Whether that is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant this is just scaremongering by the wife of a labour MP nothing more nothing less.
The rest of the thids artivcle is just lazy and would appeal only to the most infantile of labour supporters
Interesting to note that it was Dale who first used the "conservative madrassa" term, but it's fair to say that Donal picked it up and ran with it.
Anyway, I trust this amounts to a shred of evidence for you.
The Right to Bear Arms
The Young Britons’ Foundation has been described by TV’s Iain Dale as “a conservative madrassa” because of the way in which YBF trains young conservative activists in public speaking, debating, fundraising, internet activism, campaign management and media skills.
Now, like a real madrassa, YBF has added firearms training in a remote overseas outpost to its arsenal of programmes.
Yesterday, four Brits travelled to the Blue Ridge Arsenal, 30 minutes outside Washington where, after 3 hours of safety training, we got the opportunity to fire revolvers, semi-automatic pistols and an MP5 machine gun for over an hour. To say it was awesome is an understatement. The feeling of hot brass, gun recoil and the smell of gunpowder was incredible.
While I wasn’t particularly keen on the revolvers, I was rather taken by the Glock 9mm semi-automatic. However, like my colleagues, I most enjoyed firing the MP5. It was quite an experience and one I would very much recommend if you get the chance. I certainly intend to provide the opportunity to fire these weapons to more British conservative activists this summer when I bring across another few dozen activists to attend a variety of conferences in Washington, New York and California.
All I could think, though, was what a pity it was that we don’t have the same enlightened view that the Americans have as regards gun ownership – instead of allowing ourselves to be cowed into submitting to the authority of the state in that respect as in so many others. After all: guns don’t kill people – people kill people
The Guardian
There are plenty of concerned postings on the web about the YBF and guns.
I wont hold my breath waiting, but this is just about the worst and laziest pieces of bullshit to appear on labourlist
http://www.torybear.com/2010/02/pressing-buttons.html
The YBF are right wing nuts. Pickles should have more sense than to be seen anywhere near them.
The Guardian piece not good enough for you, then?
donalblaney.blogspot.com
If you want evidence of those, try its leader Donal Blaney's blog, or just google his name + gun control. It's all pretty well documented. The organisation also runs trips to US shooting ranges to fire sub machine guns.
I don't think the piece is bullshit at all, more a useful reminder of some of the people associated with the Conservative Party, and not unlikely to gain influence if Cameron is elected.
However this is entirely of Mr. Richards concoction A madrasa is a training camp where young people are indoctrinated into extremist views and actions.
You might welcome the views of a complete ignoramus especially the author of this piece is trying to portray the right as the reactionary little-Englanders yet his own ignorance betrays his own sense of intolerance.
http://twitter.com/iaindale/status/10067735552
Cameron reiterated that phrase as if he would accomplish it.
A madrasah in its literal translation removing any religious connotation is school.
The madrasah system was also the guardian of Roman and Greek science, philosophy and literature during the Dark Ages and re-discovered to spark the Renaissance.
As for the YBF, they are entitled to their views. However to incorrect use the word madrasah and also incorrectly use the contemporary connotations of more the intemperate and intolerant is a dangerous place to be.
Also, thanks for the history lesson on Labour's hard left. I recall that members of the government were members of such hard-left organisations. One such minister had a rather large file kept on him by MI5 during his time as NUS Chairman.
Still, that's all in the past isn't it?
Labour favourite John Bercow was a member of the Monday Club.
Seeing as the majority of Madrasah are in the Arabic world, the equivalent would be using the word 'Ecole' for school in England.
..it is variously transliterated as madrasah, madarasaa, medresa, madrassa, madraza, madarsa, medrese etc.
Donal and Ian Dale used "madrassa".
Are you sure the majority are in "the Arabic world"? Given that far more muslims live outside the Arabic world than in it, this seems strange.
Excellent point. Arabs only constitute about 35% of the world's Muslims. But of course ignorance on this issue gets a free pass today.