The Test Of Loyalty Is Elsewhere

Peter Hitchens writes:

When I was 17, I was a Trotskyist, a bit like Ed Miliband’s father but with many fewer excuses. I never had to flee for my life from an advancing army. I had grown up, unlike him, in the safest, richest, gentlest age in history. I said and thought  and did things I now remember with embarrassment and shame.

But I long ago made up my mind to be honest about my past. And that is partly because I would not hold the views I now hold, or be the person I am now – conservative, Christian, patriotic – if I had not examined the alternatives and found out what they were really like.

Born in a colonial outpost, the son of a Royal Navy officer, I heard the last faint farewell trumpet calls of Empire and grew up among adults who still spoke in its confident accents.

I found out in my adolescence that it was all a shell, indebted, enfeebled, rackety, demoralised, shrivelled from ‘Finest Hour’ to ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ in a few years. 

Where could all that homeless love go now? I needed a new outlet for my loyalties and found it, for good or ill, in revolution.

So let us say I’m not especially shocked to find that others have similar pasts. It’s what they’re like now that interests me. I’ve seldom seen or met anyone less revolutionary than Ed Miliband.

By contrast, I find it quite funny watching the modern Tory Party adopting policies, especially on family matters, greenery and immigration, that we Trotskyists would once have thought rather far-fetched.

Then again, I have another reason for feeling a bit sorry for the Labour leader when his father is attacked.

I’m unusual among journalists in having been on the receiving end of my trade when it’s not at its kindest. It’s nearly 40 years ago now, so I feel I can mention here that it was no  fun being called by the News of the World after my poor mother, God rest her soul, had been found dead by her own hand in an Athens hotel room. I knew they were only doing their job, but I can’t say I liked it, even so.

Since that day, I’ve been pursued by a press pack more than once. The first time was after I helped derail Neil Kinnock’s 1992 Election campaign. The second  time was when I dared to research Cherie Blair’s little-known attempt to become an MP.

On both occasions, it was comically impossible to get my fellow reporters to accept I was telling the truth about what I was up to. This was because what they believed  was so much more interesting, and made a better story. 

Since then I’ve grown used to being called silly names, and to having my character, mental health and appearance analysed, not always in a flattering way, by other journalists. I almost enjoy it. I might as well.

Yet after all that I’m still completely in favour of a rough-edged, untamed press, because in my journey from Marx to The Mail on Sunday, via communist Moscow and quite a few other places, I’ve learned to love liberty with my whole heart. And you can’t have that without unchained newspapers.

So here we come to the article in the Daily Mail headlined ‘The man who hated Britain’. Much of life is a paradox. It seems quite obvious to me that the more you love your country, the more critical you must be of it when it has gone wrong. The test of loyalty is elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s because it involves the Navy, in which as a small boy I used to long to serve, but the picture of the young Ralph Miliband (the image of his younger son), touchingly engulfed in the ill-fitting wartime uniform  of a petty officer, just makes the accusation fade away, for me.

There’s no doubt that people ought to know and care more about the influence on our national life of Marxist politics, wildly out of proportion to the numbers of people involved – though it’s important to grasp that Trotskyists hated Stalin and the Gulag as much as anyone.

I myself spend quite a lot of time warning against the penetration of our politics, media, schools and universities by people who really do hate Britain, desire to carve up our kingdom and feed the slices into the Euro-blender, meanwhile burying our traditions under a bland pile of metricated political correctness.

If only they all carried big red labels saying ‘I hate Britain’, how simple things would be. But several of the worst of them are Blairites whose politically correct, multiculti, anti-Christian ideas come from 1980s Euro-communism, and who hate and despise Ed Miliband.

And quite a few are in the high councils of the Tory Party. Who, for instance, said, back in 2004: ‘The nation states have had their day as powers. The world must be more ordered and centralised .  .  . it’s unstoppable and irreversible’?

Why, Lord Heseltine, David Cameron’s valued mentor, in the midst of explaining why Britain should have abolished the pound without a vote, because Fleet Street would have ‘pandered to the worst and basest instincts of the mass of people’.

To me, that’s a lot more worrying than Ralph Miliband’s dislike of the pre-1945 British class system. He wasn’t alone in that. It wasted many good lives. The conservative, patriotic novelist Nevil Shute loathed English class prejudice so much he went to live in Australia.

George Orwell, who wrote with lyrical love of ‘the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows .  .  . and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings’ was another Trotskyist, who spent 1940 hoping to see Red militias billeted in the Ritz Hotel.

The American poet Alice Duer Miller concluded her 1940 love-poem to England, The White Cliffs, much treasured by many English people (including my mother) in the last war: ‘I am American bred. I have seen much to hate here, much to forgive’, and then added, as so many of us do, this final line: ‘But in a world where England is finished and dead, I do not wish to live.’

By all means, let’s have as much hurly-burly and hard knocks as we can manage. Our politics are bland enough without the press going soft and soppy as well, and how wretched it is that this row has given aid and comfort to the Polly Toynbee tendency, who for years have longed to yank out the teeth of the conservative press. But let it be to the point, and about real live issues.

Our opponents may well be wrong but it does not make them bad. Even revolutionaries sometimes have a point, and many of them – though not all of them – grow up and turn into people like me.