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Spring 2000 cover

National Observer Home > No. 46 - Spring 2000 > Articles

Very Humanely at first: The British Kulturkampf

Hal G.P. Colebatch

Winston Churchill was ridiculed for claiming in the 1945 election campaign that:

"I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no socialist system can be established without a political police . . . no doubt very humanely at first."

At the end of the 20th century a political police, oriented towards the control of culture, appears to be what Britain is getting, under a socialist, or rather radical-centrist, government.

British New Labour's "project" is to use State power, in alliance with a cultural Nomenklatura whose power overlaps and complements that of Government, to transform national consciousness and culture through the transformation of institutions. Sanctions may include criminal penalties but more generally mean the destruction of venues for alternate thought and behaviour or for the expression of alternate ideas or mental attitudes. Combined with deliberate cultural proletarianisation, "racism" and other manifestations of political incorrectness are used as justifications for political-cultural policing.

One report in "The Times" suggested that the government has asked MI5 to monitor the Conservative Party for allegedly "dabbling in racial politics". During the 1999 elections for the European Parliament a 78-year-old war veteran, George Staunton, put up signs for the U.K. Independence Party on the wall of a derelict Liverpool building with the words: "Don't forget the 1945 war" and "Free Speech for England". He was arrested by the Merseyside Police and charged with "racially aggravated criminal damage" - an offence which carried a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment, similar to maximum for military spying for an enemy foreign power under the Official Secrets Act. The offence was deemed racially aggravated and therefore far worse than ordinary crimes committed for gain, malice or sexual gratification because of the reference to "England". At about the same time it was decided not to prosecute a spy who had previously passed secret material relating to nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union.

Permissiveness and Draconianism express the allied pressures of deconstructionism and political correctness. They make a powerful and versatile instrument to satisfy Left-liberalism's simultaneous cravings for both cultural destruction and social engineering. The political and the cultural, while not identical, come into close alliance. As with the simultaneous promotion of a proletarianised "low" culture, of rock-music, soccer and bodily functions, and a nihilistic/elitist modernist/post-modernist "high" culture seen in things like the Turner Prize, it is a two-fronted attack on core values: a pincer-movement whose jaws are meeting in many places.

On 28 September 1999, Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour Party Conference at Bournemouth, commenced:

"Today at the frontier of the new Millennium I set out for you how . . . we make it a century of progressive politics after one dominated by conservatives." The speech was a bizarre, ranting attack not only on the Conservative Party, but even more on "forces of conservatism", a phrase Blair repeated throughout - "forces" which, allegedly, resided in the Labour Party as well as the Conservative and even the Scots Nationalists (perhaps with claymores, clans and cattle-raiding). He blamed these forces of conservatism for killing Martin Luther King and Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager killed in London by white thugs.

This speech emphasised the links between Government policies and Nomenklatura diktats of political correctness. It was a formal declaration of a Kulturkampf which had been in operation for some time. Downing Street press secretary Alistair Campbell told journalists before the speech that he wanted to "discredit the very word conservatism." The journalists missed the fact that this was news. Suppose a similarly-placed Tory had declared "I want to discredit the very word progressive"?

In a modern Parliamentary democracy budget limitations and electorate expectations severely constrain governments trying to put ideologies into practice directly, to the continuing disappointment of party faithful. However New Labour knows radical political change is possible by cultural means.

Blair and New Labour see Conservatives and conservatives in ecological terms: as orang-utans to be made extinct not by one-on-one hunting but by the burning of their habitat. New Labour's Kulturkampf is the most extreme in modern British history. Its goal is the transformation of British consciousness with the destruction of British traditional culture including in particular senses of the past.

New Labour is the natural political ally of modernism's and post-modernism's general assault on Western culture. Both, being opposed to all "traditions", are opposed to the notion of permanent values. Further, Labour governments have a vested interest in a milieu of squalor, poverty and drabness where resentment will tend to be turned against the capitalists, the "establishment" and the conservatives, irrespective of who is actually in power.

Blair is not in control of all the political and cultural processes. However many of them are closely identified with him. Blair's use of State power to enforce neophilic cultural revolution makes him unique among British political leaders and allies him with the cultural Nomenklatura even when he and they disagree on details.

Harold Wilson once invoked the "white heat of the technological revolution." New Britannia, despite its neophilia, has little interest in science or technology either as social panaceas or for their own sakes. Britain's contribution to space exploration, for example, is minimal, and it is doubtful if many Britons could name their country's Science Minister or say what their Government's science policy was or if den of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, asking: "Whatever Happened to Liberty?" in the leftist "New Statesman" of 6 September 1999 and John Colvin in the same journal of 27 December 1999. "The Economist" of 2 October 1999 stated: "Although Mr. Blair is no socialist, it is becoming evident he is no liberal either . . . he has [taken] a licence to trample down civil liberties." In the leftist "The Guardian", Hugo Young in July 2000 wrote of Blair's consistent "indifference to, almost contempt for, civil liberties."

While hailing the joining of Party and Nation in the same purpose, Blair has claimed that "every known offender will have their D.N.A. recorded, and evidence from any scene of crime will be matched to it." The Mode of Trial Bill abolishes the right to trial by jury for many offences. Home Secretary Jack Straw attacked lawyers who criticised the Bill as "woolly-minded" and "left-liberal". Legislation was previously announced imposing fines of up to £1,000 for people caught picking bluebells and other common wildflowers.

Writing in an obscure West Australian publication, local Labor Party State leader Geoff Gallop's 1998 pamphlet "A State of Reform", Blair claimed: "We have also reclaimed law and order as an issue of the Left", a statement which some who know the record of the Left might think ominous.

Blair stated in 1999: "It is time to move beyond . . . libertarian nonsense masquerading as freedom . . . [W]e will provide the extra resources for a database where every known offender will have their D.N.A. recorded." If this had been said by Margaret Thatcher or some other Conservative or conservative, let alone an Enoch Powell or a Jorg Haider, one could have expected some commentaries to have mentioned the word Fascism.

It was reported in April 2000 that with a new £25 million e-mail surveillance centre MI5 could monitor all British e-mails - the equivalent of State power to open all private letters. Caspar Bower, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, said: "With this facility, the Government can track every website that a person visits, without a warrant, giving rise to a culture of suspicion by association." A few weeks later it was suggested, like something not seen in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that police should be given the power to stop people leaving the country if they suspected they might cause trouble at football matches. This was literally Police-State legislation: the untested word of a policeman could be sufficient to prevent people travelling. Blair (speaking, bizarrely, to an audience of radical German theologians) proposed giving police power to march people guilty of offences such as public drunkenness and loutish behaviour to cash-point machines and without other process of law make them withdraw money and pay £100 on-the-spot fines. It would be hard to imagine a more obvious invitation to police abuse of powers. The plan was condemned by police-chiefs and dropped.

The cultural style of Blairism does not fit previous British models. Although the government contains some restive representatives of Old Labour, it does not chime with either traditional socialist or politically mainstream ethos and values. It is directly opposed to the culturally conservative values and thought (not entirely absent from the old Labour Party) which sees society as a delicate, organic whole framed by tradition and the heritages of the past and to be reformed with caution. It is more aware of tradition and heritage than any recent Conservative Government, but sees these as things to be actively destroyed in the general destruction of an environment where political or socio-cultural conservatism is possible.

So there is much official unhappiness about the British flag. A man applying to join the Metropolitan Police was rejected because of a Union Jack tattoo on his arm. Taxis have been prohibited from displaying the Union Jack, although all Britons on land have a right to fly it, because it is deemed racist. Similarly, the 34 Labour and Liberal Democrat members of the District Council at Havering, in Essex, voted to ban flying the Union Jack from the Town Hall because, according to one of them, Margaret Latham: "I think there are many people in this country who are not British nationals who feel they are excluded and under-valued at a time when we want to progress racial harmony."

The 60th anniversary of the formation of the all-Parties government under Winston Churchill in 1940, a historic and crucial moment of World War II, was officially ignored. Government policy on commemorations of the war with its "middle-culture" associations went from indifference to active prohibition: the villagers and parish council of Kessingland, Suffolk, were told in 1998 that they were not allowed to place a commemorative plaque in the village church honouring the dead of World War II in addition to the existing plaque from World War I because more than 50 years had passed since the end of hostilities.

The proprietor of Bredbury Hall hotel in Cheshire was warned by the Commission for Racial Equality that he might be seriously breaching the Race Relations Act by displaying a flag of Saint George on a leaflet with the words, "Be proud to be English", and enforcing a dress-code at the hotel, although an unusually large proportion of the hotel's existing customers were said to be Asians who liked to hold weddings, business meetings and family parties there because of the high dress-standards and generally conservative and pleasant air. A Labour-dominated District Council refused to allow a pub to extend opening hours on St. George's Day as this would be provocative and jingoistic, but automatically granted extensions to pubs which wished to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Jack Straw called for a redefinition of Englishness. He suggested the "global baggage of Empire" was linked to soccer violence and such violence was caused by "racist and xenophobic white males". Straw singled out the English in Britain for this stricture of racism, claiming that as a result of Empire: "There is a distorted, incomplete idea of what it is to be patriotic for those in England which is different to that in Wales or Scotland or Ireland." This was in direct contradiction to a claim by Blair in November 1999 that "We have got over our imperial past - and the withdrawal symptoms."

Lord Evans, a Labour Peer in charge of a new government advisory body on museums and libraries, said in his first speech that museums were elitist and should display objects in pubs where "ordinary people" could appreciate them.

The Orwellianly-titled Department of Culture, Media and Sport told Britain's leading museums and art galleries that they must meet strict quotas of "ethnic" visitors or lose Government funding. Some London galleries were told that they must prove at least twelve per cent of their visitors were from minorities, and three institutions in Liverpool were told they must have three per cent. How racial tests were to be applied to museum visitors to establish whether the quota had been met was not clear. It was claimed the object was to "stimulate interest in the nation's heritage among young Blacks and Asians." If young Blacks and Asians did not wish to visit the nation's heritage, how far would that heritage be modified in order to arouse their interest and keep the museums open and preserve the jobs of their staff? Would guards and curators concerned for their jobs drive the extra whites away? Might they bribe the crucial extra Black or Asian to attend to obtain that vital percentage point? If bribery failed, would Blacks and Asians be forcibly marshalled in barracoons to view the soiled bed-linen of Tracey Emin at Art Galleries? Would a new William Wilberforce or John Brown arise to free them, while the more paternalistic merely issued them with nose-pegs? (The incontinent Ms. Emin was an honoured guest at the opening by the Queen of the new multi-million pound Tate Modern. How many Blacks and Asians have queued to see her productions is unknown).

Andrew Robertshaw, Head of Education at the National Army Museum, was reported to have claimed many Chelsea Pensioners were afflicted by racism.

Meanwhile Labor Minister "Mo" Mowlam, a leading advocate and practitioner of the proletarianisation of culture, suggested that the Royal Palaces be turned into museums, which would presumably necessitate the transport of minorities to the Highlands to keep up Balmoral's quota of ethnically-acceptable visitors. The Royal Family, she said,could move somewhere modern and "in line with the architecture you see around London". Ms Mowlam herself lived, courtesy of the British taxpayer, in the historic and luxurious apartments of Admiralty House. (She had previously owned a house in Islington but pleaded that her city banker husband had lost his job. With her new apartment she had been able to take advantage of the London property boom and put this house on the market for £650,000).

The Sunday Telegraph magazine for 15 November 1997 quoted Chris Worthy, once President of the Oxford Union and a prominent Blairite, as referring proudly to "rock and fashion - areas in which Britain leads the world". Norman Lebrecht wrote:

"Pop culture has never gone short of official recognition . . . What has shifted under Labour is its political credibility. Because schlock songs, grunge frocks and bare-ass movies make an awful lot of money, Tony Blair reckons [their proponents] should be held up as shining examples to young people and invited to dinner at Downing Street - the more so when the Prime Minister's closest supporters, the Lords Levy and Puttman, made their names in the entertainment industry."

Schlock songs, grunge frocks and bare-ass movies were not only important as good for New Britain, but bad for the old Britain which it was both essential and satisfactory to humiliate and demoralise. Traditional light opera (mainly Gilbert & Sullivan), done for a century by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, was held to deserve no Arts Council money and it was reported that since its private sponsor, Sir Michael Bishop, could no longer meet the cost, the company would apparently have to close. Sir Michael was told by an Arts Council officer: "The Arts Council wouldn't care if you disappeared off the face of the earth." Blair claimed that the film "The Full Monty", a story of unemployed men in Northern England who became male strippers, reflected a new mood and celebrated "a great sense of confidence and adventure, and greater ease and comfort with ourselves". The country was discovering an "exciting" view of its future which was: "Look, what we're actually good at is being inventive, creative, dynamic and outward-looking." Films that celebrated achievements in art or science or in the great dramas of history were notable not merely by their absence but by their impossibility in the pervading cultural climate. He also claimed Britain was no longer "living in the world of a hundred years ago, when guys wore bowler hats and umbrellas, all marching down Whitehall". He previously claimed with pride if dubious accuracy, "Our rock music is taking both America and Europe by storm." No other major developed nation's culture seemed so narrowly focused on varieties of sleaze and grunge.

In mid-2000, yet more tens of millions of pounds went into the Millennium Dome, a high temple of Blairism, with its giant animatronic pubic lice, from which members of the public were staying away in legions. The Dome's "Content Editor" Ben Evans, a former staffer for Peter Mandelson and son of Education Minister Baroness Blackstone, apparently told a Radio 4 interview in effect that he was proud of the Dome's cultural lowness: "We're accused of having low standards and pandering to the lowest common denominator but I don't apologise for that at all." The giant pubic lice, entangled in the giant pubic hairs of the "Body zone" dummies and complete with waving feelers, were apparently an expression of his desire to make it "family-orientated and inclusive". It was announced that Mr. Jerry Springer would host the Miss World Contest at the Dome.

Stockport College in Greater Manchester banned more than 40 offensive words and phrases under equal opportunities rules, making it "a condition of service and admission that employees and students adhere to the policy". The deadly words and phrases included "lady", "gentleman" and "normal couple". This was compulsory proletarianisation of language and thought. Presumably it would be a sacking offence to teach Shakespeare's Henry V in which on the morning of Agincourt the King promises the lowest of his followers that the day would "gentle his condition." And what of Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Lady of Shalot? The word "history" was also banned.

A Schwerpunkt in the present Kulturkampf is the conspectus of British political-military history, traditions and associations. A move to erect a statue on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square commemorating the sacrifice of women in the two World Wars was rejected by the Government in favour of a piece of modern art. The B.B.C. refused to televise celebrations of the Queen Mother's 100th birthday or a Royal Military Tattoo on the grounds that they would not make "good television." Veteran broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby commented the pageant would evoke emotions unacceptable to "those same television executives who fashionably adopt a football team and chant with fervour from the terraces to demonstrate their blokish credentials". This was despite the fact that those organising the Tattoo apparently attempted to conform to political correctness as obsequiously as possible. An official leaflet for it showed a black sailor and a woman sailor wearing "H.M.S. Invincible" cap-tallies and another woman sailor with an "H.M.S. Gannet" cap-tally. Only blurred figures in the background, one looking distinctly overweight and peeved, might have been those politically-incorrect creatures, white male sailors.

Beating Retreat, one of the oldest and most famous British military ceremonies, involving the massed bands of the Household Division, was scheduled to follow the Royal Tournament and the field-gun race into oblivion. This was in spite of even the merely commercial fact that it was a major tourist attraction.

The much-loved Naval field-gun race was abolished in 1999 as being too rough, boisterous and traditional for the modern armed services (One commentator wrote: "What the public see is a field-gun barrel being thrown around as though it were balsa wood. For a lark some years ago we dropped it from a tree on to a clapped-out car. It cut the car in half."). This caused the Queen possibly to boycott, or at least not attend, the last tournament in what was coming to be seen as a typically ineffectual, or perhaps imaginary, Royal protest.

Columnist Peter Hitchens pointed out that the 2000 Royal Military Tattoo, after commencing with King Alfred rallying the English against the Danes, dissolved into pop songs and the "sentimental pacifist slop" of "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" Actually this song was sinister as well as sentimental. It had been used in the huge, ultimately Soviet-sponsored, attack on U.S. morale that played a major part in U.S. forces being withdrawn from South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese delivered into Communist totalitarianism. To juxtapose it with Alfred, not only a great patriot and warrior but a man of high moral purpose, was bizarre and insulting.

Public money was denied to middle-culture purposes like preserving boats from Dunkirk. Ms. Jane Stancliffe, the Heritage Lottery Fund officer responsible for refusing this application, said: "I suspect there are many other little ships of that type and from that era throughout the country", an eloquent comment on the mind-set and professionalism of the person making it. The most famous, the ferry Medway Queen, last ship away from the Dunkirk Mole, was allowed to sink at its moorings.

A junior British Defence Minister, Peter Kilfoyle, resigned apparently over revealed shortcomings of the British Defence forces and was replaced by Lewis Moonie, who had previously suggested that young men enlisted in the armed forces because they had personality disorders. Peter Mandelson, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and one of the most senior and influential figures in the Blair Government, speaking to an Irish radio audience in March 2000, ridiculed the Household Division as, "you know, lots of chinless wonders with bright scarlet uniforms, you know, playing and marching around . . . sort of swopping colours and doing things with flags." Hundreds of British servicemen, including many members of the Household Division, had been murdered by the I.R.A. while on duty in Northern Ireland.

Kipling commented long before on "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep." When, in one-more-than-usually-demented moment, Hitler insulted the courage of the Leibstandarte Division, its officers returned their medals to him in a chamber-pot. More appropriately to British traditions, Bruce Anderson commented that just as "contemptible" did not seem strong enough to describe Mr. Mandelson's comments, so "courage" and "sacrifice" seemed equally insufficient when it came to the Guards. No grandeur of language would be adequate to write those regiments' histories, which were best appreciated not through the medium of words but amid the fifes and drums, while the blue and scarlet and gold glory of the Colours were paraded and saluted. These Colours, he said, were interwoven with the regiments' battle honours, won at some of the proudest and most desperate moments in the country's history, paid for in heroism and in blood. He continued that it would be about as much use explaining "battle honours" to Peter Mandelson as it would be explaining Titian to a man who had been blind from birth:

"Any such statement invites only one conclusion: that its author must dislike Great Britain very much indeed . . . he cannot wait for the day that the British history which he finds so alien joins Labour's history in the skip."

In March, 2000, Keith Vaz, Minister for Europe, linked the Parachute Regiment to Right-wing extremism. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, let this pass without demur.

In general, certain groups and ideas are being declared virtuous and others evil a priori. This is done not only by central fiat but also by local-government and semi-government and Nomenklatura bodies acting at the behest of an ineluctable Zeitgeist.

Despite Blair's own high-profile Church attendance and declarations of piety, Christianity is not the least of Kulturkampf targets.

The Lottery Fund, giving grants to Gypsy, Tamil, American Indian, Irish and Congolese cultural activities, refused a relatively small application from the "Windsor Churches Coming Together Group" towards staging a presentation of Pentacost at a Whitsun service on the grounds that it "promoted Christianity."

In 1998 the City of Birmingham officially renamed Christmas "Winterval" so that the holiday celebrations would not be contaminated by any lingering Christian associations (this progressive innovation was apparently dropped after protests). The Broadcasting Standards Authority was asked to prevent the B.B.C. using the terms "B.C." and "A.D." for the same reason. Writing in "The Guardian" (what "The Guardian" prints today the Nomenklatura do tomorrow), columnist Polly Toynbee claimed that Christian church schools were "socially divisive anyway, a haven for the middle-classes."

Cultural wars are now, I believe, of greater importance than conventional political/parliamentary conflicts, especially when carried out under Government/Nomenklatura policy, direction or mind-set. In them we see much of the shape of future conflicts elsewhere. Hence recent social and political events in Britain are important to Australians

 

National Observer No. 46 - Spring 2000