Depression in Prospect

I read Prospect magazine so as to understand and keep an eye on the Gramscians. I deserve a fucking medal. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. It is an infinitely depressing task. I consider it a sort of duty, to be undertaken only with a glass of Caledonian medication in hand to stiffen the resolve.

The stiffener is a sine qua non lest after an hour in the company of bitter and self-pitying Lefties, confusedly bewailing their comprehensive defeat by the forces of reality and liberty (Bright at the Spectator, Cohen at Standpoint… gee, I dunno…) one should lose sight of the light in the eastern sky and grope blindly for that Special Edition Leonard Cohen CD with the cut-throat taped to the jewel-case.

They just cannot get over it. Even knowing that for six decades, which is more than most dictatorships get before the ropes and lamp-posts come into play, they dominated British culture and condemned all other philosophies to pariah status is not enough to cheer these Leftie bastards up. What do they want? Permanent revolution or something?

David Herman weeps into his fair-trade coffee as he lauds Poliakoff, the last Big Leftie at the BBC ('They simply don't dare cast him aside'... oo-er!) of Herman’s personal playwright pantheon of Hare, Griffiths, McEwan and of course Loach. Sigh. Of course, Loach.

He is disheartened by the rise of, for example, ‘revisionist’ (Left-speak for 'academically suspect') Andrew Roberts and of Niall Ferguson who quickly fails the Left’s simplest test by finding a couple of redeeming features in the eeeeeevil British Empire, like ‘the spread of legal norms and fighting the Nazis’. Cor. What a right wing bastard that Ferguson is. Chiz.

Herman dismisses ‘liberal’ Andrew Marr for the ‘lack of confidence’ in the ‘leftish pieties’ of his recent TV series, grumbling that Marr is only ‘repeating’ what the Left’s great thinkers said in the 1970s and not making ‘connections between past and present’. The past, that is, being the terrible days of ‘the defeat of the working class’ at the hands of Nazism and Thatcherism which, and I am not making this up, Herman brackets together. No, don't.

‘The defeat of the working class.’ Now there’s a phrase with which to describe the liberation of the poor from enslavement to Stalinists like Arthur 'Mining Disaster' Scargill and Bob ‘Jurassic’ Crowe; from career Spartists like Livingstone with his corrupt nomenklatura, and from the delusional Marxoids who flew the Red Flag over Islington’s fine Town Hall in the Left's heyday, with the borough’s Politburo dominated by Margaret ‘Enver’ Hodge, until she boarded the great parliamentary gravy train out to post-industrial Essex, there to dictate Left crapology to the Clarkson-admiring English natives whom she and the Comrades openly despise.

Actually, I think I shall soldier on with Prospect a while longer. It might be amusing to observe the wailing and gnashing when the Conservatives are in government.