Peter Hitchens: the case against Labour and Keir Starmer | SpectatorTV

welcome to spectator TV I'm Fraser Nelson Just a few hours ago the Labor Manifesto was launched in Manchester by aure

starmer

who says that wealth creation is now the theme emblazoned on every page of that 136 page document Angela rer was here telling us the conservatives have proven that you cannot tax your way to growth, the entire party stood before us as people who had learned the lessons of what they say was a wasteful and propagandized Conservative government, keen to return moderation and stability to Britain So how is the situation going? I am now joined by someone who is not exactly a union supporter but nonetheless someone who has opposed most Conservative leaders since Ian Duncan Smith and that is Peter Hitchens by Sunday's mail Peter, thanks for joining me now it seems like you normally lead the Desperation charge against the Tories but you seem to be more worried about the Labor party um Kier starma than almost Jeremy Corbin if you want to have a quick chorus if you hate the Tory party clap your hands I'll lead it merrily o I will join.

I still hate conservatives. party, but there are times when you want it to be destroyed, thrown in the beard and cut off, at times when it might actually be sensible to hold on, this is one of those times when the star Labor Party has a very similar character to Blair's Labour. party of 1997 you can tell just by looking at it that it has an enormous amount of threatening things in mind to do, you don't know what they are, look, think of two and three things that the Blair government did within a few weeks of coming to power power, the independence of the Bank of England, the colossal raid against pension funds and the appointment of Alista Campbell and Jonathan Powell to give ORD to public officials in violation of the Constitution, if there really were calamities that all the major economies of the G7 in the world they have had. gained Central Bank independence from the Bank of England, a special staff adviser number 10.

You are really saying that the Blair government was the first Blair government and AR Campbell's appointment gave civil servants no accountability. Parliament was a political revolution and is immense and Lasting damage to the neutrality of the Bank of England Civil Service Independence removes government control from one of the most important decisions any government can make: interest rates is absurd and the attack on pension funds. I think anyone who was even remotely affected by this has to recognize that it was basically disastrous for the pension system and also a simple political theft from people who saved all their lives to take care of themselves during their retirement, all indefensible, the thing was that , as indefensible as they were, it was also not announced that I just did them and I see absolutely no reason to believe why the San Francisco government wouldn't do things of that nature as well.

I wrote this morning about his constitutional plans that no one cares about at all, but they are huge and encompass everyone, right, like that, but you. what you do, I mean, first of all, there is no government in history that has not done more than what it says in the manifesto, the manifesto is basic, the idea of ​​a Manifesto is that if you put something in the manifesto, will not be rejected by the House of Lords because of our conventions, the actors in 2019 had a Manifesto commitment not to increase National Insurance. R went on to do exactly that, but I tell you if you want to try and say here that the Starmer government is a threat or um a particularly serious threat these aren't exactly you guys you don't have much to point to now should I say I don't know the half of it about this nor you what I know the character of these people I also know what?

K Starler is and there is a very dogmatic person, very left-wing, a very left-wing person, really the man who tells us that the creation of wealth is the center of his Manifesto, well, yes, this, but it is like the great conversation between Mr. Toad and Mr. Badger, I will say. anything there, but once he is freed from the responsibility of facing the electorate, all this means nothing. Do you seriously believe that the lab part has become wealth creation? I think we would have to be immensely gullible to think that. there are two interpretations of the negative stars, one is that as you say he is a hidden corbon knite, he just releases his much worse than Corbin, when will people ever understand that poor steam powered Jeremy Corbin?

The Edwardian Marxist list made no secret of what he was doing. He hadn't actually adjusted any of his ideas at all, so he was basically spouting things that went out of fashion on the international left in the 1960s, totally harmless because you can see it approaching a mile from the modern left. subtle methods of salami cutting and back rounding uh to achieve it to achieve its action see what Peter Heyman wrote in The Observer a few years ago he said that a new work as a project was far more revolutionary than anything Corin had ever contemplated.

I've met people in the new lab, my old friend Philip Basset, who I met when I was in the financial times and in the times as a labor correspondent when it was just before the 797 elections to you, we had a farewell lunch CU we knew that once I worked for Blair we wouldn't have much to do with each other and he said you have no idea how extensive this project is and I kind of did it because I knew a little bit about blism, but I didn't know. Well, I didn't know how extensive it was in terms of the constitutional, cultural and moral changes and the educational changes that would result from it and the country is now almost unrecognizable from what it was in 1997, but the work is not finished in a quarter cury everything changed P surely I mean, but changed for the worse The phraser Milson Friedman once said that Tony Blair was Blair in language, but right in action, well then Milson Friedman must have been gagar in that moment. no connection, he was pointing to the first term of the Labor government, where there were incredible restrictions on spending, the economy was growing quite well, he was true to his word not to alter the Apple card, a word that Kir Starmer is giving in this moment. was the camouflage period and then as soon as they freed themselves from it, they went and let themselves go, they did it in a second term, that's fine, with Democratic consent in the 2001 elections and again in 2005, and now they want finish the job and one of the reasons they want to finish the job is that they need to make constitutional changes so that what they do is irreversible.

This has been a Labor concern since Harold Lasi in the 1930s. Everyone has always wanted to make sure that no Conservative government and no free Parliament could ever reverse what they are doing and they have not been able to devise a method until now and what is the purpose of this new constitutional document, that is exactly what it is for when you look at some of the missteps that the conservative government has made in the last four or five years missteps that you have led the field and highlighting, let's look at the blockade, for example, and everything that arises from that H, let's look at the way the tax burden has risen to the highest level in the post-war era look at the failure of NHS reform look at the resurrection of the welfare crisis yes, everything is terrible yes, all these things that I put to you are much more serious than who is a special advisor or number 10 or um, some constitutional tinkering.

I mean, right now what you're describing is no scarier than what we've already seen. It's much scarier. What is the difference between the Conservative government and the Blairite or Stam right? The Labor government is the difference between masochism and sadism, uh, you, it's pretty horrible, uh, living under a post-20 post-Cameron modern Conservative government because they've basically swallowed insignificant ideas without understanding them, they maintain the insignificant legacy without extending it to any great extent, but they maintain. Eh, but what Stama will do is revitalize the Blairite legacy and continue down the path that Blair started and this means a major change.

I'm sure you've also accused the Tories of being right about Blair. I have accused them of being Blair BL Blair by default and Cameron was open about it. He told a group of SRA journalists that he was the air for Blair with George Osborne present, although again Cameron is almost politically illiterate and didn't really understand what he was taking on, he just wanted the job and would have done anything. thing for the position, is what matters to us here, but he did not understand the project that he accepted as permanent and he accepted that he would not try to reverse that was the condition under which he assumed the position, but he did not know how to proceed or he intensified it because he did not believe in her, while someone like Kosama, a Pap White veteran of politics and society of about 20 years, an adult man from the U who held positions not only of membership but of actual activity in deeply left-wing organizations and who is obviously a dogmatist and has a simple test for you, he does not reveal it very much because he knows that he should not directly say yes.

I'm a dogmatist, but when asked the other night if a dear member of his family were seriously ill, would he do it privately? uh to to get advance on the waiting list and he said no and people said he couldn't say what he wanted to say. I promise you he said it right. He is a deeply dogmatic person and, but because of this you point out the loyalty that he maintained in his youth. Now I know someone else in his youth. and that is you, yes, I know, and you know it because I tell you, I tell you that one can be forgiven for various phases that you go through in your, I am asking to be forgiven, well, in fact, I will tell anyone who asked me that to this day I derive an immense advantage from a Marxist reading background;

It helps me understand politics much faster and more clearly than most people ever will, but I am not a Marxist reader and it is quite clear that I am not and I have broken with this in a completely public and I lost a lot of friends doing it and there are still people walking the Earth who really hate me for it, so I don't think it's the same as someone who was uh a a member of a very select and highly esoteric ultr sad organization, a follower of the amazing malles raptis in his 20 years, uh, and it's not that the other person to whom this applies is BL himself and Blair's Trotskyism, which he admitted to Peter Hennessy. long after he left office he would have destroyed it if it had come to light in the early 90s, but he kept it a secret as many of his cabinet members know that many of his cabinets were active members of sad organizations or even communists, but they never were.

Speaking of which, he came out of other people, but is it really relevant? Joh re was a former crusader guy Alan John re John Reed was a communist part of Britain and then there was Alan Milbourne he was also a famous communist and ran a bookstore called not famous from not famous as far as he was concerned did he ever Did you hear him explain it or did he regret it or say something about it? What I saw to affect market reforms and public services more than the Conservatives ever dared and I really wonder if the divide between political parties is as great as you may doubt here during the Blair years we had market reforms in health market reforms in schools the academic agenda that was now started by Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair and here you tell us the word Blair, we should all be terrified, this is 1968, this is what happened in 1968, the spring of Prague and the events of May in Paris, which completely changed the nature of the revolutionary movement, moving it away from nationalization, from economic privacy, towards the social and cultural. education and sexual politics and also away from the Soviet Union and that change has now become a reality in Western countries.

It's called a trend. It's called Eurocommunism. The Blairite theoretical journal Marxism Today where the Blair government got most of its ideas. It was a Eurocommunist magazine, but most people, because they say they haven't had any Marxist training, don't even know what it means, the left, right?, it's fine. D xaing said that getting rich was glorious. Peter Mel said no. It doesn't bother me in the least when people get filthy rich. The left no longer cares about the rich and it turns out that anyone who looks at them can see that the rich don't care about the left either? the rich are perfectly happy to fund the left in governments it's no longer a problem it's about examining modern politics with the categories of the 1890s do you think the conservatives deserve another five years in power?

Oh, they deserve it, no, but it's not a question of deserving it. it means we deserve a Labor government is the point a vote is a practical act with measurable consequences it is not an emotional spasm the conservative party leaned in front of me in this pretty studio here and offered me Kane to beat them on the bottom, if that was it legal thenI would be happy to do it, since they deserve all kinds of punishment and being forced to run around the playing fields too, but that is not the point: we do not punish them by throwing them off the field. in the office everyone will leave and spend more time with their money the people we will punish will be ourselves then you will have to endure the next 15 or 20 years under a new labor government 15 or 20 years, that's what you think, they are not giving the lightly, I promise you that the votes are 6, that will depend on the voters.

Do you really think that we are looking at a vote not only for the five years but for the next two decades, well, if the constitutional document that I keep telling you about its um is enacted, it really doesn't matter much because even if they lose office, they won't lose the power. quickly, um, you talk about that, so I mean, fundamentally, I mean that there is a creation of a new chamber to replace the chamber of laws which I do not disagree with, in principle, the chamber of laws is obviously unbearable as it It is now, but this is the House of regions and local government, it has a lot of power for decentralized nations, you probably know what the SE convention is, which will be revised so that there is almost no power left.

We are in Westminster to do anything to stop devolved governments doing anything. There will be the introduction of new things called social rights, similar to human rights, which will basically mean that judges can intervene if they think a policy has not been given. giving people their social rights in terms of housing or poverty or whatever and a huge amount of power will be taken away from Parliament and handed over to the Supreme Court, which will decide on these things and also again to the big left. local governments and for several others B is quite complicated and clever, it is not a subtle UNS thing, but it is largely a subtraction of power from what was previously a sovereign Parliament to other bodies that form another Sovereign Parliament with a different uh, with a different majority coming in, we will have difficulty reversing it, so it is dismantling the democratic apparatus, it is dismantling the particular feature of our English or British democratic practice, namely the absolute sovereignty of parliament in terms of of the same way the Human Rights Act did that, much more, much more deeply, well the conservatives had 14 years in power to do something, but it didn't go well, again, you're asking me to defend the conservatives that I have .

There is no interest because there is a choice in this election, is there not? It's the Conservatives or the Labor and um no, I think people have to understand that if that's not you're not going to get what you vote for, anyone who's been consciously living in this country for the last 30 or 40 years has hardly ever gotten anything so who vote, the way to use your vote is to vote against what you don't want instead of trying to vote for what you do want. I very much agree In favor of voting against, I say vote against the workers wherever you live, if there is any chance that your vote will make it less likely that the workers will win, do it because otherwise you will spend many years regretting it and the conservatives will be less bad than the workers. because they do not want to carry out the constitutional reform they are flaccid it is the stem of King Lan King they are flaccid they do not have real ideas of their own they simply maintain anodyne ideas without knowing what they are for they do not extend them very much they are not energetic and active and neither they nor they have any dogma own so they don't get carried away by that but you are bad but you must accept the difference between the bad and the worst and that generally one prefers the bad to the worst, give them the option.

I do. There have been many people who have become so frustrated with you with the Conservative party that they believe this election is all but lost and that Kier Starman is going to win. a large majority no matter what, but what can happen here is the destruction of the conservative party as they can uproot it. The average has been saying that this could be the election, that it is the end of the road for the conservatives and the beginning of renewal. We need some creative destruction here, we need to flatten it and people need to vote to reject and discard all messages of conservatism so it can be reborn again, perhaps through a farista movement.

I don't know if you're a supporter of that or it could be through something else, but given that you've been one of the leading, if not the leading, conservative critics of the right, it's funny that you now don't want to advise people to take advantage This opportunity to simply end the totally conservative movement so that again, it's not funny, it's perfectly rational. I take the point of view of the main AR batons when the facts change. I changed my mind, what do you sir make the facts in 2010 when I lost friends again and actually lost weight? frustrated by the fight urging people that what they absolutely should not do is support Cameron's coup and the Tor party and that they should not vote for Tor in 2010.

The turning point, as far as I'm concerned, in our history modern, you would have kept it. Gordon Brown, oh, completely yes, and Gordon Brown by then was exhausted, uh, and in fact, in several important ways to the right of David Cameron, that wasn't a big loss, uh, trading David Caramon for Gordon Brown and in the interim period as Gordon Brown sat scowling. in Downing Street unable to do much then we could have rebuilt possibly we couldn't not necessarily definitely we could have rebuilt some kind of patriotic, socially, morally and educationally conservative party, we could have failed it as early as 2010, after 13 years of vigorous blaris and much of What was left of Conservative Britain in education, in academia, in newspapers, in broadcasting, in life in general, had already been destroyed, the resources for reconstruction were scarce, but we had much more than the pathetic tribute bands who are now Claiming they will be able to replace themselves, we now have Niga Farage and the reform of the UK, what's the problem with them?

Well, I mean, one thing was wrong with Nigel Farage and other people think about others, to me, that leads to all kinds of Another conclusion is that he has come out in favor of decriminalizing marijuana, whatever Nigel Farage is , he's not a conservative, well, this is a man who wants to have Net Zero immigration, he wants to have a fundamentally different New Jersey model, like it was when you heard about it. in the debates a few days ago he sounded like he was running for the leadership of the conservative party now you dismiss everything he has to say because he was once a semi-liberal or marijuana well no, i don't think njel farage is what we would call a deep thinker, I don't think he has serious thoughts about many things, I think he's an immensely astute man and I think he's a pretty lucky man, but I don't think he has any particular interest in the things that really concern me about the social, cultural and moral decay of this country, okay, but if there were Hitchin zes out there and I'm sure they would try to follow their school of thoughts here, they could have done it.

He agreed with every word he has written about the Conservative party. Maybe they will finally see NAA Faraj and reform the UK as a new right wing party and what they are basically offering is conservatism without the conservatives. Well, they might think that, but they don't understand the In that

case

, I suppose it is conceivable that there will be such a change in the British electoral system and that Farage will end up forming the opposition in Parliament, but it is much more likely that, as I think you speculated , it would be a very large parliamentary Labor party. uh the Lib Dems as the official opposition and a bunch of other people scattered around the chamber are being ignored and that's the most likely outcome and that outcome would definitely mean two Labor terms.

Without a doubt, in my opinion, as I say, if they can get two terms, they will be there forever, so their message in this 2024 election is to vote Conservative. No. I'm not saying at all that anyone should vote for anyone. You should vote against the Labor Party wherever you are. voting could prevent the election of a Labor MP use it so vote lidm if that would have that effect yes if you live in Bristol Central vote green I guess so I think to stop the labor movement I mean unless it's less enthusiastic, but let's just not do it.

I don't want them with a majority. I don't think people should be influenced by polls. They may be right. They may be wrong. polls are often wrong in recent times polls have been completely wrong about elections in India Norway and Australia in the history of this country I have witnessed elections where polls have been completely wrong, the most notable being the 1970 , where on the election night of June 18, the Times Round on its front page three polls say that Labor has a majority and a professor from Strath Clyde who was not John Curtis, I think predicting a Labor majority of 75 and the edition of 500 a.m. of the Times of June 19 said conservatives on their way to victory these things can be wrong and, what's more, it is a question of self-respect, if you are a self-respecting person, with a mind and a will, you shouldn't look over your shoulder and go around to see how You should vote, so a lot of other people are doing this, so I'll do it.

You should vote based on what you think is right. Well, on that note, Peter, thank you very much for joining us on Viewtor TV. It's a pleasure.