You shouldn't think I don't have things to say, things to think. I just find it hard - as I have for as long as I can meaningfully remember - to get them down
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I saw part of that in the Snail itself (not my own copy, I hasten to add). For the most part, completely beyond parody - Quentin Letts often strikes me as resembling an imagined persona, all the presumptions and prejudices of a certain part of English life thrown together into one, and programmed to come out with all the most obvious lines imaginable (in the bit I read, he even nominates Jimmy Savile - this is a world that still regards the seatbelt laws as a profound infringement of civil liberties). At least Peter Hitchens thinks for himself, whatever you think of *what* he thinks. In 2002 I started a let's-all-laugh-at-Letts thread on Usenet after he had sneered at the government for being so vulgar as to regard faster internet connections in rural areas as a priority (as if he himself was a fucking farmer) - a risky business on as far-right-dominated a group as I was posting on, but it turned into a thread singing the praises of Ludacris (don't ask), so that was all right.
He *is* right about EastEnders, though. His full comments about Westwood (which are far nastier than those you quote) should be repeated to his supposedly left-wing critics over and over again until they realise precisely who they're allying themselves with. The scariest bit there is the comment about ITV (which is showing more signs of turning into a British Fox News if Cameron lets it than even Sky) being Lib Dem. The other commenter is right about Rupert Murdoch (as quite a few traditional conservatives are). And Letts did show unexpected signs of One Nation Toryism when he included Thatcher on the grounds that, through regarding the miners as the enemy within, when in fact many of them were profoundly socially conservative (as indeed they were - the NME of that time was supporting many people who would have viewed its own ultra-liberal socio-cultural stance with every bit as much scepticism as the denizens of Henley-on-Thames would), she strengthened the North-South divide and therefore weakened social cohesion. Hypocritical on Letts' part, of course, but at least he's a tiny fraction of the way there.
"regarding the miners as the enemy within, when in fact many of them were profoundly socially conservative (as indeed they were - the NME of that time was supporting many people who would have viewed its own ultra-liberal socio-cultural stance with every bit as much scepticism as the denizens of Henley-on-Thames would)"
Yeah, a bit like PH's rhetoric about "oh, it was good when we had decent, patriotic, masculine, manly, church-going, Churchill-qouting men working down the coalmines, men who sustained eight million wounds in world war 2 and who were versed in the sublime cadence of the King James Bible, unlike these effete, foppish, pro-EU woofters in call centres today."
Quite. I hope you don't think I'm endorsing Letts/Hitchens because I'm not. There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the nostalgic stance that Old Rightists now take re. Britain's industrial past, remembering that they were the ones who were so quick to call for its abolition when it was still the present, because it bred Marxist traitors who brought down a government or simply because our energy could be obtained quicker and cheaper elsewhere (not to mention their promotion of an essentially pre-industrial image when they controlled official images of the country, as they pretty much did fifty years ago). A few years back, This England magazine (vide Patrick Wright passim) ran a feature in one of those "aspects of old towns" sections about (I think) Middlesbrough - the first time they'd ever really acknowledged industrial Britain, as far as I was aware. The thought of the magazine's readers mourning its demise when they were the ones cheering on the police during the miners' strike was quite stomach-churning for me, and I suspect even more so for those who could meaningfully remember those times.
I think it *is* quite true that many of the miners were socially conservative, though. The Manics' 'Holy Bible' contains pro-death-penalty and anti-PC songs, after all, and the phrase "the nation's moral suicide" (which could so easily be a Mail headline if used in any other context). And I don't think it's romanticisation to say that there was a culture of venerating high culture in some of the mining areas (South Wales especially) that New Leftists would later come to view with suspicion. It could well be the residual echoes, still there in the Manics' childhood (but gone by the time they reached maturity) of this pro-high-culture stance that at least partially formed the sentiments of "PCP" - the Left of the old mining areas was a Left which did not demonise "dead white European males", and I think this is why people like Hitchens retrospectively (though hypocritically) sympathise with it. I remember once writing on The House at World's End, when the "Republic of Mancunia" axis and its long-term affinity with things like Ricky Spillane and early hip-hop came up for discussion, that there was a tendency in the mining areas to be as wary of such things as "the Lord-Lieutenant of Herefordshire" would have been (I used that phrase because it was the most Old Shire England combination of words I could think of, almost a *parody*, for all that it was a real office until Heath got his hands to it, in the same way that Quentin Letts appears to be). I'd still say that. Even the pro-Soviet tendencies in mining areas had much to do with wariness of American pop culture - the Soviet Union was almost to them what a mythical feudal England was to shire conservatives.
Letts is obviously a right-winger of the Americosceptic stripe, and therefore I think he is sometimes right for the wrong reasons, for example when he praises Harold Wilson for having kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Ultimately, though, he is stuck in the same rut as many other Mail writers - he condemns the aftereffects of global capitalism while still denouncing any kind of socialism or state involvement in the economy (just as he denounces deregulated broadcasting while mocking the post-war social democratic ideas which prevented it for so long). His vision is essentially *pre-capitalist* in the same way that Peregrine Worsthorne's is. I think this is why the Mail titles seem more *hypocritical* than those owned by Murdoch - at least his papers have many fewer problems with the actual aftereffects of capitalism.
"There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the nostalgic stance that Old Rightists now take re. Britain's industrial past, remembering that they were the ones who were so quick to call for its abolition when it was still the present, because it bred Marxist traitors who brought down a government..."
Complementary to that, a quote from Hitchens: "what was the reward for the decent, courageous miners of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire who refused, at great cost, to back Arthur Scargill's wretched political strike? Why, they were put on the dole soon afterwards, a funny sort of 'thank you' to the men and families who may well have saved the British constitution through their bravery. Hostility to the Tories in the formerly industrial areas of England is not necessarily irrational."
I would *love* to read some of Hitchens' late 70s / early 80s reports from the Express when he was "industrial correspondent" (at that time a massively important job on virtually any newspaper) - I presume they were heavily slanted towards the Tories, as practically all such reports in the Express, Mail etc. obviously were, and they might make an interesting comparison (to say the least) with some of his latterday quasi-nostalgia for industrial Britain.
He *is* right about EastEnders, though. His full comments about Westwood (which are far nastier than those you quote) should be repeated to his supposedly left-wing critics over and over again until they realise precisely who they're allying themselves with. The scariest bit there is the comment about ITV (which is showing more signs of turning into a British Fox News if Cameron lets it than even Sky) being Lib Dem. The other commenter is right about Rupert Murdoch (as quite a few traditional conservatives are). And Letts did show unexpected signs of One Nation Toryism when he included Thatcher on the grounds that, through regarding the miners as the enemy within, when in fact many of them were profoundly socially conservative (as indeed they were - the NME of that time was supporting many people who would have viewed its own ultra-liberal socio-cultural stance with every bit as much scepticism as the denizens of Henley-on-Thames would), she strengthened the North-South divide and therefore weakened social cohesion. Hypocritical on Letts' part, of course, but at least he's a tiny fraction of the way there.
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Yeah, a bit like PH's rhetoric about "oh, it was good when we had decent, patriotic, masculine, manly, church-going, Churchill-qouting men working down the coalmines, men who sustained eight million wounds in world war 2 and who were versed in the sublime cadence of the King James Bible, unlike these effete, foppish, pro-EU woofters in call centres today."
Reply
I think it *is* quite true that many of the miners were socially conservative, though. The Manics' 'Holy Bible' contains pro-death-penalty and anti-PC songs, after all, and the phrase "the nation's moral suicide" (which could so easily be a Mail headline if used in any other context). And I don't think it's romanticisation to say that there was a culture of venerating high culture in some of the mining areas (South Wales especially) that New Leftists would later come to view with suspicion. It could well be the residual echoes, still there in the Manics' childhood (but gone by the time they reached maturity) of this pro-high-culture stance that at least partially formed the sentiments of "PCP" - the Left of the old mining areas was a Left which did not demonise "dead white European males", and I think this is why people like Hitchens retrospectively (though hypocritically) sympathise with it. I remember once writing on The House at World's End, when the "Republic of Mancunia" axis and its long-term affinity with things like Ricky Spillane and early hip-hop came up for discussion, that there was a tendency in the mining areas to be as wary of such things as "the Lord-Lieutenant of Herefordshire" would have been (I used that phrase because it was the most Old Shire England combination of words I could think of, almost a *parody*, for all that it was a real office until Heath got his hands to it, in the same way that Quentin Letts appears to be). I'd still say that. Even the pro-Soviet tendencies in mining areas had much to do with wariness of American pop culture - the Soviet Union was almost to them what a mythical feudal England was to shire conservatives.
Letts is obviously a right-winger of the Americosceptic stripe, and therefore I think he is sometimes right for the wrong reasons, for example when he praises Harold Wilson for having kept Britain out of the Vietnam War. Ultimately, though, he is stuck in the same rut as many other Mail writers - he condemns the aftereffects of global capitalism while still denouncing any kind of socialism or state involvement in the economy (just as he denounces deregulated broadcasting while mocking the post-war social democratic ideas which prevented it for so long). His vision is essentially *pre-capitalist* in the same way that Peregrine Worsthorne's is. I think this is why the Mail titles seem more *hypocritical* than those owned by Murdoch - at least his papers have many fewer problems with the actual aftereffects of capitalism.
Reply
Complementary to that, a quote from Hitchens: "what was the reward for the decent, courageous miners of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire who refused, at great cost, to back Arthur Scargill's wretched political strike? Why, they were put on the dole soon afterwards, a funny sort of 'thank you' to the men and families who may well have saved the British constitution through their bravery. Hostility to the Tories in the formerly industrial areas of England is not necessarily irrational."
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