For friends, comrades, lumpen fellow cage-dwellers and shit like that...

Now, I haven't really followed the ding-dong between Marko Attila Hoare and my esteemed comrade and fellow Trots blogger Peter Ryley along with a few others but on catching the tail end of this, it isn't difficult to decide whose side you are on:

"While I indeed appreciate and respect several of these contributors, the overall tone of the blog is defined by the hatred, poison and negativity spewed copiously by the lumpen, semi-literate ’Will’ and by one or two others."

I take great offence at the word 'lumpen' being used as a term of abuse. Not personally, you understand - I'm more downwardly-mobile middle-class white trash myself. But in my unrelenting downward trajectory, amongst the most intelligent, gorgeous, freedom-loving people I have ever met have belonged to that class dismissed as 'lumpen', 'underclass', 'unemployable' - and other Victorian shit of that nature. If I'm ever foolish enough to get married again, I'll be having a member of this small but resilient social group as my best man. If I can put it like that, you might just be able to catch the music of what I'm saying - you fucking snob.

And it is Whiggish, Victorian bullshit we have to contend with from 'comrade' Marko. Those who declare the old divisions of left and right to be redundant are invariably former leftists and liberals who can't quite bring themselves to acknowledge that they've lost the faith of their youth and have moved to the right. He takes it further and produces a dichotomy that puts Pro-Western and Anti-Western as the principal ideological division of this age. One of my friends at DSTPFW rightly identified more than a whiff of Fukuyama in what he was saying. Accurate and appropriate, yet in some ways too generous in imputing to our protagonist subtlety of thought he does not possess. For he strikes me as one who belongs to that ancient tribe: those who thought change via humanistic improvement was impossible; then it came along and they accepted it, all the while pretending that they hadn't and simultaneously insisting that no significant future progress was either possible or desirable. A Tory, in other words. And a sensitive Tory at that:

"Not to mention the unending stream of vulgarity and abuse which any civilised person must find disgusting..."

Oh, sweetie! I feel so badly for you - to be introduced to how people in places like Glasgow and Newcastle actually talk. You know, like real people, majority people, common people, unwashed, uneducated and uncouth people. The kind of people who, if you were honest with yourself, you'd admit you despise. How traumatic and ghastly this must be for you. 'Burkes' at home? Unkind, unfair, unjust - to Burke, that is...