Why I don't speak on behalf of the collective left

As a political writer, one of the things that I find really frustrating is the fact that so many people tend to simply dismiss my views by crudely labeling them as those of an enemy ideology.

By far the most common label that people tend to use to dismiss my work is "leftie" (usually combined with a smattering of crude insults, fallacious arguments and lazy assumptions) but many others have also tried to condemn me by labeling me as a "communist", "Marxist", "socialist" "anti-capitalist" and many other things, without ever having tried to justify their assertions with facts, evidence or analysis.

The idea that I somehow represent any of these political viewpoints is completely wrongheaded, and the tactic of labeling me as such and then attacking the label is an extremely weak debating strategy indeed.

I'm just a guy

The views that I express in my work are my own. I don't speak on behalf of any organisation or ideology whatever. People are free to agree with me or disagree with me as they please, in fact I actively encourage people to try to find something I've said that they disagree with, because I'm just a guy from Yorkshire, and nobody should be 100% agreeing with everything I say.

I'm not a member of any political party and I never have been, however there is obviously some overlap between my views and those of particular political groups. A few examples of this kind of overlap include Positive Money, The Green Party, Common Weal, Unlock Democracy, Basic Income Europe and Rethinking Economics, but I don't endorse everything that these groups say, and I certainly don't speak on their behalf.

I don't speak on anyone's behalf but my own. If people agree with what I've said, they're absolutely free to share my articles and infographics, to quote me or to borrow my arguments for their own use. They can do this without the act of borrowing a specific veiwpoint of mine being a blanket endorsement of everything I've ever said.

Heuristics

The tendency for human beings to put simple labels on things is perfectly natural. The world would be impossibly complicated if we had to consider the incredibly complex detail of everything we experience, rather than just labeling things "tree", "cloud", "person", "blogger", "left-winger" or whatever.

The act of putting simple labels on things is a normal and necessary part of human existence, but there's still a strong distinction to be made between people who understand concepts like heuristics and confirmation bias, and recognise within themselves that they often use simple labels to reduce the incredible complexity of things to a manageable level, and those of us who don't, and tend to think rigidly within the limits of the simplistic labels they've applied to things.

I'm not trying to be judgmental or anything, or to say that some people are more inherently aware than others, because as far as I'm concerned it's within almost anybodies grasp to understand stuff like confirmation bias and heuristics if they have the opportunity and inclination to learn about them.

Labeling things

I am always very hesitant to label my beliefs, especially because so many political and economic words have become so layered with meanings that go so far beyond the original intended senses, that in many people's minds they mean something completely different to the actual definition.

I'm pretty sure that most of the people who tend to use words like "leftie" and "socialist" as insults to hurl at people actually have very little idea of what the words actually mean. While someone who self-identifies as a socialist believes that the means of production should be owned socially and run cooperatively for the benefit of all sectors of society, the person who has only ever read about the perils of socialism in the Murdoch press or the Daily Mail is likely to be using some kind of simplistic short-hand platitude like "spending other people's money" or "jealous of success" as their definition of what socialism means. Thus, to self-identify as a socialist is to give many people a convenient label with which to immediately dismiss your views as ridiculous.

I'm not saying that socialism is right or wrong. There are so many different branches of it that any such simplification would be an exercise in lazy absolutism. What I will say is that I strongly agree with some socialists about some things, I strongly disagree with other socialists about other things, and that the vast majority of my views on socialism fall somewhere between the two extremes.

My reluctance to pigeonhole myself by labeling my views with specific words is summed up by one of my favourite (and most easily memorable) existentialist quotes:

"Once you label me, you negate me" - Søren Kierkegaard

Left-Libertarianism

One of the very few labels I have ever allowed myself to self-apply is left-libertarian because the term simply doesn't carry the layers upon layers of (often bizarrely warped) political baggage in the same way as so many other terms like socialist, capitalist, communist, anti-capitalist, anarchist etc.

In reality my political and economic views are too complex to be constrained by a term like left-libertarian, but I am prepared to wear the label because it should be reasonably self-evident that a left-libertarian is concerned with promoting social justice and maximising freedom, and even if it's not self-evident, people would either have to think a while about what it means or go and look it up (both of which are good outcomes). They certainly wouldn't be able to use it as a convenient label to dismiss my views as, and to hurl at me as an insult, because "you left-libertarian bastard" and other such potential insults just don't parse.
  
The divided left

When people try to dismiss my work by labeling it "leftie" they often make the mistake of talking about "the left" as if all left-wing people are some kind of hive mind, and as if generalistic criticism of anything that is claimed to be left-wing carries the same weight as actually reading what's been said and addressing any of the specific points that have been raised. It's easy to spot these kinds of collective criticisms because they often refer to "the left" as if everyone who is not as right-wing as they are is part of one homogeneous blob that can be generalised about and dismissed.

Anyone who knows anything about left-wing politics (or has seen The Life of Brian) must be familiar with the problem of factionalisation. One of the most bitterly frustrating things about left-wing people is that so many of them seem to have more determination to attack other left-wing people for promoting the wrong shade of left-wingness, than they have to actually criticise the real enemies of the left like powerful right-wing media barons, entrenched establishment interests, tax-dodging multinational corporations, the pushers of neoclassical pseudo-economic dogma and the crony capitalist political elites.

It is easily apparent that "the left" is so divided and factionised that anyone who makes sweeping generalisations about "the left" clearly doesn't actually know anything much about it at all.

Not all "lefties" agree with me

Some of the strongest and most heartfelt criticisms of my work come from other people on the left who think that I'm doing it wrong. Other strong criticisms come from the libertarian-right.

I think the reason that the strongest criticisms of my work tend to come from people with whom I have something in common is that they are capable of actually engaging with what I've said, rather than simply labeling it as "leftie bollocks" and hurling a sequence of insults and logical fallacies at me.

It's obviously a lot easier to build a coherent counter argument to something if you actually read what has been written and set out your specific objections to the parts you disagree with, as opposed to simply dismissing the whole thing as "leftie bollocks".

It does seem like a strange phenomenon, but my experience bears it out. The most coherent criticisms of my work almost always come from people who occupy the green and yellow segments (see diagram), whilst the vast majority of insult and logical fallacy laden "critiques" of my work see to come from supporters of political parties that occupy the red quadrant.

The idea that I somehow represent all "lefties", or all libertarians for that matter, is nonsense, especially given that the most coherent criticisms of my work almost invariably come from other "lefties" and other libertarians.

Why I don't speak on behalf of the collective left

I don't speak on behalf of the collective left because I'm just a bloke sharing my opinions. I don't represent any political parties or protest groups, and neither do I claim to speak on behalf of people who follow my Facebook page or share my work. I speak on my own behalf, and if other people choose to agree or disagree with any of the things I've said, that's entirely their own prerogative.

People who try to dismiss what I'm saying by making generalised criticisms of "the left" as if I'm some kind of spokesman for the "leftie" hive mind, or by hurling political words at me as if they are insults (rather than technical terms with specific definitions), are basically demeaning themselves by publicly demonstrating the fact that they don't actually have a meanigful argument against what I'm saying, and that they're incapable of even understanding that what they've said doesn't even remotely constitute a coherent counter argument.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Absolute equality and the pedantic left

There are some, that I call "the pedantic left" who seem to prefer the idea of a permanent neoliberal crony capitalist dystopia (where the cultural hegemony dictates the definition of "socialism" is akin to something like "pure evil") to the idea that they might have to compromise with other leftists that have slightly different interpretations of what "socialism" might actually mean, so that together they can build solidarity and fight back against the ever accelerating inequality imposed by the crony capitalist establishment.

In my view this abandonment of solidarity in order to engage in pedantic left-wing infighting is one of the big reasons that the right-wing crony capitalist establishment has managed to increase inequality so dramatically and to build and reinforce such a strong cultural hegemony in the first place.

Absolute equality

Distribution of resources

The subject of this article has been on my mind for some time, but an argument with a couple of socialists over the definition of the word "socialism" has pushed it to the front of my queue of articles to write.

The argument is this: I came across an American video on wealth distribution which defined "socialism" as absolute equality, where the poorest person in society gets absolutely the same as the richest person in society (see images). The rest of the video was quite interesting so I posted it on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page with a disclaimer about the absolutist equality stance being a complete straw-man misrepresentation of what "socialism" actually means. 



In my view socialism means that people should have equal access to fundamental resources like education, health care, welfare, energy, finance and sufficient staple resources like food and water. This means that such fundamentals mustn't be monopolised or commodified by rent seekers. To put this into very simple terms; my view of "socialism" is that society should provide people with equal access to opportunities and equal access to fundamental resources, not ruthlessly enforce absolute equality in everything (no matter how much or little the individual is prepared or able to contribute to society).

Several angry socialists came along to condemn my view of socialism as "facile" in defence of the absolutist equality position I was criticising. The problem of course is that the absolutist equality stance is obviously a lot more "facile" than a system that provides equal access to fundamental resources (health care, staple resources, energy, welfare) and opportunities (such as education and finance), but allows economic freedom to pursue non-fundamental commodities (consumer products, arts, literature, modern technology, entertainments, luxury goods, Pigovian products ...).

One of the very easy to grasp criticisms of the absolutist equality position is that some people want commodities that others don't. Some people want 64" flatscreen televisions and others don't (because like me, perhaps they barely watch TV or play computer games). I don't want a massive flatscreen TV, but I have absolutely no problem with others aspiring to ownership of commodities that I don't want. If they want to work a bit harder, or for a few hours longer to acquire the luxury item I don't want, then that's absolutely fine by me, just as the guy with the TV is probably quite happy that I work a bit harder or longer to acquire the science fiction books that he might have absolutely no interest in owning.

Under the absolutist equality definition of socialism either 64" screens (and my science fiction books) would have to be provided to everyone (even those that don't want them - a waste of resources) or they'd have to be banned (totalitarianism). The only other option would be to devise a system which determines how much relative utility is provided by each non-essential commodity, which would rely on the same kind of aggregation problems as neoclassical economics does, and would result in the creation of a vast and inefficient redistributive bureaucracy (is it even possible to determine how many science fiction books create the same level of utility as a big telly? Would a state administered system that expends resources on making such arbitrary determinations result in the most efficient use of resources?).

If you think equal access to basic resources, but freedom to pursue non-essentials is more "facile" than absolutist mandatory equality in absolutely everything, you either haven't thought about it very much or you've misunderstood the meaning of the word "facile".

The value of labour

The next problem with the absolutist equality stance is that it does something that no true socialist would accept; it reduces the value of labour to zero.

One of the most obvious problems with the idea of absolute equality is the fact that all labour would have to be given the same value. The workaholic manager would earn the same as the laid back shop assistant; the highly trained engineer would earn the same as the unskilled labourer; the educated expert would earn the same as the anti-intellectual that refuses to learn new skills; the worker in a dangerous or highly stressful job would earn the same as the worker in a safe or extremely relaxing job. To the vast majority of people, such a system would be transparently unfair. If your system contradicts the common-sense view that the hardworking deserve more than the lazy, the educated deserve more than the uneducated and that jobs in which the individuals risk their health or their lives deserve some form of danger compensation, then you will never be able to enforce such a system without resorting to totalitarianism.

The idea that all labour is equal is a huge problem, but there is a bigger problem still. If everyone is to get exactly the same whether they choose to work or not, then the value of labour is reduced to zero (in financial terms) because it classifies labour as having exactly the same value as no-labour. If the person that chooses not to contribute gets exactly the same as those that choose to work (in a difficult and dangerous jobs to fun and easy ones), then the value of labour is reduced to zero, meaning that there is no financial incentive to work at all. Why would anyone get up in the morning to go and do a dangerous or unpleasant job if they were entitled to exactly the same share of resources if they just stayed at home and did nothing?

The only way an absolutist equality system could possibly work is if labour was made mandatory (for those that are able), because without labour, society would cease to function. But how would it even be possible to force people to work in a system which explicitly prohibits financial coercion?

Absolute equality is the same kind of nonsensical and unworkable absolutist gibberish as the extreme-right view that deregulated markets are perfectly efficient, which is the reason that I choose to believe in a form of socialism that provides for people's fundamental needs, eradicates poverty and removes barriers to opportunities through education and access to finance, but which takes into account the value of the social contribution of the individuals and provides the individual with the liberty to acquire non-essential resources, which therefore creates the incentives to work and to contribute to society.

I believe that the absolute equality position is an absurd caricature of what socialism means. It is such an absurdly unrealistic stance that you're actually undermining the meaning of socialism if you believe in such nonsense and proclaim yourself a socialist. You're not a socialist, you're not even a Marxist (Karl Marx believed that incentives and class hierarchies would still exist within the socialist society) you're an absolutist egalitarian.

Absolutism vs compromise

Returning to the subject of "the pedantic left", it's fair to say that the market socialist (who has a somewhat similar definition of socialism to my own) and the absolutist egalitarian have something in common. They are both strongly opposed to the crony capitalist cultural hegemony and the discredited neoliberal pseudo-scientific economic models that are used to to justify the rent-seeking behavior and outright corruption of the wealthy establishment.

Surely it makes sense for the opponents of crony capitalism to put their differences aside and agree that the most important thing in the immediacy is to come together in solidarity to oppose the cultural hegemony of the establishment?

If you believe in the absolute equality definition of socialism, surely it is better to compromise with market socialists (and other left-wing factions), because a market socialism system is far, far closer to your absolute equality ideal than the vast and rapidly growing inequalities of the current neoliberal socio-economic paradigm.

The problem is that many on the left fail to see it this way, and refuse to co-operate with anyone else on the left who has strayed from their interpretation of "true socialism". One of the most visible examples of this is that way that several members of the new left wing group Left Unity have expended their energies attacking and undermining the Green Party, rather than concentrating on the development of a coherent set of left-wing policies and a powerful social justice narrative to promote their own party.

Instead as attacking the Green Party as "not left-wing enough", it would surely make more sense for Left Unity to examine what the Green Party have done right in order to break into the closed shop of orthodox neoliberal establishment politics that is Westminster, and to identify areas of agreement in which the two parties can co-operate.

If the left spends it's time and energy bickering and infighting, they simply allow the crony capitalist establishment to continue strengthening and reinforcing their cultural hegemony.

Leftist solidarity

There are many examples of diverse leftist groups coming together in solidarity to form powerful political organisations, I'll give a couple of brief examples.

Labour
The Labour party in the UK was born of co-operation between numerous trade unions and leftist political groups. Although Labour was never perfect, and has now been usurped by adherents of orthodox neoliberalism, it did achieve a number of important things that the vast majority of left-wing people can appreciate, including the establishment of the National Health Service, the massive improvements to the social safety net, legal aid, the post-war improvements in housing, and the establishment of the economic conditions that led to the unprecedented general prosperity and social mobility of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which have subsequently been eroded away by over three decades of neoliberal pseudo-economics.

Syriza
The Greek political party Syriza (the coalition of the radical left) was formed as a coalition of various leftist groups in 2004. The groups that make it up include Social Democrats, Marxists, Trotskyites and the Green Left. In the wake of the Greek economic crisis and the economically destructive bailout conditions imposed by the IMF, the European Central Bank and the EU, they have risen to become the second most popular party in Greece and the main opposition in the Greek parliament. Since the last election in 2012 their popularity has improved again, meaning that if (when) the current coalition government fails, they will almost certainly form the next Greek government. Although they are extremely unlikely to impose a full-blownTrotskyite revolution, the Trotskyite faction must recognise that being part of a broad left-wing coalition is preferable to being a tiny minority party with no elected representatives at all.

The problem with co-operation is that when the views of several leftist organisations are aggregated, the result is not entirely pleasing to all of the participants. However, the result is usually a great deal better than a divided left bickering amongst themselves and allowing the right to maintain absolute control over society and the economy.

Conclusion

The self-defeating divisiveness of the left is deeply problematic but it is also amusing. The idea of representatives of a group called Left Unity expending their time and effort in attacking and undermining other left-wing groups is a laughable display of unintentional irony. Probably the most amusing parody of the factionalisation of the left is the famous Monty Pythons' Judaen People's Front scene from the Life of Brian, where they openly admit that the only people they hate more than their Roman oppressors are the various other anti-imperialist factions.

The only way that the left is ever going to be able to effectively fight back against the cultural hegemony of the neoliberal right, and begin reversing the trend towards ever greater inequality, is if we put our own differences aside and show some solidarity against the greater enemy.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that if you are unwilling to tolerate any left-wing views that are not almost identical to your own, then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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12 things you should know about the Daily Mail slurs against Ralph Miliband

The Tories thought they were going to win some kind of PR coup by using their 2013 party conference to do little more than announce that they've completely run out of ideas and their only policies are even more malicious attacks on the unemployed and then engaging in a spot of empty bragging about how well they are managing the economy (when everyone knows that the only people experiencing "recovery" are the establishment elite and their Tory chums - the rest of us are still being punished with the longest sustained period of wage repression since the 19th Century).

Their plans have come badly unstuck because the headlines, and the social mediascape have been dominated by reactions to an article in the Daily Mail slurring the deceased academic Ralph Miliband, for no reason other than the fact that he was the father of the Labour party leader.

This smear attack spent an awful lot of effort analysing diary entries Ralph Miliband made when he was 17 but almost completely glossed over the three years he spent serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. It also contained outright lies about his political stance on the Soviet Union and included a photograph of Ralph Miliband's grave with an incredibly tasteless pun. After a great deal of criticism from across the political spectrum, the Daily Mail published an bombastic editorial, in which, instead of apologising for their insults and lies, they actually made things even worse (here's an annotated copy of that editorial).

Here are twelve things you should know about this revolting Daily Mail smear attack.

Inappropriate moral arbitration

The Daily Mail proprietor Harold Harmsworth
with his hero, Adolf Hitler.

By condemning Ralph Miliband as "evil" and "unpatriotic" the Daily Mail have appointed themselves arbiters of what is moral, and what is British. It is difficult to imagine a more inappropriate organisation to decide such things. 

Surely everyone now knows that the Daily Mail has a long history of supporting fascism?

During the interwar years the Mail was run by a fascist sympathiser called Harold Harmsworth who used the Daily Mail to push for an alliance between Britain and Nazi Germany and to praise and promote Oswald Mosely's British Union of Fascists.

Harmsworth's fixation with fascism and his adoration of Adolf Hitler led him to write to Hitler on several occasions congratulating him on his military conquests. He described Hitler's as "superhuman" and predicted that he would become known in Britain as "Adolf the Great". Harmsworth also travelled to Germany to have a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler too (see photo).

It's not as if the Daily Mail have learned their lesson about supporting "evil" regimes either. Decades later they chose to openly propagandise in favour of General Pinochet's murderous military dictatorship in Chile. The Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson famously defended the mad Chilean torturer by claiming that "the demonisation of General Pinochet [is] the most successful, mendacious propaganda exercise ever carried out in the 20th century".

What a revolting spectacle to see a newspaper that openly praised and supported Adolf Hitler attacking a Jewish immigrant who served three years in the Royal Navy (including the D-Day landings) as unpatriotic and "evil". If the Daily Mail had any sense of decency, they would of course, keep silent (out of shame at their support for Adolf Hitler) when it comes to determining whether people (especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe) were patriotic or whether their politics were "evil".

Attack the ancestor

The fascist promoter  Harold Harmsworth was more commonly known as
Viscount Rothermere, I don't use such terms because, like Ralph Miliband,
I believe that the UK would be a much better place without so much
inherited wealth and privilege.

Anyone who is familiar with debating techniques, knows that one of the weakest strategies of all is the ad hominum (attack-the-man) tactic. When the weak debater has nothing resembling an adequate retort to the argument of his opponent, he resorts to smear tactics.

The Daily Mail attack on Ralph Miliband as a consequence of Ed Miliband's strong performance at the 2013 Labour Party Conference is lower even than an ad hominum attack. It really does show the paucity of their criticism of Ed Miliband if they think that slurring his dead father represents any kind of reasonable argument.

The worst thing about this attack-the-ancestor strategy is that the Daily Mail is still owned by the descendants of the Hitler adoring Harold Harmsworth. If the Daily Mail see fit to attack Ed Miliband by criticising his father, surely that then gives everyone else the right to attack the current Daily Mail proprietor Jonathan Harmsworth for the fact that his great-grandfather, from whom he inherited his vast media empire, was a filthy Hitler worshiping, Nazi loving anti-Semitic shitbag of a man.

Unpatriotism

Instead of using the fact that his great-grandad was a fascist-promoting Hitler fanboy to criticise the current Daily Mail owner, we can instead focus upon his his own activities, namely his dodgy tax affairs.

Harmsworth is such a "patriot" that he lives in France in order to avoid paying UK tax. His wealth was estimated to be over £1 billion back in 2006, but he is such a "patriot" that he sees no moral obligation to actually pay UK tax on his earnings from the Daily Mail, unlike the vast majority of taxpaying people who are stupid enough to buy a paper that lectures them about what is and isn't patriotic, that is owned by someone who deliberately lives abroad and registers his shares in that newspaper in a tax haven in order to avoid paying tax in the UK!

You'd have to be living in cloud cuckoo land to believe that it isn't unpatriotic to go and live in France in order to deliberately damage the UK economy by dodging-tax on your vast UK earnings.

Outright Lies

There were several outright lies in the Daily Mail slur attack, one of the most egregious was the assertion that Ralph Miliband approved of, and supported human rights abuses by the Soviet Union.

Anyone who is actually familiar with Ralph Miliband's work and views would know that he was actually a critic of the Soviet Union. To put it into rather crude terms, Miliband believed that the Soviet Union represented an absolute bastardisation of Marxism, which gave him a very strong motivation to criticise Soviet human rights abuses. Not because he opposed Marxism out of abject fear of it, like most of the British establishment, but because he saw these abuses as a betrayal of true Marxism, which does not in any way support the idea of a vast, all-powerful state torturing, imprisoning and killing anyone who dares raise a dissident opinion, read dissident literature or listen to dissident music.

One conclusive piece of evidence that Miliband was not an apologist for Soviet human rights abuses was presented by a particularly unlikely source. The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch and pushes the same toxic neoliberal nonsense as the Daily Mail, but they delighted in pointing out that Ralph Miliband was a signatory on a letter to the Times in 1983 which complained about exactly the kind of political persecutions that the Daily Mail accused him of supporting.
               
"Evil" ideas

The Daily Mail claim that Ralph Miliband's ideas and works were "evil" and un-British. Anyone with the slightest amount of curiosity could easily find out for themselves what Miliband actually wrote and conclude that his ideas were far from "evil" ( Here's a short article explaining some of the key themes in Ralph Miliband's works).

Unfortunately, the typical Daily Mail reader has no natural sense of curiosity, and instead simply recycles the opinions they've read in their Fascist Hate Comic in lieu of actually developing anything resembling ideas of their own. 

There are probably hundreds of thousands of Daily Mail readers sold on the idea that Ralph Miliband was an evil Stalin loving commie, and  that his works and legacy should be destroyed to protect future generations, perhaps in a Nazi style public book burning event (we know how much the Daily Mail has a history of supporting Nazi ideas and practices).
            
Misconceptions about Marxism

The attempt to smear Ralph Miliband as an apologist for Soviet oppression simply because he was a student of Marxist philosophy betrays an extreme level of political ignorance. To slur a student of Marxist ideas by association with the worst excesses of the Soviet Union is akin to slurring anyone who believes in capitalist ideas with claims that they support, by implication, the crimes against humanity committed of any number of vile capitalist regimes such as Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Apartheid South Africa or General Pinochet's Chile.

Still, overt displays of political ignorance from a publication that serves no other purpose than to fill the minds of the politically illiterate with simplistic propaganda narratives is hardly surprising is it?

Neoliberalism: A truly unpatriotic ideology

The Daily Mail tried to claim that Ralph Milibands left-wing ideas (such as his opposition to hegemony and inherited privilege and his promotion of participatory democracy and meritocracy) were unpatriotic, but it should be absolutely clear to anyone who has followed political developments since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, that if there is one particularly unpatriotic economic ideology it is the brand of orthodox neoliberal pseudo-economic gibberish that the Daily Mail has ceaselessly championed.

Just think about it for a couple of minutes. Was it the tiny minority of obscure Marxist academics that ensured huge chunks of our nation were sold off on the cheap to unaccountable corporate interests, no matter where they came from?

Of course it wasn't. It was neoliberal economists and politicians, (vociferously supported by the Daily Mail) who have ensured that our utilities companies are mainly owned by foreign interests, including the French state (EDF) and a collective of German municipalities (E-on). The neoliberal brigade also ensured that our public transport system was hived off to foreign interests in a disastrous privatisation experiment that resulted in Britain ending up with the most decrepit and most overpriced public transport network in Western Europe. The neoliberals also ensured that the media could be largely controlled by foreign interests (foreign media ownership is even prohibited in the neoliberalism fixated United States). Thanks to the neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology relentlessly pushed by the Daily Mail, our airports are now operated by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund, our tax collection offices are owned and administered by a tax-dodging company based in Bermuda and even our so-called "independent nuclear deterrent" has been privatised into the hands of a consortium 66% owned by American corporations!

Even now, the darling of the Daily Mail Michael Gove is busy giving away our schools, for free, to unaccountable foreign interests such as the American owned Aurora Academies Trust, which uses a transfer pricing scheme to make sure that British taxpayers' cash is used to pay for an American curriculum to be taught to British kids at their formerly state owned school. 

Do you think Marxists would have allowed this grotesquely unpatriotic sell-off of state infrastructure to happen?

Of course they wouldn't - Had people like Ralph Miliband been in charge, our utilities, transport infrastructure, our military hardware, our schools and our tax collection offices would not be owned by a bunch of corporations that don't give the faintest damn about what is best for the UK economy, they would still be under democratic British control. It doesn't matter whether you believe the right-wing myth that state owned infrastructure is inefficient or not, it is undeniable that had the Marxists been in charge, Britain would still own it's own infrastructure.

Academic Marxism is clearly not as unpatriotic as the Daily Mail's favoured pseudo-economic ideology of neoliberalism. For further demolition of the right-wing "wrap themselves in the flag" appeals to patriotism, check out this article I wrote in 2012.

Some Tories are decent!

The reaction of a few old school Tories demonstrated that in a political world dominated by slimy PR men and vile mud slinging tactics, there are still a few dinosaurs who remember a better, more honourable way of doing politics.

Michael Heseltine was one of these decent Tories. He openly condemned the Daily Mail slur campaign as "unjustified" and accused them of "carrying politics to an extent that is just demeaning".

Another old school Tory called John Moore (who was also a cabinet minister in the Thatcher government), who studied under Ralph Miliband at the London School of Economics, went a lot further than Heseltine, accusing the Mail of telling lies about his former professor. Here's what he said:

"Ralph Miliband taught me and I can say he was one of the most inspiring and objective teachers I had. Of course, we had different political opinions but he never treated me with anything less than complete courtesy and I had profound respect for his integrity ... He had come here as a refugee, done his duty to his adopted country by serving in our Royal Navy during the war, become a great academic and raised a good family ... I saw him week after week and it beggars belief that the Daily Mail can accuse him of lacking patriotism. I never heard him ever say one word which was negative about Britain – our country ... The Daily Mail is telling lies about a good man who I knew. The people of this country are good and decent too. They do not want the Daily Mail attacking the dead relatives of politicians to make political points." [source]

A different approach from Tory HQ

The response from Tory party HQ was a lot more mealy mouthed. They instructed Tory MPs to say nothing more than statements along the lines of "any child would want to defend a parent". 

This is quite clearly an effort to manage the reaction in a way that allows the Tories to be seen to be responding to the negative public reaction to the slur attack, but to keep the political capital the Mail have given them by creating the caricature of "Red Ed defending his Stalinist Dad".

Instructing their MPs to simply state that any child would defend their parent, without condemning the lies, the underhand tactics of attacking a man by slurring a dead relative, or the distasteful gravestone pun is a rotten tactical move, which is akin to saying "even serial killers have loving families". This kind of carefully managed malice has the fingerprints of Lynton Crosby all over it. It is quite clear from this PR manouvre that top decision makers at Tory HQ are delighted about the political capital they've gained through the Daily Mail slurs, so they've decided to respond in the most mealy mouthed manner possible, so as to avoid undermining the useful public perception that Ed Miliband's dad was "evil".

Lack of respect for the dead

I've already demonstrated the disgusting hypocrisy of the Daily Mail in two of the previous sections (A newspaper that openly supported Adolf Hitler accusing other people of supporting "evil" regimes, A newspaper owned by a foreign resident tax-dodger accusing other people of being unpatriotic) but there is one other piece of hypocrisy that is really quite remarkable.

I'm sure everyone remembers the wave of cognitive dissonance inducing right-wing political correctness that swept the nation in the week following the death of Margaret Thatcher.

One of the loudest cheerleaders of this brand-new "mustn't criticise the dead" form of political correctness was the Daily Mail. They published one particularaly cringeworthy piece in which they described any criticism of Margaret Thatcher or her toxic legacies as "bilious hatred and lack of respect" and claimed it as a "disturbing new low in British life".
 
Just a few months later, they've taken to openly lying about a dead academic in order to score political points against his son, and printing an extremely distasteful "pun" next to a picture of his grave.

I'm sure we can all agree that this kind of utterly hypocritical and downright dishonest political point scoring marks a "disturbing new low in British life".

Two million people read this shit!

The thinking person knows that the Daily Mail is a revolting tabloid newspaper with a long history of promoting fascistic ideas, aimed at the simple-minded reactionary; the kind of intellectually sub-normal half-wit who lives their life in a constant state of fury at things they don't properly understand. People who are so incapable of critical thought that they are completely immune to cognitive dissonance. People who willingly buy into the Daily Mail's moral purity campaign against pornography (which has helped enormously with David Cameron's plans to censor the internet), whilst enjoying the disgracefully sexist and voyeuristic Daily Mail sidebar of smut and the regular appearance of articles which describe teenage girls (usually the children of celebrities) in overtly sexual language.

What the thinking person often fails to realise is that the Daily Mail has a circulation of around 2 million, and when combined with massive circulation of the criminal organisation know as the Murdoch gutter press, it is absolutely clear that us thinking people are now hopelessly outnumbered by these foaming right-wing reactionaries.

Fear 

If the motivation behind such a cowardly attack on the deceased parent of a politician tells us one thing above all others, it is that the attackers are motivated by fear. It is no surprise at all that this attack came within days of Ed Miliband's generally well received conference speech, in which he outlined a few almost left-wing ideas.

Had Ralph Miliband been alive to see his son's speech he would surely have been as disappointed as I was that all Ed offered was a pledge to cap the profits of the gouging foreign multinationals that run our energy infrastructure, rather than a pledge to begin renationalising our energy infrastructure in order to bring it back under democratic control.

But the idea of capping the obscene profiteering of the energy multinationals sent the Daily Mail apoplectic with rage, and the result was their bile-fest against Ed Miliband's dad.

It seems that, if he's got the rabid right-wing press foaming at the mouth and running scared, perhaps Ed Miliband is actually doing something more-or-less right after all?

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