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 I would say that 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…

We would like to invite you this Sunday 20th April to ‘Labour: The Womens Champion’ a womens-only public meeting […]

The aim of the meeting is two-fold, firstly to gain female support for the local Labour candidate, Mr Muhammed Rasib, and secondly, to encourage membership from non-member supporters as well as for existing members to get more involved with the work of the Labour Party around Birmingham and surrounding areas.

The program will include Cllr Anita Ward, Chief Whip for the Labour Party, Muhammed Rasib, Labour Candidate for Washwood Heath, local female community champions, as well as members of the ‘Women Take Part’ steering group that Harriet Harman MP has set up, and local councillors.

Please do try to come along to benefit from the program, as well as ask any questions you may have and support this city-wide initiative. There will be many opportunities across the city for female councillors in 2010, especially for black and ethnic minority communities, so if it is something you are thinking about, you really need to be at this meeting.

Unfortunately, I will be unable to attend this meeting due to my chromosomal make-up (something I had little control of), but I have to question the validity of a women-only meeting called ‘Labour: The Womens Champion’, given its primary purpose is to garner support for a male candidate.

Car crash blogging is far from unusual (oh, for the services of a diligent and wise editor!), and I’ve published a few posts that now make me cringe with embarrassment. But Marko Attila Hoare’s latest defence of neo-Burkeism is a particularly fine example of the genre.

Take the following, which has been flagged this morning by Paulie…

“There are plenty of things wrong with the existing order here in the UK, and plenty of worthwhile fights left to fight. We need, for example, to free people from the oppression and misery of living on sink estates; break the hold of crime and violence over our young people; restore their belief in the value of education and self-improvement; provide child-care for single mothers to enable them to work; provide homes for all our citizens and residents; integrate all our ethnic and religious minorities into our citizenry; and so on. My personal belief is that the UK’s social problems are caused more by lack of education and opportunity for those lower down the social ladder, and by deficiencies in popular culture among the population at large, than they are by poverty or inequalities in wealth. I view, for example, the fact that our Labour government is committed to the target of half of all school-leavers going to university as more inspiring than any number of radicals writing about public ownership of the means of production. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush…”

“… deficiencies in popular culture among the population at large”? Very telling, that, as is “lower down the social ladder”. Given the social and cultural biases displayed in Hoare’s latest post and elsewhere in his writing, surely it’s a bit rich for the man to complain about the “Burkean” epithet.

Much of Hoare’s latest post is a diatribe against this blog written in a style very similar to that of the ultra-leftists he damns with an almost aristocratic haughtiness. One or two of us are, it seems, worthy of the great man’s attention, but the rest of us are far too common; no different from the Spartacist League or the Workers Revolutionary Party. That’s an interesting if unoriginal use of demonising rhetorical devices. Now say what you will about Daniel Davies, but that part of his criticism of certain Euston Manifesto signatories is highly accurate.

Other drink-soaked ones can speak for themselves. I may not be the sort of person one invites for tea at Claridges, but I’m entirely happy with that, and find Hoare’s little rant today mildly amusing. Maybe he finds it difficult to cope emotionally with being called a bore.

But hang on a second! The funny thing is, I could swear that Hoare had this forum for “sectarian hatred, frustration and bitterness” on his blogroll until very recently. If I’m right on this and wasn’t hallucinating, what does it say about Hoare’s latest tantrum?

And apparently I am correct on this matter at least, according to the Oracle of Edinburgh. We were once listed in Hoare’s roll of honour, but then he took us off. Then we went back on when one of us said something kind about the Squire of Greater Surbiton. And now we’re off again.

Call me a shit-stirrer, but I’m beginning to have fun with this.