Bernard Ingham: Beware of the progressives... they are truly the enemies of the British people

OF all the “isms” in this world, none, Margaret Thatcher used to tell me, has been tested more to destruction than socialism.

The Soviet Union was certainly not a good advert for it. It was so bad that, faced with row upon row of empty shelves in a Moscow suburban supermarket in 1987, Thatcher, the campaigning capitalist, was triumphantly reduced to buying a lonely tin of sardines for Wilberforce, the No 10 cat.

Our 35-year experience of a pale pink version of socialism here in the UK was nowt to write home about. Socialism has also helped to wreck more African nations than you have fingers and toes.

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However idealistic its intentions, it never works out that way. All too often, it seems to promote the abuse of power, though to be fair that is an unsolved problem for all systems of governance, including, as we have latterly seen, the Mother of Parliaments.

Yet for all its failure of stress tests, socialism retains a hold on men’s hearts and minds.

We see it today, for example, in the Guardianistas’ desire to preserve the Big State and their contemptuous dismissal of David Cameron’s substitute – the much maligned Big Society, which he might more usefully have called personal responsibility.

But we have long been assailed by arguably a more insidious menace. Its adherents call themselves liberal progressives. They are usually neither, but let us not hold their vanity against them.

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They must not, however, be allowed to get away with it just because no normal individual would like to be thought illiberal and regressive.

The sad truth is that these so-called liberal progressives have inflicted more damage on the UK in the last 50 years than our watered-down version of socialism could ever manage, even allowing for Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Red Robbo and their poodles in Parliament.

This is my specimen charge sheet of 10 counts:

Undermining marriage and the family plus standards of behaviour and self-discipline with its ripple effect through society;

Ruination of state education;

Prostitution of the universities;

Exploitation of the welfare state – indeed the general pillaging of the public purse;

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Undermining the police as a reliable means of local public protection;

Wrecking the criminal justice system;

Uncontrolled immigration at the expense of existing citizens;

Subservience to Brussels;

Imposition of political correctness on society, threatening freedom of speech;

Fanatical and dictatorial environmentalism, akin to religious mania, which seriously imperils our power supplies and therefore our very economy more fundamentally than Gordon Brown ever managed.

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All this has been done in the name of liberal progressivism or progressive liberalism.

It has made prisoners of most contemporary politicians, including the Prime Minister, who is all too prone to concede to those within his own ranks who would not shudder at being called liberal progressives.

Most of Cameron’s troubles with his own party – and doubts about his quality – stem from his bowing to wet Tory or Lib Dem opinion. Why, he is reputed even to have sided with Chris Huhne’s draconian new carbon reduction targets, which will handicap industry in balancing the nation’s books. All this means that I am ambivalent about Nick Clegg.

Last week, I felt sorry for him and called for people to get off his back. But my support is strictly limited to his commitment to repairing our national finances.

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Beyond that, I do not see him as a national asset but rather as a potential liability because there is far too much of the liberal progressive in him.

The sad truth is that Clegg, Ed Miliband and conceivably the likes of Ken Clarke are blind to the damage liberal progressives are inflicting on society. They are so convinced of their own political righteousness that they never examine the results of the rot that set in with their developing creed from the 1960s.

In many ways liberal progressiveness is a toxic development of the dilute brand of socialism that the UK underwent from 1945-79. It is all the more poisonous for its superficially attractive label.

Essentially it believes in the state, not individuals, and in licence rather than restraint and discipline. It worships equality to the destruction of standards and achievement, as we see daily in education. It inhibits the upholding of the law because it can find a reason, if not entirely an excuse, for any behaviour. It connives at our subjugation by Brussels.

Liberal progressives are truly the enemies of the people. It is time they were rumbled.