Might I be a Marxist?

I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist

James Delingpole

3 November 2007

It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with

Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’

And she wasn’t asking it as a glib, meaningless flourish, in the way a Tory MP trying to impress might ask, ‘Why we can’t make our NHS system be the envy of the world?’ Claire Fox genuinely believes that a traditional, liberal arts education of the sort offered by Eton — Latin, Greek, rigour, dates — is best. And that it’s this that our state schools should be offering our dismal, failing youth — not half-baked, dumbed-down classes about citizenship, global warming and Mary Seacole.

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Suresh Dogra

November 10th, 2007 5:01pm Report this comment

I fully agree with you.I believe that radicals and revolutionaries do very serious damage to society.Great social change and happiness are brought about by those people who do their work quietly and honestly within the space provided to them by society.The discontented lot is always kicking up one row or the other,disturbing society and making normal activity difficult.

CS Ferguson

November 19th, 2007 1:01pm Report this comment

"Why can't all schools belike Eton? Because state education was destroyed by socialism. Why can't the NHS be the most performant in the world? Because the most performing health system was destroyed by the socialist NHS." All schools can't be like Eton because there isn't upwards of £20,000 per pupil available to the state sector, and because it isn't possible to take all pupils out of their family environment and immerse them entirely in an intensive scholastic culture. Moreover, conservatives would be screaming from the rooftops about profligate public spending and state undermining of family life if it were tried. If anyone believes that all schools were like Eton prior to 'socialism', they're living in a fantasy world, unless they propose to go so far back that Eton and its ilk were the only schools that existed and all but a miniscule elite were denied any form of formal education. The NHS isn't the best performing healthcare system in the world because Britain spends a smaller proportion of its GDP on healthcare than any other industrialised nation. Again, that anyone believes that healthcare provision was superior before the establishment of the NHS, where no form of healthcare beyond the most basic variety was available to large sections of the populace. An 'excellent' health or education system may make take many potential forms, but a situation where an excellent service is available to a tiny propotion of the population and where the rest can hang, is not one of them.

Susanne

December 8th, 2007 1:26am Report this comment

Tre has never, inmy opinion, been much difference between the Marxist and old school Tory ideologies. This is perhaps why you found you had similar views to Claire Fox.

David Silverman

May 12th, 2008 4:13am Report this comment

You've neglected to mention most of the basic tenants of Marxism, if you had, you could have hardly sustained an argument that there is no difference between you and a marxist. Just because you can pick out a debate about education or the environment and find common ground, doesn't mean there is no difference between left and right anymore (or that Marxism is irrelevant).

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