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by Dr Aidan Rankin
Reviewed by Peter Etherden
First Published in Fourth World Review 120 in March 2003
THE Politics of The Forked
Tongue is not an easy read. You cannot curl up in a chair with
your mind disengaged. The text is compact, the meaning often
quite subtle and ideas rush in one upon the other with clarifications
often relegated to the notes at the back of the book. You may
find you need to read the book several times, something that
its brevity permits. Yet this is a deceptive book. Although it
purports to be about political correctness it helped me to understand
such seemingly unrelated political events as the Liberal Party
MP for Oldham, one Winston Spencer Churchill, crossing the floor
of the House of Commons to join the Conservative Party and the
split in the Swedish Liberal Party that led to the founding of
the Swedish Green Party.
Dr Rankin has a PhD in politics and has spent several years as a Lecturer in Government at the London School of Economics. He is an expert on British political history and in particular on the shifting nature of liberalism and of the parties that seek to represent tolerance, individual liberty and social justice. Here are three quotations to give you the flavour of Rankin's analysis:
The
new liberal's ceaseless talk of diversity is fork-tongued, for
under the rubric of political correctness they seek to impose
a uniformity of behaviour and thought;
New liberals do
not appreciate true diversity. They place abstract principles
before real human need, regarding those principles as universally
valid and beyond question;
Equality has come
to be seen as breaking the population into groups and distributing
collective rights at the behest of self-appointed lobbyists.
Implicit in The Politics of The Forked Tongue is the elusive Third Way being sought by the think-tanks of the Centre-Right and Centre-Left around the world. Rankin is critical of both left and right. 'By failing to adopt human-scale economics or face down a new breed of Puritan bigotry the left has lost any vision of civil society that it had previously possessed,' he writes. The Conservatives are no better for they had '…discarded most notions of common endeavour and embraced a bogus form of individualism by which human beings are reduced to economic units and the measure of all things is economic growth, not quality of life'.
There is a powerful resonance between Rankin's
interpretation of the 'Third Way' and the radical human-scale
politics of Professor Leopold Kohr and John Papworth. Let me
illustrate this with four further quotations:
'[New Liberalism's]
commitment to political correctness blocks off the possibility
of local variation and prevents consideration of individual needs';
'Whereas traditional
liberalism has strong local roots, new liberalism is a centralising
force, prepared to coerce instead of persuade';
'Small businesses,
craftsmen and independent farmers are natural enemies of the
new liberal who favours large-scale units, be they state or corporate';
'New liberals
put their faith in laws and structures erected by the state or
imposed by court ruling, regarding local initiatives and voluntary
activities with great suspicion'.
The Politics of The Forked Tongue provides early indication of a ground-breaking political analysis, evidence of a fresh new mind cutting through the undergrowth of today's party politics and representative democracies to reveal forgotten paths of political thought. At present we have only a work in progress but I would hazard the prediction that the sequel might turn out to be as important to our political generation as the political tracts of Edmund Burke, Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill were to theirs.
Aidan Rankin is co-Editor of New European. His book, The Politics of the Forked Tongue: Authoritarian Liberalism was published in 2002 and is available from New European Publications, 14-16 Carroun Road, London SW8 1JT, price £9.
P.O.Box 36, Rye, Sussex, TN31 7ZE England
Tel/Fax: 01793 226397
Email: orders@cesc.net
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