Hitchens the Good - Peter, that is - has been charged with leading the Daily Mail’s attempt to join the blogging revolution.  All the dailies are at it now, following the Guardian’s percipient lead.  They are singing along with the late Lionel Bart’s prince of cunning, desperately reviewing the situation.

The situation is this ...

The print media has managed to survive the depredations of news broadcast by radio and then television by offering the reader a special relationship.  Newspapers stand or fall according to the loyalty of the reader.  So the deal is: the paper plays on his bias, however crude that may be and, from a journalistic point of view, however much disingenuity that entails.  And in exchange the reader gives them his undivided attention.  Week in, week out.  “You gettum titillated, me gettum rich … and powerful.”

None are more rich nor more powerful than Rupert Murdoch.  In his speech to The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers in London a fortnight ago he identified “reasoned comment” (though God knows its mostly just comment) as the diamond and pearl encrusted centre-piece of this arrangement.  But is it beginning to prove inadequate to its task?  Murdoch may think so.  Certainly, he thinks that the internet revolution, with blogging at its heart, will be the death of newsprint.

“A new generation of media consumers has risen demanding content delivered when they want it, how they want it and very much as they want it,” he said.  “It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy not just companies but whole countries.”

So last year News Corp went, like most media companies, in search of advertising dollars on-line.  It bought Interflex, the parent company of MySpace - the fifth most-viewed internet domain and a regular halt for 35 million surfers.

Now, it happens that Peter Hitchens latest column for his Sunday Mail blog inadvertently explains why the media companies’ strategy won’t work.  Here he is talking about the three mainstream British political parties:-

The major parties … are institutionally dead.  Labour membership and Tory membership have collapsed during the Thatcher-Blair era, as both these parties have tried to appeal over the heads of traditional supporters, and to ignore their wishes.  The fund-raisers, the canvassers, the envelope-stuffers and subscription collectors who keep parties going have died or drifted away, feeling that they are neither wanted nor needed.

I am told many Labour wards have had to merge with their neighbours because otherwise they can no longer get a quorum for meetings.  The Tories, who debate less but socialise more, have a similar problem.  The old wine and cheese gatherings have dwindled.  Conservative Clubs now have to take non-Tories, even Labour voters, as members to keep their numbers up.

At their annual conferences, the seats are further and further apart to conceal the shrivelling attendance, the debates duller and duller, the average age higher and higher.  Dissent is crushed.  Yes, Labour roughly bundled Walter Wolfgang from the hall for heckling, with the disgraceful assistance of the police.  But the savage Tory purge of Howard Flight, for mildly unorthodox remarks made at a private meeting, was not much different

… The truth is the big parties mistrust and despise their members and their voters, and only survive by misleading them about what they are up to.  That is why ‘spin’, or organised lying as it ought to be called, has become so common.  That is why they seek money from wherever they can get it - and rich men always want to be on good terms with the powerful, or the potentially powerful. This sort of fundraising is squalid and discreditable, and ought to be banned.

But if it were, where would the cash come from to employ the parasites, propagandists, backstairs-crawlers and power-worshippers which modern political parties seem to need to survive?  Why, nowhere, of course.  So they seek to steal the money from us by force, through our taxes … There is absolutely no justification for us being forced - under the threat of imprisonment - to pay for the slimy propaganda of political parties so discredited and clapped out that they cannot even raise their own running costs from their own supporters.

By the same token the The Power Commission, a title of typically overblown self-importance completely at odds with a panel of filo pastry commissioners, reported last February on party funding.  Its idea – a mix of hypothecation and institutional donation - inevitably lacked Hitchens’ rebellious, hard-punching conclusion.  Obviously, the Commission came not to praise Caesar, but most certainly not to bury him.  They did, though, stare into the damp political grave for a fleeting second when they said this (pdf):-

The current way of doing politics is killing politics.  An electoral and party system which is responsive to the changing values and demands of today’s population should be created.  This will allow the development of new political alliances and value systems which will both regenerate existing parties and stimulate the creation of others.

Well, let’s cut through all this and name the cause of our flagging political life.  It isn’t complicated.  The collapse of the old left in the 1980’s left a vacuum which cultural politics was extremely quick to fill.  Almost overnight the working man, for so long the soul and the beneficiary of the left, became the white male heterosexual.  Class was out, and he was the oppressor now.  It was – is – a politics for the cosmopolitan and the metrosexual, and for the social worker and the labour-cost obsessed employer.

Too frightened and divorced from principle to stand fast beside their own supporters the fool-Tories traipsed wearily behind, as they always traipse behind.

The result, as any a blind man could clearly see, was two sets of traditional supporters jilted with not a word of warning or explanation, and left to work out for themselves that there was nothing in the modern game of politics for them.

OK, so now let’s align and array the forces at work in all this, and see how it might pan out for Mr Hitchins and Mr Murdoch.

Just as the vigour has gone from our political life so that powerful bias which characterised and positioned the print media has drained away.  Yes, we still have the Guardian and the Daily Mail at the extremes of daily reportage.  But no matter how many fulminations against “political correctness gone mad” decorate the inside pages of the Mail, the sad truth is that ideological differences only exist on issues of secondary importance.  On the great issues at the core of modern liberalism there are no differences at all.

I will demonstrate it with the help of the Sunday Mail’s new, heavyweight blogger.  The articles on the current Hitchens page commence, as already noted, with “Political Parties must not sponge off the taxpayer.”  Damning though Mr Hitchens manages to be, still he is not clear.  He uses language that points us in the desired direction.  But thoughts thus begun strangely come to an early end.

What does “appeal over the heads of traditional supporters” mean, exactly?  Appeal to whom?  And if “the big parties mistrust and despise their members and their voters, and only survive by misleading them about what they are up to”, what is it that they are, in fact, up to?  We should know.  We are not told.  Indeed, we cannot be told because that would be an illiberal act.  Journalists can’t survive that kind of thing any better than outspoken right-wing academics.

Below that dig at the parties Hitchens writes a piece titled, “Kilroy was here, and failed”.  It enjoins us not to vote Tory, thereby to collapse the Party of Freedom and, domino-style, the other two as well.  This we must do because they are all “discredited”.

So here we get the end of the thought, but not the beginning.  Why are they discredited, again?  Just a few words would do, Peter, perhaps like: “Unless you want to further the already disastrous racial, social and sexual decay in the West in general and this country in particular …”  You see, you have to give reasons, like Maggie did in 1979.  It galvanises people to do the most extraordinary and courageous things.  It even makes them enter the polling booth, if there is a recipient of their votes who will actually speak for them.

But … extraordinary and courageous things are not wanted from us, not by the media barons, not by sensibility-laden journalists.  Acquiescence, negligence, complicity are enough.

In his third article on the current page, ”We know the results of this experiment” Hitchens castigates his fellow-scribblers for their relaxed approach to drug use.  But the story of the life and terrible death of Mary-Ann Leneghan is not about drugs.  It is about race and race-mixing in Britain, and the violent propinquity of far too many small-brained black males.

How could Hitchens get it so wrong?  He couldn’t.  It’s deliberate.  He sets off in the general direction of making a big moral point about Mary-Ann’s passing and then, satisfied that everyone will think he is some kind of attack dog cum moral scourge, he veers off into a non-point.  It’s all a bit like listening to a Bruckner symphony or experiencing that tragic loss of confidence at the crucial moment of love-making.

Scroll down a little further and we come to “The sanity of political correctness”.  We all know Hitch hates Pee-Cee.  But he likes good manners.  It isn’t good manners to cause offence.  We mustn’t do it.  Specifically, we mustn’t say “nigger” or “dyke”.  “What would we sacrifice if we admitted that their time had gone?” he asks.  But immediately above that question he says of such words, “Racial bigots do use them as a code to identify each other.  I once visited a British National Party office in a northern town where a large golliwog was prominently displayed.  There was nothing charming or childish or old-fashioned about it.”

No, it isn’t childish to insist that our culture belongs to us and nobody else, and to display why.  How can the great Peter Hitchens, the author of The Abolition of Britain, not know that “what we would sacrifice” here is ourselves … our once indomitable spirit?  Hell, I must have recourse to words that Cultural Marxists and blacks and lesbians don’t like.  The alternative is to have my language prescribed by those who mean me ill.  It is not acceptable.

And, while we are about it, what is “racial bigot” if not a term that belongs to the humbug left.  Such language collapses the space where I stand, so that there is nothing between the centre and extreme white supremacism.  It is a manoeuvre.  It is a deceit.

If a man like Hitchens, supposedly one of the most outspoken and fearless critics of the left in modern British journalism, can’t get past knee-jerk usage like this, it’s plain that his writings do not match up to his reputation.  He has been dragged to the centre, like the hapless, “discredited” Tories he makes such a cruel show of disparaging.  By my book, Hitchens and the Sunday Mail and all the rest of our print media are as one with our political parties, and all of them have disappeared together up Karl Marx’s flabby, chapped behind.

So yes, I see the decline of the mainstream parties closely linked to the decline of the print media.  The internet is not a primary cause in either decline, though it may become the executioner of one or both.  There is a very long way to go, though, before Hitchens’ on-line readers comprehend that he is a sell-out, and that far more interesting and vital opinions are freely-put elsewhere on the web.  I think Murdoch is right to fear this vitality, and his fears will come to pass. 

The pace of change will be conditioned by the rise of the net and of free-speakers (such as ourselves, maybe), and by a growing popular revulsion at white dispossession and the trespass of culture politics.  Voters may decline to vote, but they will not cease to be consumers of political media.  They will merely search and find new political media, as they will eventually seek out a new means of expressing their political will.

In a rare moment of far-sightedness Marx once said, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

But they are allowed every single day to decide which electronic media represents them, and there is not an ounce of oppression yet in cyber-space.