"Conspiracist crank" at the heart of Tory thinking

[ian neal]

.....paranoid, far-right crank....
http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2010/02/the-conspiracist-cr ank-at-the-heart-of-tory-thinking.html

Oliver KammOliver Kamm is a leader writer at The Times. February 21, 2010

The conspiracist crank at the heart of Tory thinking

The Times reported last week:

"Teachers, health workers and Jobcentre staff could set themselves up as co-operatives in a Conservative plan to transform the public sector. David Cameron said public servants could become their own boss, pocketing cash if they could cut costs without lowering the quality of services. But the launch was coloured by the party’s refusal to apologise for conclusions it drew after making an embarrassing statistical error."

The Tories were keen that the press should report the proposal on co-operatives rather than the statistical gaffe. We published a leader on the gaffe, but our news coverage was clear on the inspiration for the co-operative notion among modern Tories:

"Last October, the 'Red Tory' thinker Phillip Blond set out his idea for the 'ownership state', arguing that public services should be delivered by social enterprises that would harness the knowledge and commitment of frontline workers."

Who is Phillip Blond and what is a Red Tory? Here's Michael White from the Guardian last November:

"Never trust an insurance company, trade union or thinktank that resorts to a pretentious Latin name, political veterans warn. Yet David Cameron will tomorrow drop in on the launch of ResPublica, the new tank launched by Phillip Blond, the 'Red Tory' poster boy whose pamphleteering skills have helped him raise millions....

"A scouser who attended Hull and Cambridge universities and converted from Rome to Anglicanism at 27 (surely proof of a contrarian strain), acquiring Daniel (007) Craig as a stepbrother en route, Blond is a protege of John Milbank's Anglo-Catholic 'radical orthodoxy'. A critique of modern secularism, it seeks to revive traditional doctrine in arts, science and culture, not just politics and the economy...."

Milbank is a theologian at Nottingham University. Blond did a PhD under him. Here are Milbank and Blond at Comment is Free last month advocating "the 'old Tory' view that privilege is not just reward for success, but also a way of providing the appropriate resources for the wielding of power linked to virtue".

Now, modern secularism is in my view an axiom of a free society, and when I read about the wielding of power linked to virtue, I think of the recent histories of Iran and Afghanistan. But Milbank's views on these issues are not the most distinctive aspect of his philosophy. In an essay entitled "Geopolitical Theology: Economy, Religion and Empire after 9/11" (undated, but posted to his departmental website on 16 May 2006), he wrote (pp. 10-12):

"Hence given the scale of the perceived dangers to the United States and to Capital, there may be some prima facie case for suspicion of conspiracy in the sequence of events leading up to 9/11 and in the unfolding of consequences since that fateful day. Indeed we know to some degree that a small cabal has contrived to impose its own agenda upon the American nation. As to the precise causes of 9/11 I remain entirely agnostic. It certainly appears that while certain strange circumstances surrounding that event have been satisfactorily explained, certain others have not been accounted for in any unequivocally emphatic way (and in particular the tardiness of response to the planes’ initial capture). Quite definitely we can say that on the part of someone a terroristic conspiracy was fomented and that who that someone really was is not as yet entirely apparent. It may well be the case that no one group of persons in this plot was fully aware of all the parties responsible for it; that some of the deceiving were also deceived and even that this could have occurred reciprocally. Likewise if there were any US or Israeli government involvement it might well be that we are talking about a small faction and that even that faction had no fully clear sense of what was actually going to transpire.

"I must stress however, that there is as yet absolutely no clear evidence for such a supposition and indeed that there is every reason for scepticism in the face of it. But on the other hand, there remains a case to answer and the refusal of nearly all public organs to press this point remains striking. One should of course view the tendency to suspect deliberate conspiracy everywhere with profound suspicion. On the other hand an out of hand dismissal of this possibility in every instance is equally a mode of dogmatism and naivety: it would be to imagine that we live in a human world in which such an event as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre could never really occur. And it is important to remember that short-term conspiracy on the part of a powerful few lies within the realm of reality in a way that long-term perennial conspiracy by a secret hidden Rosicrucian elite does not...."


I've given a long quotation first because Milbank's prose style is not direct and secondly so that I'm not suspected of removing material context. Wedged in among tortuous equivocation and reference to Chomsky, Milbank really does say that he is "entirely agnostic" about who committed the attacks of 9/11.

You get the drift: Milbank is a 9/11 Truther. You'll find his signature on the statement of Religious Leaders for 9/11 Truth ("because 9/11 Truth matters"). These people hold that:

"... the official account of 9/11 has been shown by scientists and professionals in relevant fields to be false beyond a reasonable doubt...

"the official account of 9/11 has been used as a pretext for wars that have killed and maimed millions of innocent people and caused enormous ecological damage to our planet...

"the official account of 9/11 has been used to indict Islam as an inherently violent religion and to justify discrimination against Muslims and attacks on Muslim countries...

"the official reports about 9/11 have been produced by individuals closely affiliated with, or even employed by, the Bush administration..."




Milbank is a Fellow of ResPublica. I don't claim he is necessarily representative of that organisation's thinking or of the views of his colleagues (among whom is Diane Coyle, former Economics Editor of The Independent and a friend of mine). But I'm enough of an old-fashioned empiricist to consider that there is such a thing as the truth about the attacks committed on 9/11 against the world's leading democracy by theocratic fanatics. It matters if the man who is likely to become prime minister within weeks is drawing on the social thinking of a body that counts among its leading intellectual figures a paranoid, far-right crank. And I hope David Cameron will be pressed on the point.