Forty or more years on from the heady revolutionary days of the 60’s Joan Bakewell is still breaking down boundaries and hierarchical structures in her search for a socialist nirvana….and all from her plebeian, lowly social position…as a Baroness in the House of Lords!
Of course she is fighting the Establishment from the inside! Just like John Prescott and Peter Mandelson.
Bakewell was the ‘thinking man’s totty’ in the 60’s and was suspected by the BBC hierarchy of wanting to overthrow the government.
She doesn’t seem to have changed much as here on ‘Saturday Live’ she lays out her socialist ideology for us to examine.
She disdains the collaboration of State, Church, Schools and Family that all upheld the same values….the young don’t want to feel compelled to follow those rules because they have seen Society is flawed.
She says that the power of corporations was never as great as it is today ….really? I very much doubt that is true….Corporations or traders have always played a role in shaping society….all through history….the Hudson Bay Company or the East India Company are two obvious examples…never mind the ‘nightmare’ of the ‘military-industrial complex’ growing out of the 60’s that the Left are so alarmed about….or indeed the vastly wealthy corporate Church that essentially ran the country for centuries.
Bakewell claims that the 60’s were a ‘world of possibilities’ that has never happened before or likely to happen again…really? Maybe she hasn’t followed British history…or any history….has she never heard of the buccaneering Youth that sailed off around the world in search of adventure and fortune and made an Empire in their wake?
Such simplistic statements of course are made to back up her other assertions which are equally flawed……
She goes on to proclaim that you must ‘make your own rules…make your own values’.
That sounds terrific…we all want to live our lives as we want…but we all have neighbours and we all live in a ‘Society’ which requires rules so that we ‘rub along’.
The SAS’s founder, David Stirling, was a man who broke the rules when needed, but he recognised an essential truth…..that self discipline is by far the harder virtue than following rules set in stone by others. He said this about recruits to the SAS in WWII…..
‘In a sense they weren’t really controllable. They were harnessable and all had a sense of individuality. The object was to give them a sense of purpose and once they were harnessed to that proposition, they policed themselves, so to speak. And that goal had to be a very exacting one…That bag of vagabonds had to grasp what they had to do in order to get there, which included discipline. Although most of them were escaping from conventional regimental discipline, they didn’t fully appreciate that they were running into a much more exacting type of discipline.’
That is ‘Self Discipline’.
The SAS are highly professional, focussed and self disciplined…..they are few in number, highly trained and specially selected….they can maintain the mental attitude needed to exercise self discipline for long periods…..Regular troops in standard units are not so disciplined and need to be kept under control by rigorous enforcement of rules…..should we experiment with Bakewellian anarchist ideas I can only imagine how quickly the call would go up for a police force to be re-established, and for some ‘law and order’.
Some listeners (20 MINS 40 SECS) took exception to Bakewell’s comments and said it was ‘the mentality of the rioter’.
True enough.
But she back pedalled only slightly…saying of course there must be rules…you must work out your own morality….it is a heavy burden…but there is something intrinsic in human nature that lets you know some behaviours are better than others…so work out for yourself a decent way of living…it’s quite a burden to have to do that and very much easier to live by the 10 Commandments.
I think she very definitely lives a very, very cloistered life, a cosy bubble of Upper Middle Class privilege that rarely gets to see the real side of life…or if it does it categorises it as some sort of anomaly that most people don’t really suffer from.
That is the trouble with Socialists…they have no idea of Human Nature…or don’t care….they just wish to impose their utopia upon everyone….nor do I think they have any real grasp of the true nature of Communism or ‘Social Democracy’.
Raising the Red Flag in your Student garret and singing the Internationale in the student bar is all very well but putting it into practise has consequences…very real consequences…..
Having no doubt read all those Leninist tomes surely they must have understood some of it:
‘Under Socialism all Democracy withers away’. Lenin
Socialism aims to destroy the ‘State’ as we know it….society’s servant as it should be…and make it our master…
‘The abolition of the State means the abolition of democracy’.
‘The word Social-Democracy passes muster for a Party whose economic programme is not just socialist in general but directly Communist, and where the ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole State and therefore democracy as well’. Engels.
The Communists claimed that Democracy is organised around the systematic use of violence and that Socialism, developing into full blown Communism, would end Democracy and the use of violence to enforce rules….and why would people conform to a certain acceptable pattern of behaviour in a Communist society?
Because…..the need for subjection of one section of the population by another ‘will vanish since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without force and without subordination.‘
guess she would ‘know’ that I was mmorally wrong if I disagreed with her. If I worked to my own rules that did not conform to the totalitarian orthodoxy of modern puritanism (it brooks no dissent) that is such an odious feature of modern Britain. Just look at some of the reactions that appear on this blog when prople dare to utter ‘wrong’think’ opinions. Hate crime, Thought crime.
All these old Trots should quietly fade away but the BBBC keeps breathing the oxygen of public platform into them so they carry on as The Living Dead.
Who, but who, will drive the stake into the heart?
Joan Bakewell is just a slag who knew the right people and talked the right talk so that she could make a living at it. Other slags aren’t so fortunate.
Beautifully put.
“Bakewell claims that the 60′s were a ‘world of possibilities’ that has never happened before or likely to happen again”
Peasants’ Revolt springs immedately to mind — ‘when Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ etc. Oh, and the Civil War (leading to Cromwell’s military dictatorship, which was so brilliant that they dispensed with it and restored the Monarchy when he died). And then there were the Chartists . . .
So she’s either ignorant or senile. Either way, pension her off. (And i used to quite fancy her once — the shame of it!)
Well definitely no point in anyone saying Bakewell’s probably not long for this world now.- She’s never been in it!!
“She says that the power of corporations was never as great as it is today ….really?”
No. She didn’t say that.
One more lie to add to your never ending list of lies.
“The SAS’s founder, David Stirling, was a man who broke the rules…”
You are Alan Partridge and I claim my five pounds.
Your so right Ian. I remember watching a programme on some arty farty theme where this feminist had a male model totaly nude with an erection ( I kid you not ) on a plinth whilst she did a 360 obsevation of the poor sod. The point being ? I never did understand.
The self importance and pomposity of the media luvvie metropolitan 60s generation really is something to behold. At no point do they acknowledge how bloody lucky they were living in a peaceful and secure society thanks to the generation previous to them. To make things worse they appear blind to the harm they have done to Britain by their meddling and disrespect to our countries traditions. Now as they move into retirement they expect the generation that follows them to pay all the bills.
Thank you 1327, you have expressed everything i was going to say, if the workings of her mind, along with the likes of YABrown, Vanessa Redgrave and too many others were expressed on canvas, all you would see would be a mass of scribble, whereas, say, Enoch Powell’s would resemble a Michaelangelo masterpiece.
I recall her being called “the thinking man’s tart”. Well this tart has grown moldy with the passage of time. She seems to have learned nothing in the last fifty years.
Luvvie-lives have been so comfy – huge cheques from the BBC for spouting some arty farty nonsense, the ultimate reality bypass.
The “power of the corporations” is as nothing compared to the totalitarian state. You don’t have to buy Coca Cola, you do have to pay the telly tax.
It doesn’t matter how many times the socialist model state has failed, their belief in a future “fair” society remains undimmed. She really needs to grow up, but with cheques flowing from the BBC, why bother?
“Thinking man’s crumpet” surely?
Tart, crumpet, it’s a “Bakewell Tart” as best I recall. Crumpets are for breakfast. I wouldn’t want to wake up next to a Socialist Tart. God knows what she might have tweeted.
She’s not my cup of tea
I am posting this comment here because of Alan’s reference to Prescott. One of the last golds won at the Olympics was won by a guy from Hull (for boxing). So who does the local news have to share the glory? This wouldn’t matter so much if you consider Prescott as an old has been ….but he is also a candidate for Police Commissioner….given extra publicity by the BBC
“Baroness Bakewell”
Zero a
Post interrupted, apologies, – zero accountability of civil service stooges paid to pack the upper house with Labour nominees. FFS Cameron, stop wanking with the olympic union jack, get off your two month holiday and get on with putting stakes in the heart of Labour zombies.
I seem to remember living in her sixties. It was a very small world revolving around Central London with outposts in various universities. Half a dozen tube stops & you were in a country still edging out of the austerity 50’s where the pressures to conform came from all sides. And the very worst paces for that were the socialist heartlands of the midlands & north.