The Left controls our national culture - which is why we're screwed

 Les "Access" Ebdon

I’ve become somewhat obsessed over the years by the almost total control the Left exercises over our national life - its tenor, its timbre, its essential culture. The Left now controls broadcasting, organised religion, the art establishment, the literary world, the music business, comedy, the film industry, schools, universities, the civil service, the social services, and the criminal justice system (including – bizarrely - the police). I assume that it doesn’t yet control the military – but you never know.

The problem is that, as long as leftists continue to control these areas of national life, the economy will remain moribund. Anyone with half a brain who isn’t a card-carrying lefty (that would be me, then) knows – with about the same level of certainty that we know the sun will rise tomorrow – that the only way to get Britain out of its current mess is to stop wasting our money on public sector bullshit, ditch 95% of all red tape, cut taxes, raise the base rate and tell the EU to go and do one, thereby giving the private sector an outside chance of saving our skins.

The ideas being put forward by the Labour Party, the LibDems, the unions, the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian – and, let’s be honest, by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the whey-faced prat who’s supposed to be running this country – are so stupid, so counter-productive, so nonsensical and so certain to prevent a proper recovery, it beggars belief.

But even if we had a cabinet stuffed with right-wing firebrands determined to halve government spending and to do everything in their power to help the SMEs which are the key to recovery – well, I’m not sure that much would change. That’s because the EU now dictates much of what we can do, and the Left, through its control of all the areas mentioned at the top of this rant, appears to be able to stick out its foot and trip up anyone who even looks as if they might be thinking of heading in the right direction.

But don't the conservative press and the right-wing blogosphere act as a counter-weight to the prevailing leftist orthodoxy? No - because they no longer matter. Only Westminster MPs still think The Sun’s going to win it for them. As for the blogosphere – do me a favour! If anything, by giving right-wingers a place to vent our enormous sense of frustration, it might actually be preventing angry conservative mobs descending on Westminster carrying flaming torches and demanding revolution.

Nothing will change as long as our cultural life is directed by smug, well-paid, bien-pensant, dirigiste social engineers – in other words, Britain’s Meddle Classes (see what I did there?) – and staffed by millions of people perfectly at home “in the old dispensation”, sucking at the public teat while constantly demanding more of our money, and seemingly convinced that not working in the private sector automatically entitles them to be treated as if they were self-sacrificing saints.

Mrs Thatcher – thanks to sheer force of personality and a clear, Hayek-inspired vision of what needed to be done (and, to be honest, quite a bit of luck) – blasted through the road-blocks set up by the public sector in her day, partly by selling off large chunks of it, and partly because she had the support of the majority of newspapers in an age when newspapers still mattered. What she failed to do (mainly because she was busy with other, weightier matters – saving the nation and destroying communism and suchlike) was to even try to change the public sector's left-wing culture.

Since Mrs Thatcher’s political demise, of course, there has been no attempt to prise the Left’s Gramscian fingers off the levers of cultural power: John Major was too beset by self-created distractions (and too wet), Blair’s time in office saw the rise of a whole class of pestilential meddlers such as Shami Chakrabarti and “Dame” Suzi Leather (!), and David Cameron has demonstrated his right-wing credentials by allowing the appointment of Les Ebdon – possibly the most destructive of all the repulsive left-wing obsessives intent on remodelling Britain in their own creepy image – as the “access czar” charged with forcing universities to offer places to school-leavers who can’t write their own name without the help of a team of experts.

Police chiefs who refuse to characterise crimes  against whites as racist; judges who tell thieves that they’re “brave”; archbishops acting as Labour Party press officers; NHS doctors falling over themselves to categorise the workshy as disabled; teaching unions whose main concern seems to be to ensure that no teacher can ever be sacked for being useless; a cash-bloated public service broadcaster which relentlessly promotes dodgy climate science, multiculturalism, the benefits of the EU, gay marriage and hooliganism masquerading as legitimate political protest - while whining on about non-existent public sector cuts: as long as this vast collection socialists (the Republican Wing of the Guardian’s readership) are actively encouraged (financed by our taxes) to pump out leftist propaganda, the chances of this country ever again electing a sensible government remain non-existent.

Which leaves us with the question, how did the Left manage to achieve the equivalent of a Vulcan death-grip on our national life despite losing every key argument that mattered during the past thirty years?

For the answer to that, watch this space.