Winter of the world

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

It´s almost fascinating to read Frank Furedi of vintage 2022. I´m old to enough to remember the old Furedi, "Frank Richards", the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the author of the pessimistic screed "Midnight in the Century" circa 1990 or so. 

Today, Furedi sounds like a nationalist-militarist conservative, and yet, the underlying ethos of his worldview seems to be almost exactly the same. There´s the pessimism (which stands in stark contrast to the cornucopian agitation from the rest of Spiked), but also the "battle of ideas", strangely decoupled from the materialist base. The attacks on political correctness are probably not new either, although they now come from the right rather than "from the left". 

But it´s the pessimism or school-of-hard-knocks realism that is most interesting, since it strongly suggests that the past is present, the present is past, and nothing is ever new under the sun. Which suggests that not even Spiked´s libertarian agenda will ever succeed. The way to handle our predicament is rather a retreat to a nationalist and slightly traditionalist Britain with no illusions about utopian "ends of history", leftist, liberal or neo-con. An interesting question is whether Furedi really believes that such a neo-British nation will be free from class conflict (look at history, for an answer) and if not, what he proposes to do about it...   

 The Revenge of History