GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES

We live in a lefty nation (Rod Liddle, The Times, February 12th, 2006)

I hope you’ve been enjoying the new BBC4 series Righties as much as I have. One can never have too much nostalgia and these warm-hearted programmes of life on the radical right back in the 1970s and 80s brought back so many happy memories — and, of course, one or two minor embarrassments!

I can still chuckle about singing “Hang Nelson Mandela” with my dinner-jacketed chums in the university common room, but those midnight excursions to desecrate Jewish cemeteries were perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, a surfeit of youthful zealousness. Mercifully those of us who scoured the streets looking for Pakistanis to taunt have grown up a little and reformed (these days we call them Muslims).

There was important, ground-breaking intellectual work going on, too, in those days. Programme one in the series explored the theories of the revolutionary working-class right-wing thinker Colin Snout, who advocated the complete abolition of income tax and the re-establishment of a property qualification for voters. Later, gloriously, on our screens was Viscount Cummerbund, whose pioneering work on penal reform never received the attention it deserved; handing out a free noose to every prisoner in the land seemed a democratic and incontestably cost-effective policy.

Of course, I jest. There was no such programme as Righties on the BBC. Nor could there ever be. Nobody in the corporation could possibly conceive of looking back, misty-eyed, affectionately, at the old radical right; it simply wouldn’t occur to them. What we had instead, then, was Lefties, a misty-eyed and affectionate look at the old radical left, with their solid blocks of unwashed hair, infinite lapel badges and T-shirts with Che Guevara, Tariq Ali or Kevin Gately on the front.

The difference, of course, is that rightist leaders were intrinsically evil while leftist leaders were noble humanists with uncannily bad luck in choosing their Directors of Programme Implementation.