Peter Hitchens, A Response to Conservative Home and its contributors

As it happens, I stopped being a Marxist when Mr Vaizey was seven years old. Let me put it another way. I have been a non-Marxist, and an active opponent of Marxism, for far longer than Mr Vaizey has been a grown-up. Since then I have spent much of my time experiencing at first hand and close quarters things far too few Tories know anything about at all - the British Labour and Trades Union movement, the Eastern European nations under Communism, and the USSR itself, where I lived with my family. I have also lived in the USA, and continue to travel widely as a foreign reporter, most recently in China, Japan, Burma, South Africa, Iran and North Korea. I know in detail why I am not and could never again be any kind of socialist, let alone a Marxist or Trotskyist. Any time Mr Vaizey wishes to discuss this suggestion with me, I am ready to do so, preferably in front of an audience.

But one thing I will say. The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought – a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority - are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party - despite occasional sops - of the sort listed by Tim - offered to conservative thinkers.

My fellow-revolutionaries – from whom I broke and who hate me like poison as a traitor to my generation - entered the media, the law, the education system and the civil service in their thousands when the sixties ended, intent on pursuing these aims. And as Gerry Adams used to say of the IRA ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’. The number of ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists at the very top of the Labour Party - who unlike me will not discuss their political pasts and also unlike me try to hide them - is extraordinarily large. These are for the most part not Old Labour socialists of the Clause Four trade union and nationalisation sort, but 'modern' enthusiasts for 'New Labour', which has many intellectual links with the current known as Euro-Communism , which used to coalesce round such publications as 'Marxism Today' and then migrated into the think tanks which swarmed around Mr Blair, and now swarm round Mr Cameron, who has pretty much accepted the Blair revolution as the price of establishment and BBC approval. See what I'm suggesting here?

Maynard Keynes once commented that politicians were generally the unconscious slaves of some defunct economist. They are also – especially Tories who know nothing of the Left - slaves of defunct social and political thinkers.