UK New Labourite Gordon Brown inspired by US neoconservative Himmelfarb

This video from Britain says about itself: ‘UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown talks about his undying admiration for Margaret Thatcher.’

After Gordon Brown’s and Tony Blair’s praise for Margaret Thatcher …

From British daily The Independent:

Gertrude Himmelfarb: Brown‘s guru

It is the unashamed moralism of the doyenne of US necons that appeals

By Paul Vallely

Published: 03 November 2007

Tony Blair, you will recall, was the chap with the Big Tent. Nothing so crass as that for Gordon Brown. But consider the speech he gave on liberty and the need for a new Bill of Rights earlier this month. And look at the list of sources he cited: the Magna Carta, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, de Tocqueville, Orwell, Churchill, Green, Hobson and Tawney, Jonathan Sacks, Gertrude Himmelfarb…

Hang on a minute. Gertrude Himmelfarb? Isn’t she the extraordinarily right-wing historian who has been described as “Queen Bee of US conservative intellectuals and cheerleader for the Bush administration“?

Er, yes, that’s the one. And the Labour leader is not just quoting her. He’s written the introduction to the British edition of her new book The Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American Enlightenments. More than that, he invited her to lead a seminar at No 11 Downing Street when he was Chancellor. And if the doyenne of American neocons feels well enough – she’s 85 now – he’s promised her she can have the launch party for the new volume in No 10.

Gordon has long been keen on American intellectuals. A few years back he did the intro to a book called God’s Politics, by a US leftist evangelical, Jim Wallis. But then Wallis is big on fighting poverty, and though he is anti-abortion he’s pro-gay rights.

Himmelfarb, by contrast, is a fully signed-up reactionary who thinks that, since the “liberated” Sixties, the West has descended into “grievous moral disorder”. She has called for a return to Victorian values and a re-establishment of the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. …

The year she graduated, 1942, she married [Irving] Kristol. …

Their son William is now the editor of Rupert Murdoch‘s ultra-right magazine The Weekly Standard and chairman of the neocon think-tank Project for the New American Century. “No family has had a greater impact on today’s conservatism,” The New Yorker said recently, “than the Kristols”. …

Critics say she has a blinkered or naive view of the world, ignoring issues such as slavery and racism. They point to the paradox that the untrammelled market she endorses produces the hedonist culture promoted by the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

GORDON BROWN “deliberately” ran down Britain’s manufacturing base when he was Labour chancellor in a bid to mimic the US economy, a former trade union leader has claimed in a new book: here.

Australian Rudd and Murdoch: the fashioning of a Blair-style “Labor moderniser”: here.

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