OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Marxism didn’t die. It’s alive and well and living among us. New Labour was a triumph of the reborn left, made to seem like a takeover by the right:

I know of at least six members of the Blair cabinet who to this day would prefer not to talk much, if at all, about their days in the ranks of hardline Marxist organisations. People who now go into frenzies about the leftist past of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have always ignored this aspect of New Labour and refuse to see any importance in it.

They should know better. It is not just me saying it, but the Blairites themselves. One New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, has blurted out that his party had ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural… to rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’. And another, Peter Hyman, quite recently averred that the Blairite project was ‘infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn’.

But that’s nothing. Tony Blair himself recently revealed on BBC Radio 4 that he had been a Trotskyist at Oxford. What would once have been a six-cylinder front-page revelation passed almost unremarked. Like the dim MI6 operatives in Tinker Tailor, we’ve been elaborately fooled into believing the opposite of the truth, that Marxism has disappeared and offers no threat to our happiness and liberty, even as we moan about the strange and humourless restrictions on free speech and thought that grow in our midst like knotweed. How did that happen?   Think of me as George Smiley, trying to tell you what’s really going on.

In America, our celebrity community organizers like to call it “fundamental transformation.”