So far, so good. Then, a few days ago, the London Daily Telegraph published excerpts from an interview Glasman had given for a not-yet-published issue of Fabian Review, a venerable leftist magazine. In that interview, Glasman delivered the following thoughts:

”Britain is not an outpost of the U.N. We have to put the people in this country first.” Even if that means stopping immigration completely for a period? “Yes. I would add that we should be more generous and friendly in receiving those [few] who are needed. To be more generous, we have to draw the line.”

As an advocate of the toughest curbs yet mooted on immigration, presumably he has some sympathy with [former Tory Party leader] Iain Duncan Smith’s controversial call for British jobs for British workers. “Completely. The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them.”

When this appeared, Britain’s Labour establishment emitted a shriek of horror in unison. Blue Labour is now as dead as mutton. Maurice Glasman offered the usual whimpering recantation to his PC Inquisitors—“I want most importantly to reiterate my full and total support for immigrant communities in Britain…”—but to no avail. He has been cast out into the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Charles Moore and Maurice Glasman combined to remind me that the world is by no means what it was when I was twenty. Back then, political and class patterns were those of the Industrial Age. Horny-handed sons of toil worked in mines and factories, belonged to unions, and voted Labour/Democrat. An important subset of the literary and artistic intelligentsia supported them. Toffs, stockbrokers, businessmen, golfers, farmers, professionals, clergymen, small shopkeepers, distressed gentlefolk, and a reactionary working-class element voted Tory/Republican.

Now we are under a different sky with different constellations. In Britain, a Labour politician who says that “We have to put the people in this country first” is chased out of the temple. In the USA, a leftist radical referred to Barack Obama as “the black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” and on the evidence it’s hard to disagree with him. The cartoon capitalist of traditional socialist propaganda is dining out with Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair.

Politicians of both left and right, in both Britain and the US, exist in a permanent state of swooning xenophilia, lavishing attention and money on foreigners, both at home and abroad, while apparently regarding their fellow countrymen as tiresome nuisances. Ordinary unconnected working- and middle-class citizens seem to have no effective representation at all. Our role, as Charles Moore says, “is simply to pay.”

What is “left” anymore? What is “right”? The familiar landmarks have all been obliterated. It is not even the case any longer that left-wing women are heroically ugly. Some are indisputably hot. This is a real, disturbing reversal of the natural order.

All is flux. Things fall apart. Change and decay in all around I see:

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored…