Not aware of having resorted to any cheap insults. Apologise for anything I have said to you that was read as such. {Different for truculent old horny-headed Woodenhead, mind; but he started it, Sir!} Glad you remember some of my writing with what appears to be a measure of affectionate agreement.

But when you write "I remember being astonished from time to time that an intelligent person could hold such views," that is where I feel you put your finger on the weakness of your left-orientated position; which seems to me [correct me if I am wrong] to be predicated on the postulate that morality and leftwing views are in some way synonymous or identical. They aren't. If they were, it would be hard to fathom why all leftwing societies from Cromwell's Commonwealth to Stalin's Soviet Union to Ceauescu's Romania to Ulbricht's East Germany have been such popular paradises to live in that they lasted for ever with no need for any sort of oppression of anybody within them.

The only actual political party I have ever actually been a member of, in the sense of paying subscription to belong, was Labour. I was on the ward committee of Hampstead Labour Party with a member of the then Shadow Cabinet & future cabinet minister Patrick Gordon-Walker, in 1960. Then moved to Cambridge, where my home was a ward committee room for the 1964 election. And then we got Wilson; & Kinnock; & Brown...

So enjoy your leftwing views, and the feel of moral superiority which possession of them clearly affords you. But have at least the modesty to recognise that some people possessed of all their faculties fail to share them, unthinkingly and unquestioningly, with you.

~M~