Left And Right Must Unite And Fight: Part III

Such false improvements have happened before. Another has resulted in the restriction by parental income of access to, for example, three separate sciences, certain modern foreign languages, Classics, the broad sweep of British and European history, the great books of English Literature, and perhaps even A-levels themselves in the near future. This, in turn, has lowered standards overall: most secondary school pupils are no longer taught by those whose daily business is the teaching of academically rigorous subjects right up to Advanced Level. We Real Labourites are at one with Real Tories in wanting this real education. As, in fact, we are at one on rather a lot.

Those who really believe, with deadly seriousness, in Michael Young’s satirical “meritocracy” (that those with wealth and paper qualifications may alone determine merit, on the basis of wealth and paper qualifications) are anti-monarchist. Those who really aspire to “classlessness” want to close down the gentlemen’s clubs along with the workingmen’s clubs, and to disband the chambers of commerce along with the trade unions.

Those who want a “free” market want there to be no agriculture or small business in this country. Those who refuse to see the economy as the servant of social, cultural and environmental goods, as were coal, steel and shipbuilding, are on the opposite side to those who joined the Countryside March. Those who believe that there is no such thing as society deny the society that is the family, and the society that is the nation. They are simply not conservatives at all, and that is why they are not Socialists.

Since they favour the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital throughout the world, they (logically) favour no immigration controls whatever. What they will not ordinarily say, in that case, is whether they would renounce common humanity entirely, or whether they are already preparing to pay both social security benefits and overseas aid on a scale previously unimagined. It must be one or the other. Globalisation brings this dark day ever closer, as did Thatcher’s Single European Act.

Sovereignty is seriously eroded, either when hardly anything is made in a country, or when almost nothing of any real importance is owned by its own citizens, resident there for tax purposes, and paying those taxes accordingly. That is why those who welcome this state of affairs do so.

Their slavish adherence to American neoconservative foreign policy is precisely because it is not conservative that a foreign country, simply by virtue of being that particular foreign country, might presume to change the government of any other country in the world. Hence the ninety per cent public opposition to the Iraq War, a figure which must, by definition, have included the majority of Conservative supporters.

The effects of crime are felt disproportionately by the poor, who come banging on the doors of their Labour Councillors, begging to be re-housed. Real Tories do not share any loathing of social housing or local government, or indeed of public transport.

Real Labourites did not struggle so hard and for so long to secure power only to hand it over to people beyond our control. Or rather, what little of it was left after Heath’s Treaty of Rome (opposed by Labour), Thatcher’s Single European Act (opposed by Labour) and Major’s Maastricht Treaty (opposed by far more Labour than Conservative MPs). In Margaret Beckett, we now have the most Eurosceptical Foreign Secretary since Ernest Bevin, whereas the aim of David Cameron’s A-list is to prevent Eurosceptics (as conservatives) from becoming his party’s MPs.

Likewise, we see the United Kingdom as the means of bringing the conservative benefits of Socialism to as many people as possible. The European Union is far too large for this, and it simply would not be an economic option for an independent Scotland, an independent Wales, or a “United Ireland” (with an economy built on the sands of European Union farm subsidies and film-making, the former paid for by the English), each inherently more selfish, either than the United Kingdom as presently constituted, or than any rump (such as an independent England, should that come to pass) left behind by the secession of any part of the Union.

The Commonwealth is the extension of the Union’s inherent generosity of spirit. It has been scandalously under-used for decades, not least because, with the Union from which it is inseparable, the Commonwealth is one of the strongest monarchist arguments.

Nor do Real Labourites welcome the torrent of filth in much of the media, still less the even more pernicious “dumbing down”, and the exaltation of rubbish as art. Just as the Labour Movement’s roots are in the sort of academic formation outlined above, so those roots are also in real art.

No such scholarship or art could happen if the poor and the young were stoned out of their skulls. That is why the cannabis lobby wants what it wants, which also extends to the deregulation of alcohol, gambling, prostitution and pornography, and to the eventual legalisation of heroin and cocaine. An unrestricted market cannot exist in goods generally but not in alcohol, drugs or pornography, and cannot exist in services generally but not in gambling or prostitution. Though vindicated, the Fabian and Christian Socialist pioneers must be spinning in their graves.

And so one could go on.