Only Wrong In Detail (And Not In Much Of That)

Peter Hitchens writes:

For many people in Britain, especially those over 60, politics is a simple matter of one party or the other. If you aren't Labour, you must be Tory, and if you aren't Tory you must be Labour. A large chunk of my correspondence consists of annoyed missives from Labour people accusing me of being a Tory because I've been rude about Mr Blair, and Tory People accusing me of being a Labour supporter because I've been rude about Mr Cameron.

Wearily, I bash the computer keys yet again to explain to them that disdain for the one does not mean support for the other. But I seldom get through. In fact it is one of the most frustrating arguments you can try to have. Facts and logic rarely make any impact. As far as such people are concerned, there are two political parties and if you are against one, you're for the other. This is why I use the expression 'tribal' to describe a lot of political loyalty in this country. It is not interested in facts or logic. Such people picked up their opinions from their surroundings and were never argued into them. So they can't be argued out of them either. Nothing will shift such devotion (which is valued but also secretly despised by political professionals) except the visible, undeniable collapse of one or both of the tribes.

I happen to think that the Tory tribe is closer to such a collapse than Labour, and for a lot of reasons I'm better placed to encourage that than I am to help bring about the crumbling of Labour.

But that doesn't mean I am not just as keen to get rid of Labour. It's just that I think that Labour is held together by the Tory Party - and knows it.

I remember the dreadful autumn when poor Ian Duncan Smith was trying and failing to lead the Tory Party. And I also remember being privy to a fascinating conversation between two leading BBC liberal commentators, both in my view sympathisers with the Left, and therefore much closer - in culture, attitudes, hopes and fears - to New Labour than they could ever be to the Tory Party. I mention this as a simple matter of fact. It's probably time to have a discussion about BBC bias again soon, but not now.

Anyway, these two left-liberal persons were deep in conclave about Michael Howard's rumoured putsch against Mr Duncan Smith. And it was clear from everything they said, and the way they said it, that they were very anxious to see Mr Howard stage his coup and succeed. Now, these were people who in the ordinary course of things didn't much like Mr Howard. I expect they viewed him (as I do not ) as 'right wing' and (as I do) as a threat to liberty. I also suspect strongly that their conversation was a true reflection of internal discussion at the top of the New Labour government at the same time. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later I encountered similar pro-Howard sentiments in a Guardian commentator, who was defensive about the Tory Party when I attacked it in his presence.

They wanted Michael Howard because they recognised him as a proper political professional, a man who could make the Tory Party look serious again, and save it from falling to pieces. Why should they care? Why should they be concerned? After all, Mr Duncan Smith did ( and still does) truly represent the force and mind of the British Conservative Party, a spent force with nothing to say and no way to say it. Surely a good leftist would be glad to see the Tories wiped off the map?

Well, you might also ask why the Tory government elected in 1987, with a mandate which would have allowed it to destroy the Labour Party by choking off its union funding, mysteriously decided to abandon this plan. Why should Mrs Thatcher's government have wanted to help save the Labour Party? But they did, and I really do think that people should ask questions about this very fishy business.

The reasoning was, I think, roughly the same each time. In both cases, they feared that what might replace their habitual opponent would be far more dangerous to them. And they feared for the unity of their own party if it was deprived of its traditional enemy. I've mentioned elsewhere in these postings the catastrophic effect that the collapse of the USSR had on the old NATO powers, and of Gennadi Gerasimov's silky jibe that "we have done the worst thing to you that we could possibly have done. We have deprived you of your enemy".

Well, it's even worse for political parties. I can't count the number of times, during the last ten years when Anthony Blair, faced by a backbench rebellion, has fought it off by raising the spectre of a resurgent Thatcherism sweeping the nation. When David Cameron sent his MPs into the government division lobbies recently, Labour Members felt unclean and badly rattled to find themselves in such company.

MPs may like to think of themselves as sophisticates who can have cross-party friendships, and some of them are. But they know that it is fatal, in our adversarial system, to be seen in public fraternising with the enemy or nodding too enthusiastically at an opponent's speech, even if it is rather good. There'll always be a 'loyalist' handy to record the moment and use it against you, and to leak word back to your constituency that you're not really true to the flag.

Loyalty and party discipline depend on the existence of a threat, a threat that will - supposedly - take advantage of any failure or division. And this is specially the case with New Labour, which is as harmonious as Yugoslavia.

Of course stupidity helps. I have mentioned before the twin delusion, held by the Nigels in the golf clubs and the Kevins in the Labour clubs that New Labour is somehow 'right wing'. This fatuous conceit, also held to by 'alternative' comedians, professional political journalists and supposed 'satirists' has the one virtue of being simple. It helps in the writing of a headline, or the making of a cheap joke.

But, as poor Polly Toynbee ceaselessly points out in column after column and book after book, it simply isn't true. In classic terms, of increased state power, higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, with legions of people employed by the public sector, Labour is our most left-wing government since 1945-51. In terms of constitutional revolution, it is the most radical since Cromwell. Culturally and socially, it has hugely outdone Harold Wilson and Roy Jenkins in turning the 'permissive society' into the politically correct society. In foreign policy, it has made us more subservient to continental powers than any ruler since Charles II sold the country to Louis XIV at the secret Treaty of Dover. There is also a strong case, which I won't elaborate just here, for making out that the Iraq war is not 'right wing', but originated in radical leftist ideas about reforming the world, combined with a leftist contempt for national sovereignty.

But Kevin and Nigel, seeing that the basic rate of income tax hasn't risen (though every other conceivable tax has ) and that BT hasn't been renationalised, nor the coalmines reopened, conclude that the government is 'right-wing'. Well, what can one do about the weary, mistaken cliches of conventional wisdom?

The first thing one can do is to point out that Labour used to have a genuine Right Wing. There was Hugh Gaitskell, who was against the Common Market because it would destroy the Commonwealth and end a thousand years of British history, and who made the best anti-Market speech by any British politician.

There was his ally William Rodgers, the forgotten member of the 'Gang of Four', who organised the successful Campaign for Democratic Socialism. This was set up to overturn Labour's conference decision to get rid of British nuclear weapons (a decision also denounced by Gaitskell in his 'fight, fight and fight again speech').

The CDS fought and fought and fought again, in dozens of constituency Labour Parties, while others did similar work in the unions, against this Communist-backed attempt to divide NATO and place Europe under the shadow of Moscow. And they won.

Go further back and you'll find Ernest Bevin dethroning the loveable old booby George Lansbury as party leader, because Lansbury's pacifism was an absurdity in the age of Hitler. Bevin later became one of the most instinctively patriotic foreign secretaries we've ever had (no European nonsense for him either, if it upset British coalminers). The right wing didn't just make itself felt on foreign affairs, important as they were. It might surprise you to know that a large chunk of the Labour Cabinet voted to retain capital punishment in 1948. Or that some Labour MPs voted consistently against liberalised abortion and divorce in the 1960s.

And, from my ancient days as a labour and industrial correspondent, I remember the leaders of the Electricians' And Engineering unions fighting the Cold War against the fellow travellers of the rest of the union movement. I specially treasure the memory of Frank Chapple of the Electricians ( who had helped fight against Communist ballot-rigging in his union) denouncing the rest of the TUC for their pathetic refusal to give full backing to Polish Solidarity against the Warsaw Communist dictatorship. There were little things too. I remember at a much more obscure union conference hearing an ordinary delegate, confronted with the argument that there was no unemployment in the Soviet Union, getting to his feet to snarl "And there's no unemployment in Wormwood Scrubs either".

But Right Wing Labour died soon after 1981, when the Gang of Four broke away. By no means all of them were 'right wing', but some of them were, and Labour's Marxoid left took the opportunity of the defections to make several important constitutional changes that made life in the Labour Party very difficult for socially, morally and culturally conservative-minded types.

These changes, pursued by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, were keenly backed by those bits of the union movement that were infiltrated by the Communist Party, which in those days used its industrial strength skilfully in favour of shoving Labour sharply to the Left.

The conventional wisdom is that Neil Kinnock crushed 'the Left' in his famous denunciation of the Militant Tendency, and that he prepared the way for a 'Right wing' counter-revolution by Anthony Blair (by the way, those who wonder why I call him this should know that I do it to make people think. It is, in fact, his name. He called himself that in articles he wrote for the New Statesman in the 1980s, and his wife referred to him as 'Anthony' in her election leaflet in Margate in 1983. He switched to 'Tony' for political reasons. People brought up with his background would have thought 'Tony' a bit downmarket).

Actually, the Kinnock-Blair counter-revolution is a myth. the Militant tendency, outside Liverpool, was a no-account Trotskyist sect, even smaller than the International Socialists to which I long ago belonged. It was not a major force in the leftist takeover of the Party, and its defeat didn't reverse the constitutional changes. The great fuss over 'Clause Four' is likewise meaningless.

Nationalisation hadn't been a serious issue in the Labour Party since the late 1950s. the issue over which the Left held on, and have never flinched, is comprehensive schools, identified by them as far more significant than nationalisation. Any Labour leader who sought to bring back selection by ability would be destroyed, though the Left have accepted covert selection though wealth or religious affiliation, of the sort used by the Labour elite - provided the idea of an eleven plus is strictly off limits. Taxation and the expansion of the welfare state, plus a conviction that crime was a disease that needed to be treated, are other important parts of this ideology. And, once Jacques Delors had explained the European Union's social democratic nature to them, they were mad keen on that too. Issues of national independence didn't worry this lot.

The other thing that changed was that Margaret Thatcher, by devastating manufacturing industry, had pretty much wiped out the old male-dominated heavy-lifting industries where Labour's socially conservative, religious voters were still concentrated. The union movement quietly transformed itself into a white-collar, feminised pressure group for public spending, since most union members now work in the public sector. Many of these new trades unionists - social workers, teachers, civil servants, Quango employees, BBC people, local government and health professionals - had also been through the universities or teacher training colleges of the 1960s and early 1970s, where crude cultural Marxism was the standard received opinion, and so formed the willing shock-troops of political correctness.

I think there may be one or two actual right-wing Labour MPs still hiding out in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but I don't want to make their wretched, hunted lives any worse by naming them here. They have no real influence or hopes of preferment to high office and so -unlike their forerunners - are politically meaningless.

This is why the Labour Party, whose leadership elections were once so contentious and fierce, now has no real issue over which to divide.

And yet these vestigial right-wingers represent a huge current of working class social conservatism, broadly patriotic, broadly religious, broadly monarchist, against drunkenness, gambling and sexual licence, highly uneasy about mass immigration, hostile to the EU, angry about crime and disorder.

But the Labour Party itself long ceased to represent such people.

Some of these abandoned voters might well help form the basis of the new party I hope for. In fact it would have no chance without them. They could never possibly vote Tory, and find it increasingly difficult to vote Labour. It is time they were represented in Parliament again - but it won't happen until the two old parties are obviously ready for the morgue. All that can save these two near-corpses is a silly revival of the Tory vote in 2009, and state funding. Let us hope that neither happens.