The Attlee Test

Plenty of emails saying that my views on constitutional and ceremonial matters are not only "anachronistic", but "right-wing". In fact, my view on constitutional matters is The Attlee Test: if Attlee (not to say Bevan, a staunch Unionist among so much else) could make something work, then it is beyond me why Blair or Brown would feel any need to change it.

The same applies to ceremonial: these things are changed because those changing them have given up on, if they ever really believed in, fighting against want, ignorance, ill health, squalor, and avoidable war. They have given up on, if they ever really believed in, defending the best conservative values both against the Whiggish "free" market, and against the Jacobinism, Marxism, anarchism or Fascism into which that Whiggery drives its millions of despairing victims.

If there had been, say, a Human Rights Act or a Supreme Court in the 1940s, then it seems certain that there would have been no nationalisation, even with compensation (which compensation was quite right, I might add), nor any incorporation of private and charitable hospitals into the NHS, without which there would simply have been no NHS. These measures would have been presumptiously struck down in the courts. That consideration, too, might be called The Attlee Test.