Friday 28 September 2007

Not The Tory Conference

To hell with the Tory Conference! To hell with all of them!

Britain wants, needs and deserves there be operating at every level a One Nation party, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation; a party in the tradition that came down from Colbert, Disraeli and Bismarck through Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge to Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell.

Britain wants, needs and deserves a party which will be ready to call for the utilities to be taken back into public ownership and subjected to democratic political control (just as the Tories did to electricity) when, a few years from now, the readers of the Mail and Telegraph newspapers want to rise up and demand this; a party which will have made this proposition financially viable by the effects of its taxation policies on the utilities' share prices.

Britain wants, needs and deserves a party which rejects the Lib Dems' false dichotomy between liberty and authority, instead explaining that there cannot be liberty without the authority needed to protect it, nor authority (as radically distinct from raw power, brute force) without the liberty that provides its moral basis.

Britain wants, needs and deserves a party which will use "soft power" in relation to the United States and others, to advocate and cultivate the closest possible economic, social, cultural and political co-operation between the people of West African slave descent and the people of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish descent, on the basis of their shared economic, social, cultural and political heritage, including their shared English language and their shared blood ties.

Britain wants, needs and deserves a party which will insist that the Union simply is not the Union, nor is the Commonwealth the Commonwealth, without a very strong Irish dimension; a party which will therefore work towards the Irish Republic's accession to the Commonwealth while re-enfranchising all those disenfranchised by the decline of the UUP and the Alliance Party, by the emerging takeover of the SDLP by Fianna Fail, and by the scandalous failure hitherto to provide a pro-Union party acceptable to Catholics and to social democrats, all the while emphasising that fidelity to any of the Gaelic-Irish, Anglo-Irish and Scots-Irish traditions has long (arguably always) called for the closest possible ties across the Irish Sea.

And so very much else.

What are you doing about it?

4 comments:

  1. Well, what are YOU doing about it? There's been absolutely no sign of progress over the last year or so, judging by what you've written on this blog. Who's advising you? Sack them!

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  2. There's been rather a lot, let me assure you. But it's hardly likely to appear here before it's all arranged, is it?

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  3. must be hard to arrange a non-party....

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  4. Oh, you cannot begin to imagine...

    Mind you, three practically memberless organisations have been managing it perfectly well for donkey's years now.

    Of course, everything will be up and running by the time of a 2009 Election. Quite a lot could be by spring 2008. But November this year is just a non-starter.

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