Last night’s one-off return of To The Manor Born was sublime. And it was also very timely, in that it gave attention to the normally taboo subject of the rift between the transnational big business interests that fund and run the Conservative Party (and the other two as well these days), and the agricultural interest that continues to give the very staunchest electoral support to the Tories (although that is a very recent phenomenon on the part of smallholders and farm labourers, bizarrely paralleling almost exactly the rise to monolithic status within that party of an ideology utterly opposed to the existence of British agriculture).
To my delighted astonishment, the programme ended with the former’s contrite capitulation to the latter. Would that that ever happened in real life.
For the fact is that one cannot believe both in agriculture and in the “free” market, nor can one believe in national sovereignty and be anything other than incandescent about the importation of the bulk of our very sustenance. And one must believe both in agriculture and in national sovereignty in order to be a conservative. The Tories simply are not conservatives, whereas the British People is overwhelmingly conservative.
That is why it favours the State action necessary in order to conserve all those things that define conservatism. In other words, because it is conservative, the British People favours social democracy, including, for example, farm subsidies, though (as for their first thirty years) at national rather than supranational level.
Whereas, just as the Tories no longer support social democracy (with or without using the term) because they are no longer conservatives, so New Labour, because it is not conservative as Old Labour was (with or without using the word), does not support social democracy.
What is the British People to do? This.
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I don't support Social Democracy because it was condemned by Leo XIII.
ReplyDeleteThe notion of "free trade" is nonsensical because it is a contradiction in terms. Trade requires laws in order to take place, because if you are trading something then by definition you give it over whilst requiring something else in return. If something is "free" then there is no such reciprocity - the giver gives altruistically.
There is of course no reason why British agriculture could not be made more efficient, but then British farmers would have to work comparably to farmers in the rest of the world.
What the term has come to mean in Britain, in the Irish Republic (up to a point) and in the Old Commonwealth did not exist at the time of Leo XIII, and indeed largely grew out of Catholic Social Teaching, finding a particular resonance among generations of Catholic voters.
ReplyDeleteIt is the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies), and the strong statutory and other (including trade union) protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.
By these means was a Communist Revolution prevented in one of the two countries that Marx himself deemed most likely to have one; in the other, the same thing was achieved by strikingly similar means coming down jointly from Bismarck and the Centre Party - it is very notable that this was how made peace with it at the end of the Kulturkampf.
Here as in Germany (and, indeed, as in Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), it would never have worked without the participation of the churches, and not least of the Catholic Church. Nor could it again.
With any luck, we are about to see the re-emergence of the closely related American populist tradition, and with it of the Democratic Party properly so called, at once capable and worthy of controlling both Capitol Hill and the White House for generations. When that happens, then it will light the touchpapers all over the West, beginning with these islands, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.