Proper Conservatives Need A Proper Labour Party

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there:

Farage. It is a new word. It means the headless chicken behaviour of those who suddenly see the serious possibility of a mainland – nay, even English! – seat electing someone from outside their cosy little club of economically and socially ultra-liberal secularists and Eurofanatics for war and against civil liberties. In recent days, there has plenty of faraging going on.

Well, good luck to Nigel Farage. Although I have never voted for UKIP, I am where half of its European voters must be politically. Add together the Tory and UKIP votes in Wales, or London, or any of the three Northern regions, or either of the two Midland regions, and you get a ludicrously high figure for the number of natural Tories living there. To cite one of many possible examples, UKIP has now topped the poll in Cornwall for the second time running. The Lib Dems hold every Commons seat in Cornwall. Half of UKIP’s vote simply must be either Old Labour or (especially in the West Country) Old Liberal rather than Old Tory. Plus any number of people like me who for whatever reason have never voted for UKIP, but who are certainly like that.

So a new movement is now required to fight for the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies). For the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment. For fair taxation. For full employment. For the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government. For co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies and similar bodies. And for every household to enjoy a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

There used to be such a movement. It was defined by Old Labour monarchism and constitutional caution. By Old Labour and Old Liberal Euroscepticism and Unionism. By Radical and Old Labour ruralism. And by Old Labour defence of the grammar schools, moral and social conservatism, economic patriotism, and foreign policy realism. Not everyone signed up to every point. But everyone accepted them as legitimate within the whole, and together they therefore set the mood, the tone.

Those strands now need to be publicly woven back together by new MPs, leading to a new party. Even if you are a diehard Tory who would never vote for such a party (although why would you vote for Cameron and Osborne instead?), you must still see the need of such a broadly-based social democratic and Distributist movement, to coalesce into a new party once in Parliament. It would be, as it used to be, one of the parliamentary and political safeguards of the Crown and the organic Constitution, of national sovereignty and the Union, of the countryside, of the grammar schools, of traditional values, of tightly controlled importation and immigration, and of a realistic foreign policy.

Indeed, the existence of this party would make possible the existence of a proper Tory party, which, faced with such a friendly rival, but rival all the same, would neither dare nor even wish to threaten welfare provision, workers’ rights, consumer protection, fair taxation, full employment, central and local government services, and co-operatives and similar enterprises. Thus, in stark contrast to governments and parties that do threaten those things, it could get on with conserving the Crown, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the countryside, the grammar schools, traditional values, tightly controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy. It would be the friendly but real rival constantly checking and balancing the party of social democracy and Distributism, and constantly checked and balanced by that party. These are constitutional checks and balances as important as any other, and their destruction has been part and parcel of the general destruction of constitutionality during the New Labour years.

Unless, that is, you have no desire to conserve any of those things, and you are therefore simply not a conservative at all. In that case, by all means vote for the Heir to Blair. Or for John Bercow.