Time to give a voice to:
- The alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with Russia;
- The socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base;
- Those who recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level;
- Those who refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich;
And many, many more.
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I have always wondered to what extend the social conservatism of Old Labour was simply a result of the fact that society as a whole was more socially conservative. I suspect that New Labour's hostility to the monarchy, for example, is a result of taking Left-politics to its natural conclusion, something which Old Labour was unable to do in an age where monarchism was near universal.
ReplyDeleteOh, no, the 1923 Labour Party Conference peremptorily dismissed an anti-monarchist motion, and no other has ever been proposed. The New Labour high command could still never sell the thing to the rank and file or to the unions.
ReplyDeleteThe Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment were delivered by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services.
That movement proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.
Peter Shore denounced the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and he supported for Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State.
The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party was founded out of the T&G specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.
The 1977 Golden Jubilee celebrations were held under a Labour Government.
And so one could go on. Not least, consider the strong family ties of many Labour voters, either to the Caribbean, or to Canada, Australia (especially) or New Zealand.
If abolishing the monarchy is the logical conclusion of anything, then it is the logical conclusion of Thatcherism, the economic entrenchment of 1960s social decadence. Thatcher herself scorned the Commonwealth, despised civically active Christianity, detested the Queen, and sought to supplant Her Majesty in public life.