Setting Aside

Offering yet further evidence of how totally unconservative and anti-conservative capitalism is, the usual suspects are going berserk at a potential EU directive setting aside Sunday as a day of rest. It will not ban Sunday trading outright, you understand. But it will offer some ammunition against the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, which has now returned in full along with so many other evils, such as opium dens, against which the Liberal Party also once referred specifically to the Christian basis of our civilisation.

That reference was also made by Shaftesbury and Wilberforce as Tory campaigners against phenomena now well on the way back. And by the temperance Methodists and traditional Catholics who built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. Back when the Labour Party was the Labour Party, Thatcher's attempt to make Sunday just another shopping day was the issue on which that party, acting for and on behalf of the relevant trade union, delivered the only Commons defeat of her Premiership.

The shame is that we now need the Christian Democrats of the Continent to deliver such a defeat of New Labour, which no controls all three parties. This was once the land of Wliberforce's and Shaftesbury's Toryism. This was once the land of the Liberal Party's Nonconformist Conscience. And this was once the land of the Labour MPs who defended Catholic schools, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling, and who successfully organised (especially through USDAW) against Thatcher's and Major's attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day.

Early Labour activists resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence, while the trade unions fought numerous battles to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment. Of the trade union banners depicting Biblical scenes and characters.

Yet now we need the EU? The Attlee Government refused to join the European Coal and Steel Community on the grounds that it was "the blueprint for a federal state" which "the Durham miners would never wear. Gaitskell rejected European federalism as “the end of a thousand years of history” and liable to destroy the Commonwealth. Most Labour MPs, and one Liberal, voted against Heath's Treaty of Rome. The Parliamentary Labour Party unanimously opposed Thatcher's Single European Act. 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, including, in Bryan Gould, the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. And every Labour and Liberal Democrat MP, without exception, voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies annually between 1979 and 1997.

But now the heirs of the Victorian Liberals, of the Christian Socialist pioneers, and for that matter of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, need the EU to do the sort of thing that was once done on the floor of the House of Commons against Margaret Thatcher and the full might of her "free"-marketeeering backers?

No, no, a thousand times no. What we need are proper parties, such as we used to have. We need to send our people to Parliament, there to coalesce into serious political formations. That was how the old ones came about. And that is how the new ones need to be brought about.