Tuesday 4 May 2010

He May Not Get There With Us

If, as they are claiming today, political journalists had never heard of Citizens UK until yesterday, then they need to get out more. Do they imagine that something like this organises itself, by means of nothing more than a round-robin email the week before? They are not really interested in politics, and not remotely interested in anything beyond the Westminster Village soap opera. They are glorified gossip columnists.

Yesterday, far too late for himself, Brown went right back to Labour’s roots. As it took shape, Labour adapted itself both to Radical Liberalism and to populist Toryism, depending on the pre-existing culture at least of its target electorate in the given locality. Not unrelatedly, it also adapted to pre-existing religious traditions: Catholic on Clydeside or Merseyside, Methodist in the Durham pit villages, “Chapel” in Wales, and so on.

Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes, as well as arguably two or more upper classes these days, although the old one would hotly dispute that. There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds, which especially in Labour’s early years routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.

Both Radical Liberalism and populist Toryism were very open to central and local government action in the service of the communities to which they appealed, so they were open to many aspects of the never-dominant Socialist strand in Labour as surely as they acted as checks and balances on it. Deeply rooted in the chapels, the Radicals had a pronounced streak of moral and social conservatism, especially where intoxication and gambling were concerned. Toryism, properly so called, upholds the organic Constitution, believes in carefully controlled importation and immigration, and advocates a realistic foreign policy which includes a strong defence capability used only most sparingly and to strictly defensive ends. And so on.

The movement that drank deeply from both of these wells did in fact deliver social democracy in this country, a good both in itself and in its prevention of a Communist revolution or a Fascist putsch, either of which could have happened here, and one or other of which would otherwise have done so. That movement was destroyed by those who had always been its bitterest enemies, the sectarian Hard Left, which had moved from economic to moral, social, cultural and constitutional means.

So now, a new such movement demands to be created. Brown cannot create it. But yesterday, he identified himself, and was recognised, as its John the Baptist, its Moses on the mountaintop.

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