Loving It All

Brown demonstrated that he was New Labour after all by professing not to love the prestige, the title or the ceremony of the office of Prime Minister, and by suggesting that those things were separable from its capacity to do good.

When the Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment were actually delivered in this country, they were delivered by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which 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 supported 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, now Unite, specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers. Early activists peremptorily dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist, and no such motion has ever again been brought to the floor of a Labour Party Conference, whereas it is only about 15 years since just such a motion was brought to the conference of a party which is now in government by a group including one Liz Truss. Whatever happened to her?

In this tradition is the concern that power should not be transferred from elected parliamentarians to unelected judges. That any elected second chamber should not subvert the authority of the House of Commons. And that electoral reform should not mean voting for parties rather than people, should not destroy direct local representation, should not give power to anti-constitutional or anti-democratic forces, and should not prevent necessary radical action on behalf of the poor or otherwise disadvantaged. It is the tradition of total opposition to the constraint of total opposition to any State funding of political parties that detaches them even further from wider civil society.

A new such a political movement is now required as a matter of the utmost urgency, and the opportunity to create it will be provided by electoral reform.