On Both Sides

Just as everyone has two parents, and it is pointless and dangerous to ignore the legacy of either, so all three of the twentieth-century British political movements that are about to collapse are inheritors of both of the traditions that went before them. That understanding is crucial to the creation of their replacements.

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.

I really do feel for the New Labour, Euston Manifesto, Harry's Place crowd. To them, Labour was always secular, metropolitan, and interweaved with the ever-shifting factions of the sectarian Left. But that was London Labour, or at least a significant part of London Labour. It was never like that much, if at all, anywhere else. They might consider that Labour rarely did anything like as well as one might have expected in London, where the type of Labour that produced them has always struggled particularly hard to take over from the working-class populist type of Toryism, which has always included voting enthusiastically for figures like Boris Johnson.

In the same way, the emergent Conservative Party after the First World War was something quite different from its predecessor, in that it contained a huge number of people whose families or whose persons had been Liberal, and who in many ways remained fundamentally so. Alfred Roberts may have sat as an Independent Councillor and Alderman, and never signed on the dotted line as a Tory in his life, but it was as a Conservative that the daughter whose politics he had shaped definitively was to give effect to both economic and, however much her supporters may pretend otherwise, social Liberalism, the first including European federalism, the second exacerbated within Liberalism by that disconnection from Nonconformist roots which she herself embodied. She drew heavily on other such transitional figures, including Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon and Oliver Smedley, again none of whom ever joined her party, not even Harris when she gave him a peerage.

The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, arose of course out of the merger between most of the remnant Liberal Party and almost all of the SDP, that strange phenomenon which apparently offered a vehicle to the Labourisation of that party's Liberal and Tory heritages, but which had in fact betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe, betrayed both Gaitskellism and Christian Socialism over nuclear weapons, succumbed to the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins, succumbed to the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams, succumbed to her regret at not having resigned in protest at past Labour measures to restrict immigration, and adopted a fanatical hatred of trade unions and therefore of the public sector.

Those aberrant tendencies made the SDP's members sympathetic towards the constitutional vandalism on which their new Liberal brethren actually agreed with the Hard Leftists whom they themselves were fleeing. Hence that vandalism's eventual implementation by a New Labour Project replete with those who had been Communists, fellow-travellers or Trotskyists in those days.

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.

Likewise, among numerous other examples, the situation in the United States cries out for a movement which combines the economic populism of the best of the Democratic tradition (though never without at least some Republican support), the foreign policy realism of the best of the Republican tradition (though never without at least some Democratic support), and the moral and social conservatism of the best of both.