Triumph of the Whigs

This blog has repeatedly referred to the triumph of the Whigs over the Tories within the Conservative Party, Toryism's slow drowning by successive waves of Whiggery. But the Whigs have also triumphed over the Radicals among the Liberal Democrats.

Wilberforce against the slave trade, Shaftesbury against child labour and horrific factory conditions, Disraeli's social reforms and his extension of the franchise: these Tory campaigns and measures matched those of the Radicals against opium dens, against unregulated drinking and gambling, against seven-day working weeks, and also for the extension of the franchise.

On both sides, they derived from the sense - passed down among Catholics, High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others - that the Empire's capitalist ideology was at some level less than fully legitimate, because the Empire was at some level less than fully legitimate, because the Whig State created in 1688 was at some level less than fully legitimate.

Opium dens, or pretty much the same thing, are back. Unregulated drinking and gambling are back. Seven-day working weeks are back. Numerous social reforms and the extension of the franchise might as well never have happened, and may yet be reversed in this generation or the next. By importing the products of slavery, child labour and horrific factory conditions, we are already morally in the same position as if those evils existed on our own soil, and we are preparing the ground for them to be restored to it.

But the Whigs will do absolutely nothing about any of this.