Questions for Labour's Consultation

Where is the party of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property from which every household could resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State?

Where is the party that recognises that none of these things is possible except in terms of the fiscal responsibility that they themselves define?

Where is the party that recognises those commitments as fully compatible with a no less absolute commitment to any or all of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy?

Where is the party that will - in the course of each Parliament, as a matter of routine - submit to a binding ballot of the whole constituency electorate its locally determined internal shortlist of two for Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, and submit to a binding ballot of the whole national electorate its nationally determined internal shortlist of two for Leader?

Where is the party that will submit to such a ballot the 10 policies proposed by the most of its branches (including affiliated branches where applicable), with each voter entitled to vote for up to two, and with the top seven guaranteed inclusion in the subsequent General Election manifesto?

Where is the party that will promise to legislate for a ballot line system, such that voters would be able to indicate that they were voting for a given candidate specifically as endorsed by a smaller party or other campaigning organisation (such as a trade union), with the number of votes by ballot line recorded and published separately?

Where is the party that will choose its working peers by seeking nominations from its branches (including those of affiliated organisations) and put out to a ballot of the entire electorate those with the most nominations, up to one and a half times their respective allocations, so that each of us could then vote for up to five, and the highest scoring 10 would get in?

Where is the party that will promise to legislate that every four or five years, the 12 units already used for European Elections would each elect three Crossbenchers, with each of us voting for one candidate and with the three highest scorers being ennobled?

Where is the party that will campaign for a return to the situation whereby we could safely assume that almost everyone convicted deserved to be, and where there was far less crime anyway due to proper policing, so that we could also have proper sentencing, and a proper regime for the far fewer people who were in prison?

Where is the party that will use every parliamentary opportunity to seek to restore the supremacy of British over EU law, to require all EU legislation to pass through both Houses of Parliament as if it had originated in one or other of them, to require British Ministers to adopt the show-stopping Empty Chair Policy until the Council of Ministers meets in public and publishes an Official Report akin to Hansard, to restore the annual votes on the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, to use those annual votes in order to destroy those Policies, and to disapply in the United Kingdom any ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, or of the European Court of Justice, or of the "Supreme Court" if it strikes down or otherwise compromises the Statute Law, or under the Human Rights Act under the same circumstance, unless ratified by a resolution of the House of Commons?

And where is the party that, having legislated for Scottish and Welsh devolution, is content to leave the matter there, as required by a wider context of war and of global economic crisis (never mind the collapse of the Irish Republic), and as fervently desired by most of its MPs from Scotland and Wales, with any dissent coming from people whom the Leader has hardly met, rather than from those whom he has known for many years and whom he sees every working day?

Among so very, very, very many other things.

In short, where is the Labour Party, the party that existed before the death of John Smith led to its opportunistic overthrow by the Peter Mandelsons and Harriet Harmans of the world, 1970s campus sectarian Leftists who spent the day of Prince Charles’s first wedding in Boulogne, so far removed were they from the Government that had presided over the Silver Jubilee, but whose own transition from economic means to social and cultural ones now sets the entire permissible agenda in this country?