The following questions are not posed rhetorically, but simply asked.
Is Ed Miliband's Labour Party a party for those whose priorities include civil liberties, local communitarian populism, the indefatigable pursuit of single issues, the Nonconformist social conscience, the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, traditional moral and social values, consumer protection, conservation rather than environmentalism, national sovereignty, a realist foreign policy, the Commonwealth, the peace activism historically exemplified by Sir Herbert Samuel, redress of economic and political grievances in the countryside, and the needs and concerns of areas remote from the centres of power both in the United Kingdom and in each of its constituent parts?
And is Ed Miliband's Labour Party a party for those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State?
In other words, is Ed Miliband's Labour Party a welcome and welcoming home, both for those who stand in the best of the British Liberal tradition, and for those social democrats who became disconnected from Labour by the rise within it of forces inimical to Bevan's eschewal of class conflict in favour of "a platform broad enough for all to stand upon", and whose views on certain issues have, if anything, returned to the Gaitskellite tradition in the intervening decades?
Well, is it? If so, then how, exactly? I really do only ask.
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Will you be coming back?
ReplyDeleteTo what? The only remaining party of control orders, ID cards, a national DNA database, prolonged detention without charge (not trial, charge), and all the rest of it? To cite only one policy area.
ReplyDeleteAnd to do what? I held my Parish seat with an increased vote as an Independent. They never gave me anything more than that, and in any case this ward now has two excellent members of the unitary County Council, one Labour and one Independent, both of whom have the job for life.
As for Parliament: not a woman, not an apparatchik, not on "the centre ground". Forced them to allow a Catholic on an all-women shortlist (against their own rules) and a local candidate who was not a student in her early twenties with no chance of being selected, and managed that, up to and including the selection of that local Catholic candidate who is now the MP, without being a Labour Party member.
In your own oft-repeated words:
ReplyDeleteGaitskell’s Campaign for Democratic Socialism explicitly supported the unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear weapons, and the document Policy for Peace, on which Gaitskell eventually won his battle at the 1961 Labour Conference, stated: “Britain should cease the attempt to remain an independent nuclear power, since that neither strengthens the alliance, nor is it now a sensible use of our limited resources.”
Quite so. If Labour were still like that...
ReplyDeleteBut it isn't.
I'd be surprised if most members of the Miliband I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-New Labour Party even know what all those terms mean.
ReplyDeleteOh, watch this space...
ReplyDelete