Interesting stuff from David Owen, who is close to Ed Miliband, and from David Marsh.
But in January 1948, Attlee told the nation in a radio broadcast that “Our task is to work out a system of a new and challenging kind, which combines individual freedom with a planned economy, democracy with social justice.” His Cabinet confirmed the intention “to develop our power and influence to equal that of the United States of America and the USSR,” because “We should be able to carry out our task in such a way which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States or to the Soviet Union.”
Substitute “China” (which, like the Soviet Union, has neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe) or anything else you like for “the USSR” or “the Soviet Union”. Substitute “the EU”, if you are feeling especially hysterical, although neither the central institutions nor any country on the Continent has the slightest desire to dominate Britain or what have you; to them, as to the Americans, we are just a faded old dear, an object of affectionate pity.
But what matters is that we get on with using our global reach - the Commonwealth, the British Council, the BBC World Service, the Rhodes Scholarships, and so on - in order to work out a system of a new and challenging kind, which combines individual freedom with a planned economy, democracy with social justice, and to develop our power and influence to equal that of the United States of America and anyone else who might happen to come along, so that we are able to carry out our task in such a way which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States or to anyone else.
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There would be an appetite for this kind of leadership even in the eurozone countries, a re-emergence of the old Gaullist and Christian Democractic tarditions nad of what Fianna Fail and Fine Gael used to have in common.
ReplyDeleteQuite so. On moving to Britain, members and supporters of both main Irish parties had no difficulty becoming enthusiastic members and supporters of the Labour Party. Many Social Catholics in post-War Italy promoted Keynesianism and felt a strong affinity with the domestic policies of the Attlee Government, but they were also sceptical about NATO.
ReplyDeleteJakob Kaiser’s vision was of a German Christian Democracy that looked to British Labour for its inspiration in giving effect to Catholic Social Teaching, and which gave such effect by emphasising co-operatives, the public ownership of key industries, extensive social insurance, and the works councils later suggested in the SDP’s founding Limehouse Declaration and advocated by David Owen, while also seeking a United Germany as a bridge between East and West, allied neither to NATO nor to the Soviet Bloc.
I have been told that this affinity with the glory days of Continental Christian Democracy, which itself felt such an affinity with the glory days of British Labour, is incompatible with “the Protestant Anglophone tradition”. But, especially in Germany and in Switzerland, Christian Democracy has both deep roots in Protestant as well as Catholic thought, and huge electoral support among Protestants as well as among Catholics.
And looking at those English-speaking countries (a small minority of the total) presumably meant by my interlocutors, I can see only three explicitly Protestant political movements of any note. One is in Northern Ireland, and the other two are in the United States, where one of them is white and the other is black. None of them is socially liberal, to say the least. All three are in favour of public spending generous to the point of lavishness, provided that it is on their own respective constituencies; if the price of this is the same provision for certain others, who are very often Catholics, then that price is paid, if not gladly, then at least in full.
All three simply presuppose the capacity of the several layers of government to do both economically social democratic and socially conservative things, identifying that as axiomatically the whole point of governmental institutions.
It was ever thus. Those very Protestant Tories, Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full.
Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme.
But that economic and social libertinism is not the Protestant Anglophone tradition, and it ought not to present itself as such.