One Nation Dave?

There has to be an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation.

The trade union closed shop guaranteed to the Tory 40 to 45 per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence on the selection of the Labour parliamentary candidates for the safe Labour constituencies in which they lived. In repudiating trade unionism, Tony Blair and his supporters repudiated both controlled immigration, and the moderating influence of the wider, especially working-class, electorate on and in the affairs of the Labour Party.

In that vein, the Conservative Governments between the Wars successfully delivered welfare provision, public ownership, and peace. The Tory Britain of the 1930s was not only no stranger to nationalisation (of the BBC and of electricity, for example), but had the most advanced Welfare State in the world, with Britons taking for granted the things to which American New Deal Democrats, Swedish Social Democrats and the New Zealand Labour Party still only aspired. No wonder that all three parties offered Commons nominations to Keynes and Beveridge in 1945, but they both stuck with the Liberals, so they both had to be given peerages instead.

And no wonder that the National Health Service was in all three manifestos. The Tories did eventually vote against it on a couple of technicalities, but only in the secure knowledge that it was going to go through anyway. On returning to office in 1951, when the NHS was very new and practically bankrupt, they left it intact, as they continued to do until after the 2010 General Election, which Labour would have won outright if the Conservative Party’s real agenda for the NHS had previously been made public. Tellingly, those agenda have still yet to be given practical effect.

There were Tories who opposed first Thatcherism and then Maastricht: the economically populist and pro-manufacturing, morally and socially conservative, staunchly Unionist and pro-military, strongly church-based Wintertons; the unyieldingly constitutionalist and civil libertarian Richard Shepherd; the Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth, anti-neoconservative Sir Peter Tapsell, now Father of the House of Commons; and the conservationist, agrarian, anti-nuclear (indeed, Quaker) Sir Richard Body.

There were grave reservations about, and indeed there was outright hostility towards, nuclear weapons on the part of such distinguished Tories as Anthony Head, Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Aubrey Jones, George Jellicoe and, above all, Enoch Powell. There was no mention of nuclear weapons in the SDP’s founding Limehouse Declaration. Doubts about deploying American cruise and Pershing II missiles were expressed by John Horam even after he had acceded to the SDP and become increasingly known for his monetarism. Longstanding, ongoing work in the field of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation has been and is done by Shirley Williams.

Even conventional wars, while sometimes inescapable, such as when our territory has been invaded, are not conservative, but cost taxpayers vast sums of money, create new threats by creating new enemies and entrenching or embittering old ones, and are morally and socially disruptive. We are neither fighting nor facing any inescapable war today. The point of the Armed Forces is precisely to prevent wars, by deterring them. Everything to do with the Swinging Sixties really started during the War.

And economic policies are perfectly conservative if they are acceptable to Gaullists, Christian Democrats, conservative Democrats and other such exemplars of patriotism, moral and social conservatism, or both.