Sunday 6 November 2011

A National Party No More

In the latest New Statesman, David Miliband gloatingly sets out how he is subsuming the callow Labour Students into his Movement for Change, an organisation with no formal connection to the Labour Party. That David Miliband Machine "is training 10,000 community leaders around the country over the next four years." Ten thousand.

Almost every day, and certainly several times each week, I am asked why I do not re-join the Labour Party. After all, I could never cease to be politically active, and this side of electoral reform Labour is the only party of which I could ever imagine being a member. My answer is partly that the massively dominant Labour Party in County Durham has drastically reduced the bus services to the village where I have been a Parish Councillor for most of my adult life, and has withdrawn the vitally necessary subsidised transport to the county's four faith-based secondary schools, all of which are Catholic, and one of which is in this Parish; in my time, I have done both seven years as a pupil there and eight years as a governor.

But the answer is also far wider and far deeper than that. I could only ever be a member of a truly national party. By definition, a truly national party must be profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of the financial services sector, of London and the South East, of the West and Centre of Scotland, of South Wales, of the towns and cities, of those who hold liberal social and cultural values, and of people who cherish ties to Continental Europe, to the United States of America, and to the State of Israel (specific institutional expressions of those ties are a very different matter).

And by definition, a truly national party must be profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of agriculture and manufacturing, of small and medium-sized businesses, of the North of England, of the Midlands, of the West Country, of East Anglia, of Northern Ireland, of the North of Scotland, of the South of Scotland, of North Wales, of Mid Wales, of West Wales, of the countryside, of local government, of the trade unions, of mutual enterprises, of voluntary organisations, of those who hold conservative social and cultural values, and of people who cherish ties throughout the world, most especially within these Islands and the Commonwealth, but also to the Arab world and Iran, to the Slavic and Confucian worlds, to Latin America and elsewhere, all historically close to Britain in various ways.

In principle, this is capable of extension to any other country on earth. Yes, even to America or to Israel. But always strictly subordinate to the British national interest, an integral part of which is always the priority of Commonwealth ties and of the ties within this archipelago.

A truly national party would fight every seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal.

If Labour were a truly national party, then it would be resigned to the fact that a small faction has always been influenced to some extent by Marxism, lately including the schism between those who continue to pursue Marxist ends by economic means, and those who instead now pursue Marxist ends by means of social, cultural and constitutional change. In the latter camp, they have reclassified the bourgeoisie as the victorious and dictatorial class, while a certain idea of the American Republic has replaced the Soviet Union, or less commonly Maoist China, as the global superpower imposing utopianism by whatever means of coercion.

However, if Labour were truly a national party, then it would recognise all of that as only ever a sideshow, if sometimes a noisy and a potentially distracting one. Instead, it would concentrate, pretty much exclusively, on the heritage of its overwhelming majority historically and in what are still its core areas. That political heritage is variously Radical Liberal, or Tory populist, or Christian Socialist, or Social Catholic and Distributist. All without a hint of Marxism. All with a valiant history of opposing both Communism and the Trotskyist distinction without a difference no less vigorously than they opposed Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

Not least because it continues to tolerate the presence and activities of David Miliband, Labour is manifestly still not a truly national party. Therefore, I still cannot re-join it.

9 comments:

  1. The lost leader, should have been a district councillor in 2003, should have been a unitary county councillor when the change happened, should have been an MP last year, should be a shadow minister now, should have been in the Cabinet some time around 2018/19. May God punish the people who kept you down. May only dust remain of Neil Fleming.

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  2. Looks as if you have lifted the subtitle as well as the title. This is "The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat". Er, Socialism, anyone?

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  3. If that is what you want to call it, since that is what the word has meant in this country for about as long as it has been used at all on these shores on in this tongue.

    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 for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State, while having 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.

    Drawing on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, and therefore rejecting cultural Marxism no less comprehensively than economic Marxism, and vice versa.

    With Herbert Morrison, “never having seen any conflict between Labour and what are known as the middle classes”, and, with Aneurin Bevan, denouncing class war, calling instead for “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon” and for the making of “war upon a system, not upon a class”.

    Participating in the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China;

    Upholding the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left’s traditional electoral base.

    Recognising that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

    Refusing to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich; and

    And co-operating as closely as possible with the forces of provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business Toryism, forces set free by electoral reform from tendencies variously metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian and make-the-world-anew.

    Socialism? If you like. Labourism? Simply as a matter of fact. And what other meaning has the S-word ever had in these Islands or in the Old Commonwealth?

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  4. A truly national party would fight every seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal.

    The 50-state strategy. Bring it on. Except that the only man who would, would be you.

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  5. "We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.'s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy's rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn't have to die poor. And I made it because a man with whom I served in the Georgia Senate, a man named Jimmy Carter, brought honesty and decency and integrity to public service."

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  6. Zell Miller, enormous public investor in education, shifted the correct way against segregation and against abortion, and never shifted from the correct positions on decency in the media and on the definition of marriage, as well as on the social justice issues to which he refers in your quotation from him. (He is still alive, but I am assuming that you are not he.)

    He remains a registered Democrat. Shame about the Bush endorsement in 2004, and shame that he seems to be backing Gingrich, but take heart from the fact that Gingrich is not going to get anywhere.

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  7. It beggars belief that there has never been either a Disptaches or a Panorama on the Movement for Change.

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  8. Except, alas, that it doesn't.

    This is really one for Unreported World, deserving of the full Peter Oborne treatment.

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  9. This post and your own at 21:45 yesterday look like the basis for something better, a movement of our own.

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