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reduced the bus services to the village where I have been a Parish Councillor for most of my adult life, and has withdrawn the vitally necessary subsidised transport to the county's four faith-based secondary schools, all of which are Catholic, and one of which is in this Parish;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.