Across The Trenches

Without the part in square brackets, this letter of mine appears in this week's Spectator:

Richard Ryder claims that the heirs of Victorian tycoons “failed to carry their radical Whiggism across the trenches” into the Conservative Party. But, on the contrary, the Conservative Party has been hoovering up Liberals, as Liberals, for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts’s daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs (although its founders and its founding backer, like Roberts, never actually joined), and now the Liberal Democrats. The Tory organisation has always replaced the Liberal one, but the Liberal ideology has always replaced the Tory one.

The Conservative Party is itself therefore two parties in one, which would be entirely separate in many other countries, competing hardly at all for the same votes and co-operating hardly at all on any issue of policy. The metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew party has finally defeated and banished the provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business party. The Whigs have finally defeated and banished the Tories. [But preferably in a context of electoral reform, which can only suit the Tories down to the ground. They are not the only ones.]

There are two traditions in British politics, going back before there technically was a single British State, to the events of and after 1688. One always supported that coup, the other mostly came to accept it as a done deal, but often only after a very long time. The first therefore supported, and indeed embodied, the Whig oligarchy, with its Empire and with that Empire's capitalist ideology. The other always felt that something about that settlement was less that fully legitimate, a sensibility passed from generation to generation among Catholics, High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics), Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others. Out of that sensibility arose the American Republic, the campaign against the slave trade, the Radical and Tory action against social evils, the extension of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

All three main parties today include strong elements of both traditions. Going back before even the events described above, the Conservative Party's looser Tory precursor included Patriot Whigs, and before them Country Whigs almost all the way back to 1688 itself. Radical Liberals, Tory populists, and Whig oligarchs from both the Conservative and the Liberal Parties, contributed significantly to the creation and development of the Labour Party. Many in all of those lineages seceded to the SDP, which united with a Liberal Party still containing very large and active tendencies both towards Radicalism and towards Whiggery.

But in the form of the Coalition, the Whigs in the Conservative Party have permanently defeated and banished the Tories, while the Whigs in the Liberal Democrats have permanently defeated and banished the Radicals, and the heirs of Labour's populist Toryism (Tory Socialism, as it was once known favourably in both parties that that term calls to mind) via the SDP. Tories may seek to join or to take over UKIP, although it commands considerable sympathy among people who have accepted every detail of the successive Liberal Unionist, Liberal Imperialist, National Liberal, and IEA-Thatcherite transformation, assuming the position thus defined to be the essence of Toryism.

And what of the Radicals and the Tory Socialists? Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes. There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour's early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.

Both Radical Liberalism and populist Toryism were very open to central and local government action in the service of their communities. They were therefore open to many aspects of the never-dominant Socialist strand in Labour as surely as they acted as checks and balances on that tendency. Deeply rooted in the chapels, the Radicals had a pronounced streak of moral and social conservatism, especially where intoxication and gambling were concerned. Toryism, properly so called, upholds the organic Constitution, believes in carefully controlled importation and immigration, and advocates a realist foreign policy which includes a strong defence capability used only most sparingly and to strictly defensive ends. And so on.

The movement that drank deeply from both of these wells did in fact deliver social democracy in this country, a good both in itself and in its prevention of a Communist revolution. That movement was destroyed by those who had always been its bitterest enemies, the sectarian Hard Left, which had moved from economic to moral, social, cultural and constitutional means. But those bitterest enemies were themselves defeated in the person of Ed Miliband at the last Labour Leadership Election. Ed Miliband should make himself the rallying point for those who would restore social democracy while also upholding the organic Constitution and restoring strict controls on intoxication and gambling, carefully controlled importation and immigration, a realist foreign policy which includes a strong defence capability used only most sparingly and to strictly defensive ends. Among other good things.

At the last European Elections, the Liberal Party, which still exists in the Radical tradition, participated in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy coalition that could have done so much better with a more sensible name and, more to the point, without a media blackout which said a great deal about just how threatening to the Whig Supremacy is was recognised as being. That formation, however, has become TUSC, just another vehicle of the sectarian Left, and bound to experience as much success as all the other such vehicles, past, present and future. The next European Elections offer an opportunity, this time with considerable media coverage if properly organised, to support Labour where its lead candidate, at least, supports a statement of principles from the patriotic, socially conservative, non-Marxist base of the British Left, and to run a candidate, or preferably a list of two, where that is not the case. Any takers? Mind you, there is plenty of time yet.