Get This Party Started

Under Ed Miliband, Labour was ahead in the polls for over a year until the blip caused by David Cameron’s pretend non-veto. Even after that, Labour won its fifth by-election in a row, with the usual comfortable swing from the Conservatives. Labour has hundreds more councillors, with hundreds more again expected this year. Those are real votes.

But Iain Duncan Smith took the Conservative Party to poll leads, and he made it the largest party in local government. That was precisely why the Blairite media determined to get rid of him. Conservative MPs should have seceded. If the same thing is done to Ed Miliband, then Labour MPs, aided by plenty of union money, should also secede. Great swathes of us in the country at large would rally to our reborn, restored party.

Our party would have an absolute commitment to the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament. That is fully compatible with a no less absolute commitment to any, all or none of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

Ours would be a truly national party, profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of agriculture and manufacturing, small and medium-sized businesses, the countryside, local government, the trade unions, mutual enterprises, voluntary organisations, and social and cultural conservatives. Profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of people who cherished ties throughout the world, most especially within these Islands and the Commonwealth, but also to the Arab world and Iran, the Slavic and Confucian worlds, Latin America, and elsewhere, in principle including any country on earth, and ideally including all of them.

Not to the exclusion of financial services, the presently favoured parts of the country, the towns and cities, social and cultural liberals, or those who cherished ties to Continental Europe, the United States of America, and the State of Israel. But to the exclusion of any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else. Always giving priority in international affairs to the ties within the Commonwealth and within these Islands, and having no truck with any idea of the American Republic coercively imposing utopianism. Rejecting all class-based politics in favour of what Aneurin Bevan called “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. Fighting every seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal.

Our party would draw deeply on a heritage variously trade unionist, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and so on. Integral to that heritage is a valiant history of opposition to all of Stalinism, Maoism, the Trotskyist distinction without a difference, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Those who have never recanted their former Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism, or their former support for those Far Right regimes, admitting that that stance had been wrong at the time, could have no part in our truly national party.

Given the chance, Ed Miliband could and should make Labour that party once again. I might even re-join it. Denied that chance, it would fall to the rest of us to reconstitute our party elsewhere. I would certainly join that.