Workers' Power: A Conservative Cause

Martin Vander Weyer opposes the idea of worker representation on remuneration committees, and no wonder that he does. Among the many conservative principles that such representatives would articulate would be the priority of the family and the local community, together with a patriotism which includes economic patriotism, itself including both tight controls on capital movement and tight controls on immigration. Integral to national sovereignty, including to national security, are a strong manufacturing base, control of our own food and fuel supplies, and the ownership of our industries and enterprises by our own citizens. As representatives from the floor would understand.

Such representation is one of several German features that we urgently need to adopt. Others are regional banking with close ties to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors; small and medium-sized family businesses on the Mittelstand model; and vocational as well as general skills training, accorded the same respect as the very high level of academic achievement that Germany has also retained and which we must restore here in the United Kingdom.

A Leader heavily influenced by such thinking has given his party a year-long poll lead. Even after the blip caused by David Cameron’s pretend non-veto, that Leader led that party to its fifth by-election victory in succession, with an 8.5 per cent swing against the Conservatives in exactly the sort of seat the failure to win which cost them an overall majority in 2010. It is sad to see The Spectator joining in the lazy Blairite clamour to remove Ed Miliband and thus close the debate to ideas such as the above. Indeed, to any idea from beyond a “centre ground” the scandalous narrowness of which is matched only by its scandalous origins in the Eurocommunism and Trotskyism of the 1970s and 1980s. Is that really what High Tories want from their magazine?