Family Reunion

I cannot deny having been impressed by the website of the continuing SDP, which, for all its unfortunate punctuational quirks, reads very much like a Blue Labour document when it deals with the substance of principle and policy. Or, perhaps even more, like something designed to unite Blue Labour and the Old Left, after the manner of Neil Clark, intended speaker at the Blue Labour Midlands Seminar and actual speaker at this weekend's 21st Century Marxism Conference in Bishopsgate, though on the unifying topic of appropriate public ownership. Yes, you read aright. Bishopsgate. In the City.

Exactly how Marxist that Conference's organisers in the CPB and the Morning Star really are is any case a very moot point indeed. They gave up the whole idea of a British Revolution, and instead committed themselves to Parliament, local councils, trade unions and tenants' associations as long ago as 1951, with the CPB splitting from the old CPGB and taking the newspaper with them (although there was and is no formal relationship) in 1988 when the CPGB, now defunct, looked like going a bit more campus radical.

That way led Democratic Left, the CPGB's proto-Blairite legal successor to which, only because there was no more Soviet money for its original purpose, the party's last office was seamlessly transferred. Thence it passed to the Blairites of the New Politics Network, and now to the Blairite flame-keepers of Unlock Democracy, in an unbroken succession. Remember that, as Blair seeks to stage a comeback. Whereas the Morning Star enjoyed Parliamentary Lobby access throughout the Cold War.

Attempts by the gulag and Holodomor revisionists of the Scargillite SLP to take over the People's Press Printing Society, the co-operative that owns and publishes the Morning Star, have been singularly unsuccessful. But you will never hear any of the numerous Old Tankies of New Labour (there are also numerous Old Trots, and they are just as unrepentant) utter one word of remorse. Their stock response is John Reid's "I also used to believe in Santa Claus."

That will not suffice, certainly not when set alongside the CPB's and PPPS's stock A-level answer assessment which balances economic development, full employment, universally free education and healthcare, affordable housing for all, cheap and extensive public transport, scientific progress (although I am not so convinced about that in the USSR), cultural facilities, and the rights of women and of national minorities, with regret at the entrenchment of the bureaucratic-command system, at the integration of the Communist Party and the trade unions into the apparatus of the State so that they were rendered incapable of critiquing it, and at the fact that "severe violations of socialist democracy and law occurred" so that "Large numbers of people innocent of subversion or sabotage were persecuted, imprisoned and executed."

So says Britain's Road to Socialism, which constitutes both the policy position of the CPB and the editorial position of the PPPS. Of the 10-point Alternative Economic and Political Strategy forming its fifth section, only the eighth and the tenth points, the eventual "withering away of the Socialist State" and that State's total separation from religion in the meantime, are beyond the Pale of the party of Ed Miliband, Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman. Neither of them bears any resemblance to the content of the Morning Star day in and day out.

In many ways its flagship edition, for the weekend both of the Durham Miners' Gala and of the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, featured articles by two sitting MPs and by a Residentiary Canon of Durham Cathedral. Both of those MPs were tellingly first elected in 2010, when the Morning Star's call for most constituencies to elect Labour MPs was in the starkest possible contrast to the line taken by The Guardian. All in all, it is no wonder that Ed Miliband recently addressed a hundred thousand people from a platform bearing an advertisement for one of those newspapers. Guess which one. The CPB's website denies that the party has Marxist roots, as such, at all, describing it as a product of the Labour Movement that it sees as going all the way back to the Peasants' Revolt, a view wholly incompatible with anything like a Marxist historiography.

The SDP's turn to strong Euroscepticism, also the position of the continuing Liberal Party that participated in the No2EU - Yes to Democracy lists at the last European Elections, is particularly notable, and particularly welcome. If Russell White could email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, then I should be most grateful, as we have several pressing projects to discuss. But all attempts to involve the SDP in the re-emerging movement have met a brick wall. Perhaps, and understandably, sore from the Alliance in the past, the SDP has refused to co-operate with anyone else.

Yet its position is essentially that to which Labour might require that local Independent candidates subscribe in return for a free run and trade union funding (most obviously by the PCS, RMT or FBU, or by the Unison General Political Fund) in constituencies where the party was in third place or below, itself in return for not uncritical support during the next Parliament in order to give back a voice and a vehicle to the mainstream, moderate majority.

There is no chance of that in Aberavon, where Labour enjoys over 50 per cent of the votes cast. But Bridlington is in the East Yorkshire constituency, where Labour is in, albeit a very close, third place, with the combined Labour and SDP votes greater than the vote for the Lib Dems. A Lib Dem Councillor has recently defected to the SDP in Mole Valley, where Labour is in a very definite third place, but where we may safely say that no one has any more desire to vote for either Coalition party than they have anywhere else. Or must the pleasures of particularism come first?

Something similar applies to the Conservative target seat of Bradford West. Would it really kill people to let the sitting MP defend it with broad support, at least in return for standing down Respect candidates in most or all other constituencies? Would they really rather have him on the outside as the re-emergence took shape? He may have been mixing with some of the wrong crowd in recent years, but George Galloway is a pro-life Catholic and a fierce opponent of such things as drug liberalisation and lap-dancing clubs.

Whatever else might follow from the fact that he was never a member of the Campaign Group, nor even of the Tribune Group, it certainly gives the lie to any lazy classification of him as "Loony Left". He is an outspoken opponent of Scottish separatism, and of the only European Union that is ever going to exist. His anti-Blairite Labour views on the great socio-economic issues of the present moment are in line both with public opinion and with the position of the Leader of the Labour Party.

His victory over a Blairite candidate, insofar as that candidate held any political opinion rather than being a mere cog in a machine, constituted a vindication and endorsement of the Labour Leader over his enemies, of the right Miliband over the other the wrong Miliband. Galloway's return to Parliament was hardly a Labour loss at all. He says that he wants a Labour Government, and he votes with Ed Miliband's Labour against the neo-Blairism of the Coalition. The Blairite remnant within the Labour Party was the real loser.

But then, they supported the Islamist dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Galloway opposed it. They supported taking out the bulwark against Islamism in Iraq. Galloway opposed it. They support the Islamist dismemberment of Russia. Galloway opposes it. They support the Islamist dismemberment of China. Galloway opposes it. They support taking out the bulwark against Islamism in Syria. Galloway opposes it. They were and are wrong and unpopular. Galloway was and is right, and in tune with public opinion.

Frankly, the main problem with either the CPB or the SDP is plainly and simply its name, together with the attendant iconography. If the SDP has seen the light on Europe, has it also on nuclear weapons? If not, why not? Almost, if almost, everyone in the CPB could agree with almost, if almost, everything on the SDP Principles and Do You Think (see what I mean about punctuation?) pages of the SDP website. Almost, if almost everyone in the SDP could, on that basis, agree with almost, if almost, all but the eighth and tenth points of An Alternative Economic and Political Strategy. On both counts, so could Jon Cruddas. So could Maurice Glasman. So could Neil Clark. So, I think that we may safely say, could Ed Miliband. And so, if it matters, could I.

Ah, yes. What of your humble blogger? I have the honour and the pleasure of an MP who is not only a friend and neighbour, which is obviously a boon rather than a political judgement, but also a practising Catholic who sends very positive replies to traditional Catholics on moral issues as generally defined, while campaigning vigorously for the countryside against the supermarkets and against the abject failure of the Coalition to do anything at all in that cause, and while also writing repeatedly for the Morning Star and marching under the Burnhope Banner at the Big Meeting. Unless something very drastic indeed happens between now and 2015, then I shall certainly be voting, and indeed campaigning, for the re-election of Pat Glass. That will not be my first embodied example of co-operation between the Labour Party and the wider family.

No, I did not vote for Pat last time. I still respect Watts Stelling, who was a key figure in the administration of the old Derwentside District Council by my closest political allies and by my most formative political teachers, against both the infantile Leftists and the generally infantile within and around their own Labour Group, and against the less numerous but still disruptive infantile Rightists and generally infantile among and around his own Independents. I am still glad that he kept his deposit, and that he took more votes than the reduction in the Labour majority; an important point was thus made, a harbinger of the new coalition that became evident nationwide at the recent local elections, and which is on course to win in 2015.

But I am also glad that Pat won. Another one very tellingly first elected in 2010. Her predecessor was notable as many things. But not as a moral traditionalist, not even against the deregulated drinking and gambling that conflicted most with her Methodist background and commitment. Nor as a campaigner for the farmers. Nor as a campaigner against corporate power. Nor as a contributor to the Morning Star. Nor as a marcher at the Big Meeting. Nor even as an attendee at it. But that was a different time.