Progress Of A Sort, Perhaps

In my experience, expulsion from the Labour Party frees up any amount of time in which to get on with politics. However, it seems not to appeal to the members of Progress, the lavishly funded Blairite party within the Labour Party. But Progress should take this in its stride, renaming itself, most obviously, the Progressive Party, and presenting candidates to the electorate under its own name.

Once upon a time, there was a party which believed in 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, pragmatic public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and, at least as an ideal or an aspiration, a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

In the pursuit of those objectives, which successfully prevented a Marxist revolution here in one of the two countries that Marx himself thought most likely to have one, that party was able to accommodate an enormous diversity of perspectives: provincial and metropolitan, rural and urban, religious and secular, socially conservative and socially liberal, foreign policy realist and liberal interventionist, Eurosceptical and Eurofederalist, pro-Commonwealth and pro-American, monarchist and republican, Unionist and variously separatist.

Those whose priorities were agriculture, manufacturing and retail, the means of production and distribution, made common cause with those whose priorities were the services sector in general and the financial services sector in particular, the means of exchange. There were people who cherished the United Kingdom’s very considerable and longstanding ties to the Arab world, the memory of the British fallen to terrorist attacks in Palestine, and the Catholic and Orthodox witness of the Arab Christians, including their foundation of Arab nationalism at American Protestant missionary universities. Alongside those worked people who cherished the political project that was like them: staunchly secular and liberal, economically leftish or extremely left-wing, and Ashkenazi Jewish to the core.

That party went into abeyance after the death of John Smith, but it is now back under Ed Miliband, accordingly far ahead in the polls on a permanent basis, and winning local council seats even in Southern villages that it had not contested in 30 years or more. Progress is actively subverting that, and is therefore going to be kicked out. It should have the courage of its convictions and constitute itself overtly as the party for unbridled capitalists who are intolerantly metropolitan, urban, secular, socially liberal, liberal interventionist, Eurofederalist, pro-American, republican, happy to see the Union dissolve in the interests of its own sort of people, devoted to casino banking as the sum total of the British economy, and supportive of an Israeli Government which is now Far Right both on economics and on ethnicity. Like New Labour used to be.

Luke Akehurst, newly removed from the National Executive Committee, could be Leader. With Dan Hodges, facing personal expulsion for his pro-Boris activism, as Akehurst’s Deputy. Good luck to them at the ballot box.