Consilio et Labore

The motto of the City of Manchester does not quite mean “Respect and Labour”. But it comes fairly close.

There was no mere closeness, however, about Left Futures and Kate Hudson, long of the CPB but now the Respect candidate at the forthcoming Manchester Central by-election. Cue much back-peddling and grovelling by Jon Lansman. But expect more of this. I hope that the Labour candidate wins, since she is on Ed Miliband’s staff.

However, a good showing for Hudson would give the lie to the claim, either that Respect was purely an extension of the personality of George Galloway, or that it was purely an instrument of Pakistani or Bengali communal politics, the exact opposite of the situation at Bradford West, where it was Labour that was that instrument, with Respect as the reaction against it. A good showing at Manchester Central would make the point in such terms that even the BBC could neither misrepresent it nor ignore it. Centred on a pro-life Catholic of impeccable Euroscepticism and, at least on this side of the Irish Sea, impeccable Unionism, a man with no history even in the Tribune Group never mind in the Campaign Group, Respect is a staging post on the road to the reconstitution of our federated, pluriform Movement.

A Movement including those to his, my and probably your Left who may remain attached to the name and to some of the symbolism of the Communist Party, but who share our total rejection of Maoism and Trotskyism, and who share our approach to the former Soviet Union and allied states which balances a recognition of economic development, of full employment, of universally free education and healthcare, of affordable housing for all, of cheap and extensive public transport, of scientific progress (although see here), of cultural facilities, and of the rights of women and national minorities, with the most profound 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 large numbers of innocent people to be persecuted, imprisoned and executed.

Since as long ago as 1951, those comrades have rejected violent revolution in Britain, in favour of the parliamentary, municipal, industrial and wider communitarian processes. With them, we share the strongest possible identification with those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day, instead obtaining, and continuing to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Those who have opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be reinstated. Those who continue to fight for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs. Those who insist that government requires the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas, so that any electoral reform must to be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation, as must any new or reformed second chamber.

The rural heritage is vitally important, as is its insistent definition in terms stretching all the way back through the Levellers and the Peasants’ Revolt to the Anglo-Saxon period in this country, and all the way back to the Old Testament prophets more broadly. No Marxist historiography there. It is no wonder that this land of miners, farm labourers and railwaymen was pre-eminent in maintaining ties to the exiles, internal and external, who kept up the anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist struggles of the SRs, the Mensheviks and the “Old Bolshevik” “Right Opposition”. All three were blamed on “peasant influences”. You better believe it. And that has not gone away. It must never go away.

We must seek co-operation with those comrades, in order to secure an economy including a very substantial role both for workers’ co-operatives and for publicly owned enterprises run on behalf of the people, with the public ownership of key industries in order to boost the economy and raise the general standard of living, with massive investment by the State in key areas of the economy, and with a planned economy designed to increase the standard of living for working people, including the utilisation of this country’s vast reserves of coal. Co-operation in order to secure a substantial increase in public spending on education, healthcare, transport, housing, and recreational facilities, with the tax burden shifted onto the rich and onto large corporations, and with the reduction of direct taxes on working people’s incomes.

With them, we emphasise the importance of democracy and freedom in everyday life, with a particular emphasis on the freedom of the press and on freedom of speech, with full engagement in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system, with the refusal to consign or confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity”, and with full participation in broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities. We are therefore most concerned to secure the continued publication of the Morning Star and of Tribune, to end the wider media’s discrimination against them, and to ensure our long and fruitful partnership with Independent Labour Publications.

No less important are those to our Right who share our total identification with the trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other non-Marxist roots of the Labour Movement, including their florescence as that Movement’s full inclusion of all social classes at all levels and in all aspects of its activity. The circumstances of the last 35 years have attached some of those comrades to the Liberal Democrats or to the Conservative Party, while others serve as Crossbench Peers or as Independent Councillors. Academia, the media and the voluntary sector are among the means whereby others again make their contributions. Such comrades have always been numerous, if generally disorganised, within the electorates of the Unionist and Alliance parties in Northern Ireland. A small group continues to maintain the Social Democratic Party.

Again we must seek co-operation with all who share our identification with that heritage, and who are therefore committed to open government with a fully representative system of elections, including the greatest practical degree of decentralisation of decision-making in all spheres of our national life, including the return of sovereign power from the European Union to the British Parliament so that our country can be governed in accordance with Social Democratic principles and policies, and including a specifically English parliamentary institution while making Social Democracy once again a force for the continued existence of the United Kingdom.

The objectives of that co-operation are the elimination of poverty and the promotion of greater equality through a social market economy to ensure a fair distribution of rewards and to meet social needs by means of public investment, improved public and community services, greater responsiveness to people’s needs, the full accountability of service providers, and the strengthening of Britain’s economy through the encouragement of all forms of legitimate enterprise in the co-operative, mutual, private and public sectors, reclaiming with pride the word “Socialism”.

Integral to all of this are the defence of human rights at home and abroad, a coherent and integrated approach to environmental protection, a responsible collective approach to global problems, and the Socialist expression of our restored sovereignty by the removal of VAT from fuel and power, by the prohibition of the export for slaughter of live animals to conditions that would be illegal in the United Kingdom, and by the extensive government protection of British business and of British jobs, including the reassertion of the United Kingdom’s historic fishing rights in accordance with international law (200 miles, or to the median line), including the enormous development of civil nuclear power, and including the strict limitation and the strict control of immigration, making possible the large-scale resumption of the building of affordable local authority homes for let: Social Democracy, Social and Democratic.