Tuesday 2 October 2012

One Nation

That the Conservative Party has for so long supported the "free" market, contrary to its own history, is because it has for so long been dominated by people who are not in fact conservatives at all, but rather Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and so forth, exemplified in part by Alderman Alfred Roberts (who sat as an Independent while the Liberal Party collapsed around him, never joining the Conservative Party to his dying day), and thus above all by his daughter, Margaret Thatcher.

In fact, Toryism in its Disraelian classical form has far more in common with Labourism in its classical, also very Disraelian, form than either has with this Gladstonian Liberalism. Labourism agrees wholeheartedly both with the importance of defending the conservative values and with the "free" market's self-evidently destructive effects upon them, but goes further in proposing, specifically, the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies) and the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.

Albeit with differences as to detail, this has always been acceptable to Tories, but certainly not to Thatcherites, since Thatcher was not a Tory (i.e., a Disraelian), but, like her father, a Gladstonian, a Whig, a Liberal. In fact, far more of the Tory populist heritage was carried over into the emerging Labour Movement than into the Conservative Party. The former took over Radical Liberalism or Tory populism in accordance with the local political culture on the ground, whereas the latter has always been a wholesale Liberal takeover of the Tory machine, effectively compelling Tory voters to support Liberal politicians, not least by pretending that the aspirations of such electors had nothing in common with the only viable alternative since the end of the First World War. This Government and the public reaction to it ought to have finished off those fantasies once and for all, and it looks more and more as if they have indeed done so. Especially after this afternoon.

Furthermore, since Gladstonians favour unregulated markets, they therefore also favour the use of armed force to secure that global state of affairs, which they see as necessary for the emergence and defence of democratic institutions. By contrast, we Disraelians see such economic arrangements as subversive both of those institutions and of the values that, among other good things, sustain them; accordingly, we are immensely cautious about adventures abroad. The rising Chinese superpower confirms our belief that the "free" market not only subverts democratic institutions and their necessary underlying values, but prevents those institutions from developing where they do not already exist.

David Cameron, like Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher, is a Gladstonian. Ed Miliband is a Disraelian, a voice of Tory Britain. Let battle commence.

4 comments:

  1. All very well, but Gladstone was rather more complicated than that.

    He was an extremely fierce Tory of the most traditional kind (church and king; no to reform; etc etc.) who broke with his party (in company with Peel its leader) after abandoning traditional party policy (regulated food prices).

    The Peelite move to Free Trade was in response to the then-universal opinion that Free Trade would improve the well-being of the poor; a quintessentially Tory objective. And the critique offered of Peel's move was not that it contradicted Tory beliefs but that it hurt Tory interests and offended Tory expectations of their leaders. Disraeli was first among those offering that critique, but even he never claimed that the Corn Laws benefited the poor, and indeed quickly dropped advocating them. Meanwhile, Peel's defence of his action (particularly in his famous last speech as Prime Minister) was classically Tory in its assumption of responsibility for the welfare of the people.

    Gladstone (like Peel) was the better Tory in the 1840s, and remained so to the end of his life, although Disraeli was sometime the better Conservative.

    Gladstone's later government parsimony, and refusal to make government intervention a matter of course, also came from his early Toryism. Since a unified vision of the state was impossible to realise after the 1830s (as Gladstone came to realise) the only role left for government was to hold the ring between competing interests. Gladstone remembered his conscience over the Maynooth grant and was not prepared to force other taxpayers to violate theirs. In that sense, "not in my name" is a very Gladstonian sentiment.

    Gladstone would have willingly imposed Toryism (meaning primarilty, of course, Anglicanism) on the nation if he could have done; but he found that there is no acceptable way to do it under modern conditions. Disraeli, of course, had no care for Toryism per se, but seeing the emotional power of the unified state created an ersatz version in "One-Nation Toryism". Gladstone scorned the falsity of "One Nation", but then he was too intelligent to go along with the pretence. But he also scorned, for example, the Home Rulers, even as he tried to pacify them.

    The history of Gladstone's own political thought is perhaps the key to the evolution of parties in the nineteenth century, and therefore in ours. The continuity of his philosophy is easily obscured by those who admire different bits of it.

    Although Gladstone was internally consistent, he was a mystery to many of his contemporaries. Perhaps that is because he was older than most of them for much of his career (because he went on so long) and fifty years out of date even when he began his career. Maybe only a church-and-king Tory (non-ersatz version) can really empathise with him. But a bit of historical perpective should help.

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  2. Facebook status update from Sunday evening:

    "[David Lindsay] is fed up of the regurgitation of his books, and other material that he has been putting out in one form or another for nearly 20 years, by people who would certainly claim never to have read anything by him and almost certainly claim never to have heard of him. Sod this, Freshers' Dinner awaits and he is not going easy on the booze even if his new little charges are."

    Not any more, obviously. The Beeb even interviewed Maurice as the guru of it all, to tell us how wonderful it was. The man the media tried for a while top pretend had been shunned. The man behind the speech everyone is talking about. The man who wrote: "David Lindsay has generated a brilliant reconciliation of the conflicting strains of the Labour Tradition and is worthy of the closest attention." We can all see where that closest attention has come from.

    How was Freshers' Dinner in the end?

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  3. I had one of my freshers going until the very last second:

    "As he lay dying, James Brown placed one hand on each of my shoulders and named me as his successor in the offices of Godfather of Soul, Hardest Working Man In Showbusiness, and Soul Brother Number One.

    As soon as he had been pronounced dead, the white stretch limo took me straight to the Harlem Apollo for my Inaugural Gig."

    In the poor boy's words, "I don't know what to believe anymore."

    Welcome to Durham...

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  4. Too simplistic.

    Ed isn't a Tory at all, but recognises that the social democratic tradition was collectivist and worked for ethical socialist aims. The Tory tradition also had a collectivist element, but was more paternalistic and accepting of hierarchy. The sense of 'duty' was paramount

    What Labour has tended to do is to forget about some of its ethical past. Ed is doing this effectively, whilst not rejecting the progressive social agenda, which he is also fully committed to

    That's where he differs from your approach - Labour's One Nation will be inclusive and will, as Yvette Cooper explained and Ed has underlined in the video he has made, support gay marriage and a continuation of a woman's right to choose

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