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.