The Pro-Life Left

Being created in the image and likeness of Almighty God, each individual human life is absolutely sacred, from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death, which can and does happen at any point after fertilisation, a matter for its Author and Lord, not for us. I make no apology for arguing from a specifically religious perspective in the conduct of debate on public policy, since freedom of religion is not civic or societal freedom from religion (to which individuals are entitled, but the State and the wider society are not), but rather includes the freedom so to argue.

On that basis did Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, Tories both, use the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, the Victorian Liberals and the Christian Socialist pioneers, all did as they did precisely because they believed as I believe about the sanctity of life.

That principle rules out numerous practices, among which are direct abortion, indirect abortion either at all or (and I am told that this would never happen anymore) where any other course of action would result in the loss of both lives, euthanasia, assisted suicide, destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings, human cloning, human-animal hybridity, the creation of “saviour siblings”, capital punishment (it is a plain and simple lie that opponents of abortion are usually pro-hanging), and unjust warfare, if any war be just, but certainly including total war, as well as the manufacture, stockpiling or use of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons, together with the international trade in arms.

It therefore further entails the active struggle against numerous underlying evils, including poverty, ignorance, squalor, illness, idleness, racism, sexual promiscuity, pornography, eugenic ideologies, the alienation or marginalisation of people with disabilities, the lack of due respect for old age, the failure or refusal to celebrate the infinite beauty of every human being as the image and likeness of God, the classification of human beings solely or primarily as economic units (as in both capitalism and Marxism), and the pursuit of policies likely to give rise to armed conflict. Neither of these lists is anything approaching exhaustive. Truly, being pro-life is an entire way of life.

Iain Duncan Smith is probably pro-life, but he showed little or no sign of it while he was Leader of the Opposition. The last Party Leader to have been known as and for it was John Smith. Whereas Margaret Thatcher, she of Hillsborough and of 11 consecutive New Year’s Eves, every single one during her Premiership, spent with Jimmy Savile, legalised abortion up to birth under three of the four circumstances under which the 1967 Act, which she had supported, had legalised it at all. She also legalised destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings.

Her dear friend Ronald Reagan, whose oft-proclaimed pro-life credentials were and are an out and out lie, had legalised abortion in California, where he had also introduced the no fault divorce that has since been copied across the United States. By contrast, both of George McGovern’s running mates were pro-life. Although Henry Hyde himself was not only a conservative Republican but almost a sort of European Catholic monarchist, the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter; it has never failed to achieve its required annual renewal by both Houses of Congress. ObamaCare specifically excludes abortion, but RomneyCare specifically includes it. Mitt Romney continues to draw an income from the provision of abortion by the interests of Bain Capital.

If “there is no such thing as society” (and yes, Margaret Thatcher really did say that), then there can be no such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. There cannot be a “free” market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography. The economic decadence of the 1980s is no more acceptable that the social decadence of the 1960s. The principle of the planned economy came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberal Keynes and via Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from an ultraconservative Catholic, Colbert. The principle of the Welfare State came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberals Lloyd George and Beveridge, and via the Conservative Governments of the Inter-War years, from an ultraconservative Protestant, Bismarck.

Those who looked to the union-busting criminality of pirate radio, which was funded by the same Oliver Smedley who went on to fund the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs, were enfranchised in time for the 1970 General Election, gave victory to what they thought were the Selsdon Tories, and went on to support first the economic and then the constitutional entrenchment of their dissolute moral and social attitudes by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Labour MPs defended Catholic schools, and thus all church-based state schools, over several successive decades. Early Labour activists resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence. Upper and upper-middle-class people joined the early Labour Party precisely because their backgrounds and involvement in the Church of England made them familiar with the importance of State action against social evils.

Many Social Catholics in post-War Italy promoted Keynesianism and felt a strong affinity with the domestic policies of the Attlee Government, but they were also sceptical about NATO. Jakob Kaiser’s vision was of a German Christian Democracy that looked to British Labour for its inspiration in giving effect to Catholic Social Teaching, and which gave such effect by emphasising co-operatives, the public ownership of key industries, extensive social insurance, and the works councils later suggested in the SDP’s founding Limehouse Declaration and advocated by David Owen, while also seeking a United Germany as a bridge between East and West, allied neither to NATO nor to the Soviet Bloc.

The witness of Bob Santamaria in Australia is also of crucial historical importance, including as a warning from time to time. The New Deal was passionately supported by Southern Evangelical Protestants and by “white ethnic” Catholics and Orthodox. Civil Rights grew out of, if it has ever become “out of”, Baptist and Pentecostal churches and those in the unreconstructed Wesleyan Holiness tradition, churches lately no less active in the defence of traditional marriage and increasingly conscious of the triple genocide of the black male in the womb, on the streets and on the battlefield.

More controversially in Italy, but they cannot be discounted, were the Cattocomunisti, no less Catto than comunisiti; in any case, the left-wing Democristiani were well to the Left by British standards even at the time, and most of the Italian Left has been subsumed into the Democratic Party, which has elected as its President Rosy Bindi, late of Azione Cattolica and Democrazia Cristiana. Her election, together with that of her preferred candidate for Leader, is an immensely positive sign, and she herself deserves much credit for having reached out in this way, when we consider that she lost at least one close friend to the Red Brigades. Their erstwhile supporters exist on the fringes of her major new party. But its internal electoral results leave no doubt as to where its centre of gravity lies, as to what is its mainstream.

Within the East German Bloc Party system, much of the CDU opposed the legalisation of abortion in 1972, only one year before its legalisation either on demand or at all, but by judicial fiat rather than by even so inadequate a parliamentary means, by the overturning of the laws of all 50 of the United States of America. It is worth researching how much Christian Democracy, Liberalism, Nationalism or Agrarianism was carried over into each of the Bloc Parties other than the SED, or for that matter how much Social Democracy rather than Communism was carried over into the SED itself. Say it again: East Germany legalised abortion only one year before the United States did so, and fully five years after its legalisation in California by Ronald Reagan.

In huge numbers, members and supporters of Fianna Fáil (which Seán Lemass called “the real Irish Labour Party”, not the whole of its heritage but nevertheless there), of Fine Gael (which for all its economic faults did manage to produce the 1965 General Election manifesto Towards a Just Society, so these things are not unheard of within it) and for that matter of the Irish Labour Party, have felt able to become members and supporters of the British Labour Party.

Irish Labour has since been taken over by those who had become Democratic Left and lined up with Fine Gael up to its old tricks again. But whatever else may be said of the Workers’ Party, it is still functioning in Northern Ireland, and, unless anyone knows better, there seems little reason to doubt that its remnant voters are at least occasionally observant Catholics, if not fully practising ones, just as in the days when the Cold War was being fought hotly by proxy within the Republican subculture there, between the agents of two superpowers equally, and equally violently, opposed to the continued existence of the United Kingdom. The Workers’ Party had several internal disputes over abortion. Every SDLP MP has been and, where applicable, remains totally pro-life.

Cardinal Manning led the 1889 London dockers’ march serenaded by the Salvation Army band, and he played a pivotal role in settling that strike. Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, fought tooth and nail against abortion, not least including Thatcher’s introduction of abortion up to birth. David Cameron’s choice of responsible Minister, Anna Soubry, one of his most obvious ideological soul mates, advocates the assisted suicide that Gordon Brown consistently and cogently ruled out.

The name of Margaret Thatcher is abominated in pro-life and pro-family circles. Matched only by the abomination of the name of Tony Blair.