The Nonconformist Conscience

Not a term applicable either legally or culturally to the Church of Scotland, although it is not an Established Church in the way that the Church of England is. But even so. And still a shame, literally a shame, about the Salvation Army and workfare. It should have been a signatory to this. It isn't. For shame.

Blairites and Heir-to-Blairites, do you still not get it? It's you. You are the ones who are wrong. The Far Left, clearly unaware of the phrase "owing more to Methodism than to Marx", is whingeing and whining that these complaints ought to be coming from the Labour front bench. That argument is not without merit.

But the idea that they are not coming from there because of 20 years of reduced influence, to say the very least, on the part of the Communist Party and the Trotskyist groupuscules would be funny if it were not so sad. Who, of any importance, ever did listen to the Trotskyist groupuscules, or even to the Communist Party very much? In any case, that party wound itself up in 1991, having been taken over by the midwives of New Labour around Marxism Today.

Whereas across the political spectrum, including in the Communist Party in its heyday, people of importance did used to listen to the Catholic Church, to the Church of England and its sisters elsewhere in the United Kingdom, to the Church of Scotland, to the Methodist Church, to the United Reformed Church and its predecessors, to the Baptist Union, and for that matter to the Salvation Army.

With the exception, up to a point, of the last, if you are no longer listening to them, then they have not moved. You have. Forget "gone Marxist", blah, blah, blah. It's not them. It's you. And it is in fact your way of thinking, not theirs, that is Marxian both in its intellectual origins and in its defining paradigm.

On the Conservative benches, that shift largely took place during the 1980s, whereas on the Labour benches, it happened from 1994 onwards. But even in the Thatcher years there was no active persecution of the unemployed. She and her supporters saw mass unemployment as "a price worth paying" for other things, notably low inflation.

That view of the relationship between the two was as obviously wrong then as it is now, but it did mean that those "paying the price" were left alone. It was Labour that wanted to turn them into the happy, dancing factory operatives of the Fabian imagination. Huge numbers of them voted Conservative in 1992 in order to prevent Neil Kinnock from finding them jobs. Thus was that party able to win that General Election, expected by no one apart from Kinnock's wife.

Remember that, and remember that one quarter of Conservative voters in 2010 lived in social housing. Hundreds of thousands of them face eviction one month before the impending local elections, and possibly millions by the time that the 2015 General Election has come round. I have no dependants, but I could not live on £53 per week. Unlike Iain Duncan Smith, I do not have a father-in-law to let me live rent free on his estate in a house worth two million pounds. But even under that circumstance, come on, IDS. Try it. Try and live on £53 per week.

Today is the day when the Conservative Party committed suicide.