On Re-Joining The Labour Party

“David Lindsay has generated a brilliant reconciliation of the conflicting strains of the Labour Tradition and is worthy of the closest attention.” Dr Maurice Glasman, Lord Glasman of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill; Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme, London Metropolitan University; founder of Blue Labour.

“Current orthodoxy – both in economic policy and right across the board – has so manifestly failed us that we desperately need some fresh thinking and a different way of looking at our problems. That is precisely what David Lindsay provides.” Professor Bryan Gould, Labour MP for Southampton Test, 1974-1979; Labour MP for Dagenham, 1983-1994; Shadow Cabinet Member, 1986-1994; Leadership Candidate, 1992.

“Before Red Tory and Blue Labour there was David Lindsay. He was arguably the first to announce a postliberal politics of paradox, and to delve into the deep, unwritten British past in order to craft, theoretically, an alternative British and international future. It is high time that the singular and yet wholly pertinent writings of this County Durham Catholic Labour prophet receive a wider circulation.” Professor John Milbank, Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham.

Seven years after I was expelled, and half my lifetime after I first joined, I have re-joined the Labour Party. I have also re-joined the Co-operative Party, the Fabian Society and the Christian Socialist Movement. And I have joined Progress, Movement for Change, Labour First, Compass, Labour Left and the Labour Representation Committee. Each of those is free to remove me if the views stated here are unacceptable. New Labour did.

I was on a Constituency Labour Party General Committee and Executive Committee when I was still at school. I was on the District Labour Party at the same time. I chaired a Branch for many years from the age of 19. Just shy of 20, as a Sub-Agent, I secured an overall majority of the total vote on a four-way split in a traditionally Conservative Ward.

I was an elected Parish Councillor in an unusually large and busy Parish from the age of 21, serving for 14 years until I stood down voluntarily in 2013, during which we were among the first in the country to attain each of Quality Parish Council status, power of wellbeing, and power of general competence.

At 21, I began eight years, including a spell as Vice-Chair, as a governor of a primary school which, at the time of my appointment, still had the same Headteacher as when I had been a pupil there. Three weeks short of 22, I found myself in the same position when I began eight years as a governor of a comprehensive school. I served several years as District Labour Party Secretary, and several more as a District Group Observer.

ConservativeHome recently ran a series on 10 “Lost Tribes” of British politics. Under Ed Miliband, Labour is the party that can unite the Christian Democrats that far more British people are than realise it, the Labour Left, the economically Old Left and socially conservative paleo-Socialists given a voice by Neil Clark, the paleoconservatives who are not the same as the American ones, and the people attracted to the Red Tory and Blue Labour projects.

Unite us against the undying Tory wets, the pro-austerity Blairites, the warmongering liberal interventionists, the High Liberal pure technocrats, and the “libertarian” anarcho-capitalists. That can be done. The commendations above are of my book, Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory. Labour defined itself by uniting trade unionists, co-operators, wider mutualists, Radical Liberals, Tory populists, Guild Socialists, Christian Socialists, Social Catholics, and Chestertonian Distributists, among others.

A new biography of Edmund Burke has been written by Jesse Norman, and it has attracted favourable comment from Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer. Yet, like almost anything by Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, Disraeli, Chesterton, Belloc, or any Pope since 1891, almost anything by Burke would be screamed down in the Conservative Party that Thatcher has bequeathed, never mind in UKIP. The Independent Labour Party was said to include “even a variety of Burkean conservatism”. Anyone of such mind now has no political home but Labour.

Today, Labour alone stands in succession to those among whom there persisted an ancestrally Jacobite disaffection with the legitimacy of the Hanoverian State, of that State’s Empire, and of that Empire’s capitalist ideology. That inherited, theologically grounded disaffection produced Tory action against the slave trade, Tory and Radical action against domestic social evils, Tory and Radical extensions of the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the Boer and First World Wars.

Labour is totally opposed to the cruel cuts in our conventional defence. To the ruinous reduction in provincial disposable incomes by the abolition of National Pay Agreements. To the further deregulation of Sunday trading. To the replacement of Her Majesty’s Constabulary with the British KGB that will be the National Crime Agency. To the devastation of rural communities by the allowing of foreign companies and even foreign states to buy up our postal service and our roads.

To Royal Mail privatisation, which would sever the monarchy’s direct link to every address in this Kingdom. To the return of the East Coast Main Line, the only publicly owned railway in Great Britain and the one requiring the least subsidy from the taxpayer, to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice. And to the disenfranchisement of organic communities by means of parliamentary boundaries designed by and for “sophists, economists and calculators”.

Every single Labour MP voted to demand a real-terms reduction in the British contribution to the EU Budget. The number of Conservatives who voted with Labour was lower than the number of Liberal Democrats in the Commons. David Cameron has wholly failed to deliver that reduction. Ed Miliband has appointed Ed Balls as Shadow Chancellor and Jon Cruddas to head Labour’s Policy Review.

Behind him are the MPs who have elected Dennis Skinner, Dame Margaret Beckett and Steve Rotheram to the National Executive Committee. One third of them voted to be chaired by John Cryer. For the 2010 intake, the place to see and be seen is the Morning Star Readers’ and Supporters’ Group, reading and supporting Britain’s original, and uniquely consistent, anti-EU newspaper.

As Prime Minister, Ed Miliband will fight for Britain’s national interest at European level in the tradition of the only party ever to have held a referendum on the issue, the only party ever to have fought a General Election on a manifesto commitment to withdrawal, the party that voted as one against Thatcher’s Single European Act, the party that provided three times more votes against Maastricht than the Conservatives did, and the party that kept Britain out of the euro.

Stephen Hughes, my veteran MEP, advocates the abolition of national institutions so as to leave only EU and regional ones. His retirement makes it possible for me to vote Labour at a European Election for the first time in my life.

Labour is the force for the Union against separatism on at least three fronts. Moreover, the vast area of England where Labour now massively predominates would secede from any Thatcherite rump state. The three regions of the Deep North alone have a combined population considerably greater than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

But the relative success of Labour at the local elections in the South in 2012 and 2013, capturing first Chipping Norton and then Witney Central, indicates that the Coalition’s vindictiveness is bringing the South East back into the United Kingdom.

However, the whole of England has been removed from the United Kingdom without our consent by the dismantlement of our National Health Service. That defining aspect of British identity still exists everywhere else. The BBC is blacking out this scandal. Only Labour supports England’s NHS.

Labour never proposed changing the traditional definition of marriage, it never threatened to whip the matter, and my own Labour Left MP, Pat Glass, did not vote for it. Two Socialist Campaign Group MPs, staunchly Old Left even by the standards of that formation, voted against it.

13 of the 22 Labour MPs who voted that way, and nine of the 16 who abstained, are signatories to Early Day Motion 1334. That calls on the BBC to lift its blackout of the Morning Star. One of the two Campaign Group members who voted to save traditional marriage is not only a signatory to, but a sponsor of, that EDM.

In 2010, I did not vote for Pat, who like her husband is a friend, neighbour and former Parish Council colleague of mine. I did not approve of the all-women shortlist from which she had been selected. The Independent for whom I voted retained his deposit. But I shall be voting and campaigning with pride to re-elect Pat Glass in 2015.

Pat did not attend the recall of Parliament when Thatcher died. Although she herself is bound by collective responsibility, her two closest backbench allies voted against the cancellation of Prime Minister’s Questions in order to accommodate Thatcher’s funeral, at which neoliberal capitalism and its neoconservative foreign policy were declared the official ideology of this State. Political office and military rank were declared interchangeable, even identical, by the burial with full military honours of a politician who had never served in any of the Armed Forces.

A line was drawn from the Bristol Channel to the Wash. Beyond that, in relation to London, all territory was literally alienated, and declared occupied rather than integral. We in the Occupied Territories are well and truly bracing ourselves. At either end of the South, the Deep West and Deep Kent now resemble the predominantly Arab areas at either end of Israel, while there are numerous equivalents elsewhere of the age-old but “unrecognised” towns and villages that pepper the land within the pre-1967 borders.

We must have an absolute commitment to the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, fair taxation, full employment, pragmatic public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the organic Constitution, national and parliamentary sovereignty, civil liberties, law and order, the Union, the ties that bind these Islands, the Commonwealth, economic patriotism, energy independence, balanced migration, conservation, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, a realist foreign policy which includes strong national defence, peace (including the total eradication of nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons), an unhysterical approach to climate change, and the need for a base of real property for every household from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

We must articulate perspectives provincial and metropolitan, rural and urban, religious and secular, concerned with the means of production or distribution and concerned with the means of exchange.

We must give voice to agriculture, fisheries, manufacturing, the fuel industries, the utilities, the public services, small and medium-sized businesses, the countryside, municipal institutions, trade unions, mutual enterprises, voluntary organisations, social and cultural conservatives, each and all of the English ceremonial counties, each and all of the Scottish lieutenancy areas, each and all of the Welsh historic counties, each and all of the traditional Northern Irish counties, each and all of the London Boroughs, each and all of the Metropolitan Boroughs, each and all of the British Overseas Territories, each and all of the Crown Dependencies, and those who cherish international ties, most especially within these Islands and the Commonwealth, but also to the Arab world and Iran, to the Slavic and Confucian worlds, to Latin America, to Continental Europe, to the United States, and elsewhere.

We must make the case for a large and thriving private sector, for a large and thriving middle class, and for a large and thriving working class. Each of these depends on central and local government action. With public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are, or are not, being met.

We must insist on the successful combination of full employment with low inflation, of a strong financial services sector with a strong food production and manufacturing base and with the strong democratic accountability of both, of a leading role on the world stage with a vital commitment to peace and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction, of academic excellence with technical proficiency, of superb and inexpensive public transport with personal freedom and with close-knit rural communities, of visible and effective policing with civil liberty, and of very high levels of productivity with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance. In other Commonwealth and European countries, these combinations have been taken for granted.

We cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

We must reject any approach to climate change which threatens to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

We must uphold the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

We must enable and require fathers to live up to their responsibilities. Paternal authority and paternal responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. That basis is high-waged, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: nuclear power; and coal, not dole. Furthermore, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in needless wars.

Ours must be a robust, but not jingoistic, patriotism in the face of any and all threats to our sovereignty, to our liberty, and to our parliamentary and municipal democracy. Whether from the Executive or from the Judiciary, from the European Union or from the United States (including in relation to the British Chagos Islands and British Ascension Island), from Israel or from the Gulf monarchs, from China or from the Russian oligarchs, from money markets or from media moguls, from separatists or from communalists, from over-mighty civil servants or from over-mighty local government officers, from anything or anyone whatever, including any threat to British Gibraltar or to the British Falkland Islands.

That patriotism absolutely excludes any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else. We must reject any idea of the American Republic’s coercively imposing utopianism, since we must reject that rewritten Marxism in which the bourgeoisie is the victorious class, because we must reject all class-based politics in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”.

With an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, we must seek the closest possible co-operation at home and abroad in order to anchor the Left while engaging fully in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and the education system, refusing to consign or confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity”, and co-ordinating broad-based and inclusive campaigns for jobs, services, amenities, human rights, civil liberties, environmental responsibility, and peace, including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade.

We must therefore secure the work of Independent Labour Publications, the continued publication of the Morning Star and of Tribune, the subscription to those newspapers by Departments of State and by other public bodies for which Jon Ashworth campaigns from the Labour Whips’ Office, an end to the wider media’s discrimination against them, and the extension of their own coverage to include all parts of the country. We must become members of the People’s Press Printing Society. (When Jon and I were undergraduates, each of us thought that the other was right-wing.)

We must be worthy to succeed those who opposed all of Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. We must be the deserving heirs of those, including the ILP Contingent from Britain, who gave their lives for their equal opposition to Falangism and to Stalinism.

That heritage must define our approach both to Islamism and to neoconservatism. We can therefore have no truck with those who have never recanted their former Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism (the position of numerous New Labour luminaries), or their former support for those Far Right regimes (the position of numerous people in and around the Coalition), admitting that that stance had been wrong at the time.

And we must fight every seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal. Where Labour is in third place or below, or where it is in a distant second place, then we might dispense with any requirement that prospective nominees be party members, although they would of course have to join if they were selected. Provided that they had been registered voters within the constituency’s then boundaries for at least 15 years, and were recommended to the CLP by the public signatures of at least five per cent of the voters.

By these among other means, Labour could bring in those of Christian Democratic, Labour Left, paleo-Socialist, paleoconservative and postliberal minds, while removing the Tory wets, the Blairites, the liberal interventionists, the High Liberals and the anarcho-capitalists. It is time to get on with what Labour is really for. Here I am. You should be, too.