Admit One?

On 12^th May 2013, I re-joined the Fabian Society and the Christian Socialist Movement. I also joined Progress, Movement for Change, Compass and the Labour Representation Committee. I think that I joined Labour First and Labour Left, in that they have not told me otherwise.

However, the Labour Party still will not say whether or not it will readmit me. It is seven years since I was administratively expelled for my determination to give a parliamentary voice to the views expressed here, an aspiration eventually frustrated by ill health. Nor will the Co-operative Party, which never expelled me, allow me back in without Labour’s nod.

I am absolutely committed to the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. Workers’ rights, and the trade unionism necessary to defend and advance them.

The co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services. Consumer protection. Strong communities. Fair taxation. Full employment. Pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability.

Proper local government, including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, and the accountability provided by the historic committee system. A powerful Parliament. 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.

Peace, including the total eradication of nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; like the former Conservative Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, and like the former Chief of Defence Staff, Field Marshall The Lord Bramhall, I would cancel Trident, as is also the position of Matthew Parris and Peter Hitchens.

I stand in that tradition within the Labour Movement which is no less committed to the organic Constitution. National and parliamentary sovereignty in the face of all challenges: from the Executive or the Judiciary, the European Union or the United States, Israel or the Gulf monarchs, China or the Russian oligarchs, money markets or media moguls, separatists or communalists.

Civil liberties. Law and order. The Union. The ties that bind these Islands. The Commonwealth. Economic patriotism. Energy independence. Balanced migration, which I advocate as a mixed-race person. Conservation, not environmentalism. The countryside. Traditional structures and methods of education. Traditional moral and social values (I am a practising Catholic).

Fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. An unhysterical approach to climate change. A realist foreign policy, including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else.

I contend that the United Kingdom needs and deserves those successful combinations which many other Commonwealth and European countries have been able to presuppose and expect.

Full employment with low inflation. A strong financial services sector with a strong food production and manufacturing base and with the strong democratic accountability of both. A leading role on the world stage with a vital commitment to peace and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction.

Academic excellence with technical proficiency. Superb and inexpensive public transport with personal freedom and with close-knit rural communities. Visible and effective policing with civil liberty. 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.

I believe in a large and thriving private sector, in a large and thriving middle class, and in 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.

I recognise that 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.

I 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.

I seek to 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.

I insist on 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.

To my delight, Progress is reintegrating former SDP stalwarts while campaigning against tax avoidance and in favour of keeping the East Coast Main Line in public ownership. To my delight, the LRC is reintegrating disaffiliated trade unions, and small Leftist organisations with heritage names; such are now constitutionally committed, by their LRC affiliation, to the election of a Labour Government.

But more problematic individuals and groupuscules also operate on the Far Left. There are 11 Labour MPs on the Advisory Council of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society. Ken Livingstone was readmitted after nowhere near the years of expulsion that I have served. Dan Hodges has never been expelled.

I can see no reason why my views might continue to place me beyond the Pale.