Owen Jones makes a valiant effort to debunk whatever nonsense David Cameron imagines to constitute “British values”.
But the Radical, populist, republican tradition is an integral
part of the organic Constitution that, in and with the full ceremony and
pageantry of the parliamentary and municipal processes, has delivered before,
and could deliver again, social democracy or whatever you want to call it.
Hence the octogenarian figures of the Queen and Dennis
Skinner at the State Opening of Parliament, each with a specific role, and each
the latest, but not the last, in a long, long line.
The regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the
Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and “time out of mind”. That regime anticipated the bourgeois capitalist
Revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789.
Our own Radical, populist, republican tradition does not
derive from those Revolutions. Rather, it predates them, and it opposed them
and their consequences, making common cause with Tories for the abolition of
slavery (by very specific appeal to the Ancient Constitution), for factory
reform, for the extension of the franchise, for action against substance abuse
and gambling, and so on.
Something similar presents itself in opposition to the neoconservative war agenda, and through that to the neoliberal economic order. But that opportunity has yet to be taken.
Something similar presents itself in opposition to the neoconservative war agenda, and through that to the neoliberal economic order. But that opportunity has yet to be taken.
You'll really annoy your UKKKIP Naziboy stalker with this one. A party so racist even True Finns and the Danish People's Party won;t have anything to do with them. Says everything about the Cameron Tories that such parties will sign up with them. But not with UKKKIP. Have to draw the line somewhere.
ReplyDeleteOh, he'll be along in a minute, no doubt. But while you make an interesting point, it is off-topic in relation to this post.
ReplyDeletePoint taken, and as you have said before after Newark that party is not worth bothering to attack.
ReplyDeleteHow many clauses of Magna Carta are still in effect? Very few, I reckon.
Oh, very few have been for an enormously long time, and of course most of them never applied to most people in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe main effect of the thing was to install a military junta in England, backed by France, with which the barons were in league against the King of England.
The very first clause was overturned by the Reformation.
Next year's is an interesting anniversary, and worth marking with Radio Four documentaries and that kind of thing.
But let's not get carried away.
The people most likely to be really wouldn't like it if we were: a Church subject to the Papacy over the head of the Crown, and effective rule by a French-backed military junta, are not obviously appealing to your average Kipper or "Anglosphere" nut.
One would hope that they would view the very explicit anti-Semitism in the same way.
But their view of these things, somewhere between Our Island Story and 1066 And All That, is more than reminiscent of the passage in Tony Benn's one and only speech that Owen largely writes up in and as this article.
If anything, it has even less connection to reality than those old, familiar words had.
Daniel Hannan is turning into Tony Benn in that regard: always the same article, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, but basically rubbish.
David Cameron says Our Island Story is his favourite book.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that he does.
ReplyDeleteOld Labour politicians with Oxbridge Firsts used to say that their favourite book was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.
That wasn't true, either.
But at least they had read it, and that all the way to the end.
Whereas I very much doubt that Cameron has ever read Our Island Story, and I guarantee that he has never finished it.
Which is a pity. Everyone should have read both of them at some point.
The racist populist right is the biggest ever threat to the monarchy and the old constitution and ceremony, as it always was.
ReplyDeleteThat kind of petty bourgeois supremacism hates all that where you rightly say the great Labour national and local administrations revelled in it and took it very seriously.
Yes it does contain the "remember you are only a man" tendency of Skinnerite radical dissent. That is part and parcel, as you say.
If it is about being "ethnic" "indigenous" British and English, and it is obvious from what Ukip and many Tory supporters post online it is, the Queen has little British in her and very little English. Her children have nearly none.
They are immigrants from what is now the EU and their position is incompatible with Thatcherite, neoliberal, Anglosphere (all becoming America) logic.
Ukip is the biggest serious threat to the monarchy since Cromwell and drawn from exactly the same people. Lord Protector Nigel Farage? No thanks!
Quite.
ReplyDeleteIt has just been pointed out to me on Twitter that Magna Carta is optional in Michael Gove's History curriculum, which is itself optional in Academies such as Park View.
What a complete and utter shambles.
No small part of the point of this particular Royal House used to be that it stood outside the national, regional, ethnic and class complexities of the United Kingdom.
But, as you correctly say, its heavy foreign background is now problematic for at any rate a noisy political tendency.
It has also done itself no favours by marrying the heir into the upper echelons the old aristocracy (whereas the future George VI had never expected to come to the Throne), and by then sending the sons of that marriage to Eton, thereby doubly placing them within the English upper class.
Although this could not have been foreseen 20 years ago, that is now controversial in itself, with that class and even that school having taken back control of one political party during a highly divisive period in our political history.
It may be an accident arising out of the end of the USSR, but the whole of the Left is now the most patriotic force in British politics.
ReplyDeleteThere is no longer a pro-Soviet as well as many kinds of anti-Soviet faction. There are only the equal opponents of the EU, American domination, transnational corporations, Rupert Murdoch, excessive Israeli influence and funny money from the Gulf or wherever.
Extraparliamentary figures like Peter Oborne, Peter Hitchens and certain freelances and bloggers hold that line. Very occasional MPs far outside the Tory mainstream and in several cases about to retire try their best.
But most of the Right is extremely pro-American, pro-Israeli, pro-Saudi and beholden to Murdoch, the City and Wall Street. They are so convinced that is what being a conservative is, they never even think about it.
The remains of that from the New Labour days are definitely on the way out, no Labour MP voted for war in Syria, not one.
The all directions patriotism of Tony Benn, Michael Foot and the line below the gangway starting with Dennis Skinner is now obviously the whole point of being Labour and on the Left to people who are.
Just as being pro-global capital, pro-American, pro-Israeli and in practice pro-Saudi is now obviously the whole point of being Tory and on the Right to people who are.
The one weak link for some Labour people is the EU but the TTIP will tak acre of that. The TTIP that Ukip supports, so much for United Kingdom independence there.
Thank you so much for that, Brian. Absolutely spot on.
ReplyDeleteWorth adding is that, while they did and do keep certain company, Tony Benn was not a Marxist, Michael Foot was not a Marxist, and neither Dennis Skinner nor many, if any, of his companions past and present was or is a Marxist.
They were and are figures of the much older tradition on which Benn would hold forth, and which Owen, despite the fact that he probably would call himself a Marxist (although I am open to correction on that), sets out here.
Owen on The Guardian indicates a certain return to its Northern Radical roots, so to speak, as does the presence of, for example, John Harris.
The presence of the old Manchester Guardian in the Parliamentary Press Gallery was always part of the presence of the Radical tradition within the parliamentary process.
Today, that is continued by various Guardian, Observer, Independent, New Statesman, Mirror Group and provincial figures, with others representing Fabianism and so on.
And by what are now the long post-Cold War Tribune (in many ways always of the Foot and Benn school) and Morning Star.
It is notable that that latter and the old Daily Worker were always in the Lobby, right through the Cold War.
Those papers and the old CPGB, figures such as Mick McGahey, always had a much more eclectic approach than many abroad and some at home who shared their links.
In any case, their target audience placed them within its own sophisticated intellectual and political culture, of which they themselves were very much a feature among many others, taking them both as and with a large pinch of salt, as required.
All very British. All very, very, very British, indeed.