A party funded by Russian oligarchs and by the Gulf princelings whose money created ISIS?
Or a party funded by millions of ordinary working people within, through and as the British trade union movement?
It is perfectly obvious which is the patriotic choice.
And which is not.
He's not in government, nor ever will be again.
ReplyDeleteAnd there was nothing incorruptible about the hereditary peers...
Nor, contrary to what is bizarrely often thought, was there ever any bar on the Prime Minister appointing as many life peers as he liked, including absolutely anyone he liked, while the hereditary peers were there.
Do you mean the ones who were Nazi sympathisers, the ones who were KGB agents, or the ones who were reliably brought in to vote through every Tory EU treaty?
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have abolished them, which was the logical conclusion of abolishing trade union barons (that could as easily have happened in the other order, but it didn't).
ReplyDeleteThe claims made for them by their madder supporters are, however, as absurd as you articulate so well.
As you would say, the organic Constitution.
ReplyDeleteOf which the trade unions, their links to the Labour Party, the power of municipal institutions, and the role of those institutions as Labour's main political base, had all grown into and as integral parts.
ReplyDeleteThatcher's attack on them was as much an attack on the Constitution as anything in the Blair years was.
I have a feeling you are giving clarity to something some of of us have been vaguely thinking for years.
ReplyDeleteWell, one does one's best.
ReplyDeleteThatcher abolished or eviscerated institutions that in general, and in many particulars, often went back to the Medieval and Early Modern periods.
She tore out great chunks of the institutional fabric of the national life.
She did so on the grounds that these things were "outdated", and that they were "undemocratic" because they gave a say to people other than her own very precise sort, a sort defined both politically and socially.
And she did so with the effect of massively concentrating power in London and the South East, by removing the powerbases that existed elsewhere.
Thus were all of the precedents set.
Yep. That was it.
ReplyDeleteOne does one's best.
ReplyDeleteDoes Lindsay think any of that was some kind of answer to what I said?
ReplyDeleteDoes he not realise supporters of hereditary peers also oppose the Life Peerages Act which violated the hereditary principle?
Nonetheless, Labour abolished the hereditaries so it could replace them with "Tony's cronies" (as everyone knows).
Blair appointed a staggering 357 life peers (far more than his predecessors) in just ten years.
It was a deliberate act of totalitarianism.
He wanted to dominate the Lords.
As for "incorruptible"; the hereditary peers were incorruptible in the sense that they hadn't been PR advisors to and members of political parties before being "appointed" peers by those political parties ( not in the sense that they were all saintly beings).
They defeated Thatcher over 300 times.
That wasn't the hereditaries. She used to bus them in whenever the more political Life Peers, Law Lords and Lords Spiritual looked likely to defeat her.
DeleteMost of the hereditaries rarely or never came in otherwise, and many seemed to have no idea what they were voting for or against when they did.
Blair could have created all of those Life Peers anyway. There has never been any upper limit on the size of the Upper House.
So the "Tony's Cronies" line (from before you can have had any political consciousness) does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.
The role of local government, that of the trade unions and that of the nationalised industries were all integral to the organic Constitution as it had evolved by the 1980s.
In and by attacking them, Thatcher attacked it, and she set all the precedents that Blair followed.