Left And Right Must Unite And Fight: Part I

Britain’s Labour and Conservative traditions both derive from a series of classically Christian critiques of Whiggery, Jacobinism and Marxism. Britain’s Liberal tradition derives largely from the Whigs’ acceptance of just such a series, although it has always wrestled with a rival tradition dependent on the fallacy of inevitable historical progress. Each of the Labour and Conservative traditions, at least, therefore includes all social classes as a matter of principle, thus sparing this country the bloodshed and other problems experienced elsewhere, and is wholly committed to the constitutional, democratic process, with the same happy effects.

Yet we now find that a vulgarised combination of Whiggish and Marxian notions is simply presupposed. The Transcendent is refused, so that the whole is grounded in nothing, and therefore leads to nihilism. In economic (and thus also in social) matters, the Conservative Party adopted this approach under Margaret Thatcher. After the death John Smith, those who seized control of the Labour Party erased the fact that the combined Labour and SDP votes had been larger than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987.

Such people still deny outright that the opinion poll rating that was the 1997 result had not varied since Golden Wednesday, 16th September 1992, with swings of 1997 proportions in the European Elections just after John Smith’s death, i.e., under the leadership of Margaret Beckett. Instead, they would have us believe that the 1997 “victory” was all the work of their own archetype of those who did best, ostensibly, out of both the 1960s and the 1980s.

Allegedly, only one such as he could have won, or could win, a General Election, because General Elections are held to be won and lost in the South East, the least conservative part of the country, and therefore the part with the highest level of support for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party. If that were the case, then there would currently be a Conservative Government with a large majority. In fact, in the days when that party used to win Elections, it did so by winning considerable numbers of seats in Scotland, Wales, the North and the Midlands, all much more conservative places than the South East.

By losing first many and then most of those seats, it first nearly and then actually lost power in 1992 and 1997 respectively; and its failure to regain power has consisted precisely in its failure to regain those seats. By contrast, the Labour gains in the South East in 1997 were just a bonus, and the loss of most of them in 2005 has made no real difference to anything. Indeed, only in 2005 did Blair finally influence a General Election result in any way at all, by losing Labour one hundred seats that any other Labour Leader whatever would have saved. Thus he moved from being a mere irrelevance to being a positive liability.