How Dare We Not!

This blog has never received anything like so many comments as in response to this. A lot of the discussion seems to be about the Catholic Church, but in fact that is just a way into certain wider and deeper issues.

The Catholic Church is an important strand in the coalition on which the Labour great and good have depended while despising the people in question, but a substantial section of Her flock, especially in England and perhaps also in Wales (I don't know), has never been Labour, fearing that the Labour Party was full of Communist agents who would emerge in the event of a Labour victory.

By contrast, those Catholics who did vote Labour did so precisely in order to prevent a Marxist revolution in this, one of the two countries Marx thought most likely to have one (the other was Germany), by alleviating the social and economic problems that might have given rise to such a revolution, as enjoined by Catholic Teaching.

This split mirrored, and considerably overlapped with, the split between working-class Tories and Labour's working-class core vote, above all as organised in, through and as the unions. But in both cases, the differences of opinion were quite slight, the split being about strategy. Both sides were, and are, in favour of an economically Keynsian and Beveridgite, morally and socially conservative, patriotic approach.

As, indeed, were and are a number of other categories of people. For example, farm subsidies are classically Keynsian and Beveridgite, while those to whom they are paid are characteristically conservative in moral and social terms, and characteristically patriotic.

Yet that hugely popular position is no longer represented by any party, with the result that the parties themselves are at death's door, yet still enjoy a de facto monopoly on access to the political process.

Our 12 Independent candidacies will offer the electorate the opportunity to begin the process of replacing this bankrupt cartel, a process which will include the replacement of the existing parties with those (probably more like tendencies of the Whig/Tory variety, at least until we are all long dead) which actually speak for the British People.

For ourselves, dare we take this risk? Well, for those who went before us and for those who will come after us, how dare we not take it! How about you?