Of "Right-Wing Breakaways" From "Left-Wing" Parties

Warnings here and elsewhere about "right-wing breakaways from left-wing parties," citing such unhappy precedents as the SDP, and the long career of Bob Santamaria in Australia (though certainly flawed, no single individual deserves more credit than Santamaria for the fact that Australia never came under Soviet domination).

So I must make it clear that I am not proposing "a right-wing breakaway from a left-wing party": as much as anything else, you can't breakaway from something that no longer really exists. Labour was a morally and socially conservative party of British and Commonwealth patriots exactly when, and because, it was most committed to the Keynes-Beveridge-Attlee Settlement; fully informed by both aspects of this heritage, ostensibly "right-wing" and ostensibly "left-wing", it opposed the Soviet Union and wider Stalinism at the same time, and on the same grounds, as it opposed apartheid South Africa and its Rhodesian satellite.

These things were, and are, connected; Labour was cut off from them at the same time and by the same people. In consequence, it took only twenty-two per cent of the eligible vote last time, winning only because the other lot really have collapsed completely. There is an enormous gap to be filled, so let's fill it.

And let's be clear about what it is that binds the "right-wing" and "left-wing" aspects of our heritage. It is best articulated by Chesterton in his magnificient study of Dickens, in which he writes of the need "so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome." Yet so to view the world is precisely to realise "that there is something the matter", which is why pagans have always been "conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else", since (and this is obviously much more controversial) Original Sin "in the only part of Christian theology which can be proved," so that "the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition", but rather "the normal itself is an abnormality." This is of course very like Postmodernism. Only older, wiser, better.

Better not least because, for Chesterton and for us, it was this view of the world's flawed goodness that made Dickens a social reformer and which would mkae social reformers of us, since, like him, we recognise people's degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity "fond of this world, even in order to change it", in contrast to simple (Whig or Marxist, including neoconservative) optimism or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which discourages reform. We have to "hate [the world] enough to want to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing", for it is "at once an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening."

Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view, uniquely, as all its critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox "in the hearts of men, God has been put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration." Furthermore, "A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling", since "a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution."

That which inspires and informs our dedication to the "revolution that is a restoration" (the Welfare State, workers' rights, progressive taxation, full employment, and peace and disarmament) is preceisely that which inspires and informs our dedication to the "fixed and familiar ideal necessary to any sort of revolution", i.e., to the best principles of moral and social conservatism in the Western tradition. Furthermore, that "fixed and familiar ideal", with its inherent and constant call to that revolutionary restoration, is embodied in the institution that effects and literally crowns the Union and the Commonwealth that are the indivisible object of our patriotism.