By popular request (seriously - 10 emails in as many minutes), any chance of some responses to the text of what follows here, too?
Labour used to believe in social democracy. It did so precisely because it had profoundly conservative social and moral values, not least a strong British (and therefore also Commonwealth) patriotism focused on the institution binding together each and both of the Union and the Commonwealth. All of this was, and remains, mainstream opinion in Scotland, Wales, the North, the Midlands, and the decidedly less chi-chi parts of the South. In some such constituencies, turnout last time was as low as one in three.
So there is a huge gap to be filled by the restored party of those Labour MPs who defended the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement. By a party tough on crime because most victims are poor.
By the party of the Attlee Government, which dismissed the European Coal and Steel Community as "the blueprint for a federal state", which "the Durham miners would never wear". Of Hugh Gaitskell calling the Common Market "the end of a thousand years of history" and a threat to the unity of the Commonwealth.
By the party of ardently Unionist Labour MPs from Scotland, Wales, and their adjacent areas. Of Roy Hattersley sending British troops into Northern Ireland in order to defend the grateful Catholics there precisely as British subjects defined by their liberties under the Crown (whereas citizens are defined by their obligations to the State and to the government of the day). Of Roy Mason running Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom, with terrorism treated as a plain and simple security problem. Of Harold Wilson guaranteeing the Anguillan people’s right to be British, explicitly outside the American hegemony that had wanted to re-create there the brothels and drug dens of old Havana.
By the party of those Labour MPs (mostly Methodists) who resisted relaxation of the laws on drinking and gambling. Of those (mostly Catholics) who fought against abortion and easier divorce. Of those who voted in favour only after warning against exactly what has come to pass: abortion more common than having a tooth pulled, and one in three marriages ending in divorce.
That was the party in favour of the Welfare State, workers' rights, progressive taxation, and full employment. It dissuaded Truman from dropping an atom bomb on Korea, and it refused to send British forces to Vietnam. It opposed the Soviet Union and wider Stalinism on the same grounds, and with the same ferocity, as it opposed Fascism in the Iberian world and elsewhere, as well as apartheid South Africa and its Rhodesian satellite. It won elections on enormous turnouts and in the face of serious opposition.
Responses to the text? OK. It doesn't really have a conclusion - it just stops for no reason, apparently in the middle of something.
ReplyDeleteFunny, lots of people want to read it again, and nobody has anything to say. Why would anyone request it? It's already on the blog. Can't they find it? Are they stupid?
ReplyDeleteOh, the popularity. I can't read through this entire comments thread, it would take far too long.
ReplyDeleteYou know, this lack of response makes me think that when posts do seem to get big responses it's not because they're read by lots of people at all, but just because one or two people post lots of comments under lots of different names.
ReplyDeleteI don't have any evidence for this. It's just a suspicion.
Are you suggesting that David is just replying to himself over and over again ... oh the shock of it all! How perceptive you must be!
ReplyDeleteI see that the stupid peasants are out again. I for one hoped that he would put this up as a separate post in order to see whether you were actually capable of engaging with the arguments. He did and cleary you're not. I don't know why he wastes his time in Geordieland, I really don't. He could do so much better.
ReplyDeletehow do you know these commentators live in the North East, where exactly does it say that...David?
ReplyDeleteI don't. But the usual suspects on here have often dropped hints, or more than hints, about knowing me personally, and that explicitly from my political work.
ReplyDeleteSo, Martin, please note that they can't be from "Geordieland" (or, at least, it's very unlikely that they are). Although I agree that they are not doing the North East any favours.
How can David, on one hand, advocate free speech and freedom from the tyranny of parties and on the other hand just dismiss anyone who disagrees with him as a thick northerner who must be from his ex-local labour party. Surely people are entitled to disagree with you purely on the basis that they have analysed your arguments and believe them to be inadequate, in their views. Or are you as guilty, as you claim the main parties to be, of arrogance in believing that your beliefs are superior.
ReplyDeleteI didn't dismiss them in those or any other terms, nor would I. But correspondents of mine certainly do. You need to consider how the tone and much of the content of many comments here reflects on the North East in general. Not very well at all, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteI'm from the North East too, and I often find it excruciating to read the bile to which David is subjected on here.
ReplyDeleteOne of the worst things about us round here is that so many of us have an affected dislike of anyone who doesn't hide the fact that he can construct a sentence or has ever read a book. And that is what it is, an affectation, a sort of inverted snobbery.
Anyway, I think that the party David proposes is just what Britain needs. Right about grammar schools. Right about crime. Right about Europe. Right about the Union and the Commonwealth. Right about American hegemony.
Right about drinking and gambling. Right about the horror that abortion is now "more common than having a tooth pulled" and that "one in three marriages ends in divorce".
Right about the Welfare State. Right about workers' rights. Right about progressive taxation. Right about full employment. And right about opposing both American domination and all forms of repressive regime, whether of the Left or of the Right.
Anonymous 3:15 PM, no one really has "disagreed" with him about any of this. They have simply refused to engage, you have simply refused to engage, in anything except personal abuse.
I can't tell you how embarrassing that is for the rest of us, just how bad it makes people from round here look. People reading it from elsewhere must just think that we are all incapable of understanding issues such as these. Well, I'm not. Are you? If so, then you should find a more appropriate website to infest.