Of Hereditary Barons and Trade Union Barons

The Constitutional Reform Bill will, with the full support of the Tories, remove the last hereditary peers. No more guaranteed voice for the socially conscientious and historically conscious. For the rural and provincial. For the classically educated and the church-based. For the agrarian, making them broadly or strongly anti-capitalist, aware of the importance of State economic action in protecting social and cultural goods, and rooted in the most militant living tradition of direct action in such causes. For those with the Union and the Commonwealth literally bred into them. For those sceptical of American hegemony, and even more so of the Israel First lobby. Of course Blair wanted rid of them. Of course Cameron wants rid of them.

There was no argument against trade union barons that did not also apply to hereditary barons. Each restrained Thatcher’s and Blair’s class. The unions had no Thatcherite or Blairite delusion that “history began with us”. They loved a bit of ceremony, and a lot of hierarchy. They sustained the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair. They fought to secure the economic basis of paternal authority. They frequently marched behind banners depicting Biblical characters and events. Like public ownership, they were safeguards of the Union.

Today, even in their reduced condition, the unions are Britain’s most significant force for national sovereignty. The BNP-obsessed media may have ignored No2EU – Yes To Democracy (the name didn’t help). But it found room for leaders of the Lindsey oil refinery workers, actively opposed to the importation of a new working class which understands no English except commands, knows nothing of workers’ rights in this country, can be moved around at will, and can be deported if it steps out of line. Who else is making any such stand? Who else is making the unions’ stand against the global capital behind that importation? Against Rupert Murdoch? Against a foreign policy which prioritises Israel and then America, with Britain third, if anywhere? But the hereditary peers would have done so, not least in unison with the tribunes of the other class that also sends off its sons to be harvested in pointless wars waged by those who object equally to being checked by trade union barons or balanced by hereditary barons.

The hereditaries should never have made themselves directly partisan. Those unions which ever were should also have given it up long ago. Quite a few have now done so. Just as it should become axiomatic that the only “left-wing” candidates worth bothering with are those, of any party or none, who can secure union funding, so it should become axiomatic that the only “right-wing” candidates worth bothering with are those, of any party or none, who can secure some sort of backing from the hereditaries. In many places, those may very well be the same people. They certainly ought to be.