Don't Agree With Nick

Nick Herbert, that is. David Cameron has dispatched this justly obscure individual to participate in a march in Warsaw by persons who, like Herbert, demand that the world be fascinated and overawed by the fact that they happen to experience homosexual urges, there being nothing genuinely interesting about them, or else they would feel no need to mention this.

Apparently, Herbert is going in order to offend other members of the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, the Group created by Cameron at Strasbourg; David Davis had promised to withdraw, not from the meaningless EPP, but from the very meaningful Common Fisheries Policy, so the BBC and the public school papers made sure that no one found out. Perhaps everyone else in that Alliance will now realise that they are far too good for David Cameron, and start looking for worthier partners in the United Kingdom. We are here, ready and waiting.

Like most of this Alliance, we support measures for the payment of mothers to stay at home with their children, for adoption and against abortion, for palliative care and against euthanasia, for traditional marriage (or, at the very least, against compelling anyone to conduct deviations from it), against sex and violence in the media, against State toleration of drugs and prostitution, against unrestricted Sunday trading, and against supermarkets opening on what are supposed to be public holidays for everyone including shop workers. Like most of this Alliance, we support the safeguarding or restoration of family life in general and paternal authority in particular by the safeguarding or restoration of high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment. Like much of this Alliance, we support generous welfare provisions, public services in the public sector, universal healthcare provided by the State, workers’ rights, and the public ownership of important companies.

We stand in the tradition of the Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce. The tradition of the Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling. The tradition of those, including John Smith, who successfully organised (especially through USDAW, the shop workers’ union) against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership. And the tradition of the trade unionists who battled to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment, frequently marching behind banners that depicted Biblical scenes and characters. Our standing in that tradition, as much as anything else, is why we are no longer members or supporters of the Labour Party. It does not want us, so we do not want it. We certainly do not need it. We never really did.

We stand in the tradition of the trade unionists who have spent decades defending the secure, high-waged, high-skilled, high-status jobs of the working class. We refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use to the necessary level the spoken and written form of the national language of the given member-state, which in the United Kingdom means English. Our standing in that tradition, as much as anything else, is why we are no longer members or supporters of the Labour Party. It does not want us, so we do not want it. We certainly do not need it. We never really did.

We stand in the tradition of the Labour MPs who mostly voted against Heath’s Treaty of Rome. Who all voted against Thatcher’s Single European Act. Who voted against Major’s Maastricht Treaty in far greater numbers than the Conservatives, including the only resignation from either front bench in order to do so. And who all voted against the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies every year between 1979 and 1997. Our standing in that tradition, as much as anything else, is why we are no longer members or supporters of the Labour Party. It does not want us, so we do not want it. We certainly do not need it. We never really did.

And we have deep political roots in the former mining communities, in the women’s suffrage movement, in the 1945 General Election victory, and elsewhere, making us unsullied by the weird cult of Winston Churchill, so that instead we can and do condemn his carve-up of Europe with Stalin, just as we condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire. Our standing in that tradition, as much as anything else, is why we are no longer members or supporters of the Labour Party. It does not want us, so we do not want it. We certainly do not need it. We never really did.

Informed by all of this, we want to participate in building a transatlantic alliance with those who, on the same day as President Obama received their states’ Electoral College votes, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling, and voted for President Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going. A transatlantic alliance with figures such as Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine and Bart Stupak. A transatlantic alliance with figures such as General Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, and the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec. A transatlantic alliance with figures such Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And a transatlantic alliance with figures such the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor, who directed sixty per cent of Civil Rights activity in 1960s Chicago, and who was a stalwart of Opus Dei.

Theirs is the America of traditional marriage, heavily regulated (if any) gambling, and the reduction of abortion through support for pregnant women. That is the America of big municipal government, strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, very high levels of cooperative membership, housing cooperatives even for the upper middle classes, small farmers who own their own land, and the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. That America long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. Until very recently, that America led the world in “not seeking for monsters to destroy”. That is the America with which Europe must co-operate for the good of both and of the world, as surely as the Europe set out in my first five paragraphs is the Europe with which America must co-operate for the good of both and of the world.

Furthermore, our own country, the United Kingdom, has particularly close ties to countries in which movements such as this are of considerable significance. We want to be worthy and active partners of those in Australia who continue to bear witness to the Five Primacies of B A Santamaria: the integrity of human life, support for the family unit, decentralism, economic and wider patriotism, and Judeo-Christian values. The European Union and its members need voices like that, including the voice of this Alliance.

We want to be worthy and active partners of those in Canada who combine the best of John G Diefenbaker with the best of Tommy Douglas. Diefenbaker was the morally and socially conservative rural populist who established the Canadian Bill of Rights, the Royal Commission on Health Services, the Agricultural Rehabilitation and Development Act, and the National Productivity Council (Economic Council of Canada), and who extended the franchise to all Aboriginal peoples. He campaigned to save the Canadian Red Ensign, with the Union Flag in the corner and thus making Canada a nation under the Cross. He denounced apartheid, and blocked the Commonwealth readmission of the new Republic of South Africa. And he refused to have American nuclear weapons in Canada. The European Union and its members need voices like that.

Douglas, voted the Greatest Canadian by CBC viewers in 2004, was the Baptist minister who united unions, farmers and co-operators in order to give Saskatchewan the publicly owned Saskatchewan Power Corporation, its extension of electrical services to remote villages and farms, the Saskatchewan Government Insurance Office, many Crown Corporations in competition with private sector interests, the unionisation of the public services, Canada’s first programme of universal free hospital care, the groundbreaking protections in the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights against private no less than government abuses, and the province’s Medicare programme that soon afterwards became nationwide. The European Union and its members need voices like that.

Aware of those ties, we are also aware of Commonwealth ties generally, and most anxious to build a bridge between Europe and the Commonwealth, not least including the emerging economic, cultural and military power of India, and always mindful of the needs of those, such as Christians and Dalits (who are often Christians), who are threatened by the rise of Hindutva. An example of this Alliance’s potential importance in developing ties between Europe and the Commonwealth arises out of the presence in South Africa and certain other Commonwealth countries of communities defined by adherence to the Dutch Reformed or similar traditions in their historic forms, by no mean only among white people in South Africa, though certainly including them. Commonwealth connections also greatly assist the building of bridges to other regions of the world, especially Africa and the Caribbean, not least in order to give priority, within strictly limited and strictly legal immigration, to immigration by those who adhere to the classical, historic, mainstream Christianity that is the foundation of European culture.

Furthermore, whereas the European Union is no place for Turkey, Europe has a particular historical affinity with the Christians of the Middle East. We seek a most significant bulwark against any Western or other action that is contrary to, for example, the interests of the Copts of Egypt. Or the interests of the Christians of Israel, including Nazareth, and of the West Bank especially, although also of the Gaza Strip. Or the continued reservation to Christians of the Lebanese Presidency and of half of the seats in the Lebanese Parliament. Or the existence of predominantly Christian provinces, and of Christian festivals as public holidays, in Syria. Or the reserved parliamentary representation for Armenians and Assyrians in Iran, in the starkest possible contrast to Turkey and Iraq respectively. Or the interests of the Christians in Iraq, three per cent of the population before the 2003 invasion, but half of all refugees from that country today.

We also seek a pivotal role in expressing in the present age the historic mission of the Slavs as the gatekeepers of Biblical-Classical civilisation, not least against the Islamic or other conquest that can of course take many forms, but no less importantly against internal decadence.

And we seek a strong relationship with a China which still makes things, builds things and mines things, putting the jobs, heat and light of her people first. She is emerging from the gangster capitalism that always follows Communism by returning to her own culture, which is firmly centred on the family and the local community, reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, has barely started an external war in five thousand years, and is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity. And she takes Africa seriously, even going there to secure the food supply necessary for her to give up the extremely anti-Confucian one child policy.

We wish to take the lead in responding by advocating most emphatically a return to making things, building things and mining things. To prioritising jobs, heat and light. To the family and the local community. To tradition and ritual. To moral rather than physical force. To the Golden Rule. To Agrarianism and Distributism. To a pronounced aversion to war. To the classical Christianity that completes and transcends Confucianism, in no way destroying it. To a very Classical and Patristic openness to, and interest in, Africa. And to the glorious celebration of the fact that the very last thing wrong with the world is that it has people in it.