The British Obama

So Chuka Umunna is again being hailed, after a very successful Commons debut as Shadow Business Secretary. He has close links to Lord Glasman and company, and he talks about "One Nation Labour", so why not? In the meantime, why not Ed Miliband? Ed Miliband is not remotely a social conservative except, perhaps, in a few cultural ways that almost everyone is. Chuka Umanna I don't know about in those terms, although, while open to correction, I suspect something similar, because most of that generation of Labour politicians (scarily, he is younger than I am) are broadly like that. But they have both won the confidence of Blue Labour.

Likewise, in 2008, on the same day as Obama received their Electoral College votes, California and Florida voted to re-affirm traditional marriage. Missouri and Ohio voted not to liberalise gambling. Colorado voted to end legal discrimination against white men. From coast to coast, the people who voted for Obama were the mainstays of, especially, the black and Catholic churches. Obama supporters included Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak and others of like mind. Obama supporters included Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec, and Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And Obama supporters included the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor and a stalwart of Opus Dei.

Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option or a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. (The Hyde Amendment, banning federal funding of abortion, was proposed by a Republican who was not merely a conservative but almost a sort of European Catholic monarchist, but it was passed by a Democratic Congress, signed into law by Jimmy Carter, and subject to an annual renewal which it has never been denied no matter how large the Democratic majority in either House. Likewise, both of George McGovern's running mates were pro-life Catholics, in stark contrast to the record of his party's supposed "centrists".) Nor is there coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama's own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey's Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, which latter declined to endorse either him or Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the "free" trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal.

Democratic Governor Steve Beshear has just been re-elected by a margin of 20 points. In Kentucky. Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Democrats have just won a special election to retain control of the State Senate. In New Jersey, the land of Chris Christie, they have increased their majority in the State Assembly and retained control of the Senate. Ohio voters have rejected by 61 per cent to 39 a proposal drastically to reduce the collective bargaining rights of public employees. And in Mississippi, the constitutional recognition of personhood from conception, while opposed by the outgoing Republican Governor, was supported not only by the Republican nominee to succeed him, but also by the (black) Democrat. So, joining the Rust Belt Catholics, the Southern Democrats are on the way back. Only this time, they come in both colours. The Democratic Party is winning back its old Northern base of "ethnic Catholics" to add to the blacks whom it picked up as they moved North and as Johnson backed Civil Rights, all the while slowly but steadily re-conquering the South on something not far short of a miraculous biracial basis.

Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Eisenhower, who ended the Korean War, took an even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, declined to intervene in Indochina, denounced the military-industrial complex, and advocated nuclear power as "atoms for peace" 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. In 1960, John F Kennedy branded Eisenhower and Nixon as soft on the Soviets. But then, in 1954, Eisenhower had written to his brother, Edgar N Eisenhower, that, "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H L Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Nixon, who suspended the draft, pursued détente with China, and ended the Vietnam War in union with Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee who went on to sign the Helsinki Accords. Nixon believed in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded education) and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and as surely as that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime, and who now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Consolidation beckons, by means of reaching out to the successors of Reagan, who withdrew from Lebanon in 1983, and who initiated nuclear arms reduction in Europe. The successors of James Baker, who called on Israel to "lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel" in order to "foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity", and who negotiated the voluntary disposal of all nuclear weapons by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The successors of the Republicans who opposed the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration. The successors of George W Bush, who removed American troops from Saudi Arabia after 11th September 2011, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

The defeat of David Miliband by Ed Miliband may be compared to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Barack Obama. A new and better party can now be created. Or, rather, restored. A party for all those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament. Not restricted to, but certainly including, those who have a no less absolute commitment to any or all of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

A party which believes in the social, cultural and political need for a large and thriving middle class, and which therefore supports and delivers the very extensive central and local government action without which such a class cannot exist. A party which understands that what is usually described as private sector employment depends on bailouts or the permanent promise of them, on central and local government contracts, on planning deals and other sweeteners, on the guarantee of customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and on all manner of other government action. Government therefore has a duty to deliver that action. Those who benefit from it are as dependent on public money as any public sector employee. With public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not being met.

A party for those who are aware of, who understand, who value and who draw on the Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other roots of the Labour Movement, rejecting cultural Marxism no less comprehensively than they reject economic Marxism, and vice versa. A party for those who, with Herbert Morrison, "have never seen any conflict between Labour and what are known as the middle classes", and who, with Aneurin Bevan, denounce class war, calling instead for "a platform broad enough for all to stand upon" and for the making of "war upon a system, not upon a class". A party unencumbered by the ludicrous notion that public provision is, or ever was, supposed to be "a safety net for the poor", rather than universal. The party at the organising centre of the alliance between the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else. The party of the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base.

The party for those who 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 spoken and written English to the necessary level. The party for those who 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. And a party engaged in the closest possible co-operation with the forces of provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business Toryism, forces set free by electoral reform from tendencies variously metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian and make-the-world-anew.

Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna, over to you. Yes, We Can.