Monday 1 July 2013

Admit One?

On 12th May 2013, I re-joined the Fabian Society and the Christian Socialist Movement. I also joined Progress, Movement for Change, Compass and the Labour Representation Committee. I think that I joined Labour First and Labour Left, in that they have not told me otherwise.

However, the Labour Party still will not say whether or not it will readmit me. It is seven years since I was administratively expelled for my determination to give a parliamentary voice to the views expressed here, an aspiration eventually frustrated by ill health. Nor will the Co-operative Party, which never expelled me, allow me back in without Labour’s nod.

I am absolutely committed to the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. Workers’ rights, and the trade unionism necessary to defend and advance them.

The co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services. Consumer protection. Strong communities. Fair taxation. Full employment. Pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability.

Proper local government, including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, and the accountability provided by the historic committee system. A powerful Parliament. The need for a base of real property for every household from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

Peace, including the total eradication of nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; like the former Conservative Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, and like the former Chief of Defence Staff, Field Marshall The Lord Bramhall, I would cancel Trident, as is also the position of Matthew Parris and Peter Hitchens.

I stand in that tradition within the Labour Movement which is no less committed to the organic Constitution. National and parliamentary sovereignty in the face of all challenges: from the Executive or the Judiciary, the European Union or the United States, Israel or the Gulf monarchs, China or the Russian oligarchs, money markets or media moguls, separatists or communalists.

Civil liberties. Law and order. The Union. The ties that bind these Islands. The Commonwealth. Economic patriotism. Energy independence. Balanced migration, which I advocate as a mixed-race person. Conservation, not environmentalism. The countryside. Traditional structures and methods of education. Traditional moral and social values (I am a practising Catholic).

Fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. An unhysterical approach to climate change. A realist foreign policy, including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else.

I contend that the United Kingdom needs and deserves those successful combinations which many other Commonwealth and European countries have been able to presuppose and expect.

Full employment with low inflation. A strong financial services sector with a strong food production and manufacturing base and with the strong democratic accountability of both. A leading role on the world stage with a vital commitment to peace and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction.

Academic excellence with technical proficiency. Superb and inexpensive public transport with personal freedom and with close-knit rural communities. Visible and effective policing with civil liberty. Very high levels of productivity with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance.

I believe in a large and thriving private sector, in a large and thriving middle class, and in a large and thriving working class. Each of these depends on central and local government action. With public money come public responsibilities, including public accountability for how those responsibilities are, or are not, being met.

I 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.

I reject any approach to climate change which threatens 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.

I seek to enable and require fathers to live up to their responsibilities. Paternal authority and paternal responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver.

That basis is high-waged, high-skilled, high-status employment. All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: nuclear power; and coal, not dole. Furthermore, paternal authority cannot be affirmed while fathers are torn away from their children and harvested in needless wars.

I insist on the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past.

To my delight, Progress is reintegrating former SDP stalwarts while campaigning against tax avoidance and in favour of keeping the East Coast Main Line in public ownership. To my delight, the LRC is reintegrating disaffiliated trade unions, and small Leftist organisations with heritage names; such are now constitutionally committed, by their LRC affiliation, to the election of a Labour Government.

But more problematic individuals and groupuscules also operate on the Far Left. There are 11 Labour MPs on the Advisory Council of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society. Ken Livingstone was readmitted after nowhere near the years of expulsion that I have served. Dan Hodges has never been expelled.

I can see no reason why my views might continue to place me beyond the Pale.

5 comments:

  1. I was so disappointed when you were too ill to stand, even if we did get a very good MP as thing turned out.

    No-one could have predicted that at the time, she was a complete political unknown whereas you had been around for ever in local politics despite only being in your thirties.

    She had been on the same parish council as you for something like one fifth as long and that was it. But a good MP as it has turned out and at least better than what we would have had if it had been for the women only short list.

    Try and imagine him writing anything like this or your articles for the London Progressive Journal. Try and imagine him writing anything. No wonder he is so insecure and petty that he is keeping you out of the party. He and his girlfriend are justifiably terrified that after the Second Coming no-one will remember their names or what they looked like.

    If your old mates Labour and Independent from the Derwentside days who could never understand why you were not a district councillor had got their act together against the all women short list, the abolition of the district council, the mess over the sighting of the Consett academy and everything else, they could have had the parliamentary seat and given Labour a bloody nose. You would have been the obvious person to give it to and they could easily have made you the first past the post.

    These views would now be expressed inside Parliament. I realise it might have killed you but you have every reason to feel robbed twice over, of your rightful district seat in 2003 and of your rightful parliamentary seat in 2010. I am amazed you want to go back. They don't deserve you.

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  2. Water under the bridge.

    Pat is a superb MP. And we are all absolutely committed to a Labour victory now that the party has come home to the views set out here. Even if, bizarrely, the author of this piece is still not allowed to do so.

    You are right about what could have happened in 2010 if certain people had had their acts together. But they didn't. So it didn't.

    Water under the bridge.

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  3. David Lindsay I saw a quote from your blog about immigration and compulsory English competence - the following is my response - "spoken like a loyal UKIP supporter - internationalism recognises that the problem is capitalism and its inability to meet our needs, NOT the number of immigrants and their competence in speaking English - do not fall for nationalist/xenophobic arguments - we do not have to share the austerity out fairly and supporting ruling class arguments is a sure way to split working class solidarity - the only blame for our problems lies with them and their political power and an anarchic economic system that reckons only with their surplus - where are you coming from? "The enemy is at home" - it's the capitalist system and our ruling class - End of! Tom" But had I seen your current statement of position I would not have been so polite - 'economic patriotism'- etc. etc. - I doubt that there is any point even posting this - from a defence of working class interests you are never going to be much use. Tom Richardson

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  4. He is either a Harry's Place type or a Spiked Online type, probably Spiked with that self-conscious and obviously false "working-class" to justify no restrictions on immigration and no requirement on public bodies to Buy British.

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