Feeling Blue, Seeing Red

I had honestly never known that the Quakers observed Lent. You learn something new every day.

I expect that, especially since the Iraq War, most Quakers have been Liberal Democrat voters, at least until the Coalition came along, with a growing minority voting Green. They will not be voting Liberal Democrat now. In most cases, frankly, there is no point in voting Green.

Let us look at the Anglican Sees the occupants of which have joined Quaker leaders in declaring themselves so splendidly today.

The names of Wakefield, Manchester, Durham, Sheffield, Newcastle, Doncaster and Birmingham seem predictable enough, although several of them include responsibility for areas very different from those which their titles would most immediately suggest.

For example, at least half of the Diocese of Newcastle is covered by Coalition constituencies that have never returned Labour MPs, one of which has hitherto permanently had what are now the two Coalition parties in first and second place.

Leicester, Sherwood, Buckingham, St Albans, Salisbury, Truro, Oxford, Lichfield, Gloucester, Derby, Swindon, Rochester, Chichester, Bristol, Taunton, Chelmsford, Tewkesbury and Brixworth are either in the marginal Midlands, or in what has been the battleground between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in the South West (for all that somewhere such as Gloucester, Swindon or Bristol may return one or more Labour MPs, their wider areas have hardly ever done so), or else in the Tory heartlands.

In all of those places, the experience of extreme poverty as a result of the Coalition’s policies is now being described with frankness. Moreover, the Midlands, the South West and the South East are all suffering horrendously as a result of 30 years of neoliberal and anarcho-capitalist refusal to do something so basic as to preclude against flooding.

The names of Bangor and St Asaph also leap out. “Church or Chapel?”, with regard to background even if not with regard to present practice, is still the first question in much of Wales in order to determine whether or not the addressee belongs to the Tory third of the Welsh.

Bangor and St Asaph are both in North Wales, including in their pastoral care areas where the Conservatives used to be able to take victory for granted or consider themselves well-placed; in the Vale of Clwyd parliamentary constituency that contains St Asaph, the Conservatives are still in a close second place, and in 2010 the two Coalition parties had a higher combined vote than the total for the first-placed Labour candidate.

I knew Dr Croft of Sheffield slightly when he was teaching at Durham, and he is a dyed-in-the-wool Evangelical. Dr Warner of Chichester is an uncompromising Anglo-Catholic who used to run the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham. There are others besides, whose signatures likewise make it crystal clear that this is no mere liberal love-in.

The choice of Methodist Chairs of District as signatories can hardly have been accidental or coincidental. Durham? South Wales? Oh, no. Newcastle upon Tyne, yes, although that is not a poor city, and it is very far from a monolithically Labour one.

Liverpool, yes, although that, too, has a large Liberal Democrat presence and a long Conservative history. Sheffield, yes, but the same can be said there. The three in London, yes, but London includes some of the richest neighbourhoods on earth, and they vote as one might expect.

Also, though, super-marginal Nottingham and Derby. The South East. And what until 2010 were in parliamentary terms the almost uncontested Lincolnshire and Cumbria. The absence of Cornwall is perhaps regrettable.

Likewise, the United Reformed Church’s Synod of Wales bespeaks the old Welsh Liberal tradition, in particular, while the North Western Synod covers Cumbria, Lancashire and Cheshire, and while the Eastern Synod covers Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire.

Plenty of places could have announced their suffering and no one would have paid any attention. But that cannot be said of these.

It seems a shame that only England and Wales were included, since the matter under discussion is not devolved. The Scottish Episcopalian bishops would have signed this. There are Methodists in Scotland; not very many, but there are. The URC’s links to the Church of Scotland and to the United Free Church are very close indeed.

The names of Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist leaders from Northern Ireland would also have been most striking. The Alliance Party’s only MP, who is an active Presbyterian, pointedly does not take the Liberal Democrat Whip, while the Ulster Unionist Party’s last MP, an active Anglican, resigned from that party when it allied itself to the Conservatives, and has been re-elected as an Independent who votes, not merely with Labour, but on certain issues with the Labour Left even when the front bench either abstains or votes the other way.

The same is now true of the DUP, which, for example, voted en bloc with Labour against war in Syria, and voted to release the Shrewsbury 24 papers when most Labour frontbenchers did not vote at all, the most notable exception being the justly ambitious Andy Burnham.

It is highly telling that no Northern Ireland MP has any kind of affiliation to the Coalition, not even the one whose party is a member of the Liberal International, and not even the one who is the last, at least to date, of the titled, Anglican grandees to serve in the House of Commons in the Unionist interest.

For Northern Ireland, at least other than in the five Sinn Féin constituencies, now exists within the British political mainstream that dominates between the Highland Line and a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, and which at the next General Election will be seen to fan out into the Highlands and Islands, where the Labour vote has always been larger than almost anyone realises, and into the South of England.

Oddly, the hardest nut to crack will be the Welsh-speaking countryside, most of which was once a straight fight between Labour and the Conservatives. But Plaid Cymru in the North is a rural Radical, pro-peace, and at least in cultural terms largely Chapel-based party, without the SNP’s visceral anti-Labourism.

That Old Plaid is waiting to be dislodged from the incomers of Southern Far Leftism in New Plaid, which often speaks Welsh barely, if at all, and which exhibits a decidedly opportunistic streak, such as supporting the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, and opposing a reduction in the British contribution to the EU Budget, voting with the Conservatives at Cardiff Bay in the first case and at Westminster in the second.

The large Labour overall majority is not really going to necessitate any kind of deal with Plaid Cymru. But they will deserve a certain respect and affection for having wiped the floor with the Liberal Democrats, and their MPs are going to be from areas bearing no resemblance to those which have produced, and which are preferred by, their party’s ostensible controllers. Many things about them will be important signs to Labour to remain faithful to its own roots.

That last will also be true both of the SDLP and of the DUP. The DUP is like the SNP, like Plaid Cymru, like George Galloway’s topping of the poll in every ward of the Conservative target seat of Bradford West, and like the Greens’ capture of Brighton Pavilion without reducing the Labour vote but while seeing the Conservative vote collapse.

The DUP is a force economically well to the left of New Labour, at any rate (and except in the SNP’s case and parts of the Greens’, of the economic Left plainly and simply), which has taken over previously, and still essentially, Tory sections of the electorate: the anti-Labour half of Scotland, the non-Labour vote in Welsh Wales, the affluent and over 90 per cent white parts of Bradford West, Brighton Pavilion, and the people who formerly turned out without fail for the Ulster Unionist Party.

Sylvia Hermon’s success at North Down, like that of Bob McCartney before her, is in the same vein. If anything, she is economically more left-wing, more Old Labour rather than New, than he was. She is undeniably far less warlike internationally. North Down is usually compared to a Southern English Conservative seat. But it was always more like a Northern English Conservative seat, or a Scottish Unionist seat, being within fairly easy distance of many of each, back when there were such places.

To be fair, there still are a few of the former in the North West, and North Down resembles an historically Tory part of the North West in the way that the SDLP seats resemble historically Labour parts of the North West, notably in the fact that they have both had, to all intents and purposes, Labour MPs since the middle of the 1990s, with every likelihood of retaining such in 2015 and beyond.

The North, the Midlands, the Lowlands for Westminster purposes, most of Wales in population terms, and 13 of the 18 seats in Northern Ireland: these are the heartland, to which everywhere is becoming more and more conformed, as will become startling apparent in 2015.

Even the five Sinn Féin seats are vulnerable to the SDLP if it makes enough of an effort on bread and butter issues, on Sinn Féin’s intolerance of any dissent from its support for abortion, on the serious possibility that it might go into an austerity coalition led by one or other of the right-wing parties in the Republic, and on its two-faced attitude to the Irish language, especially in education.

The Liberal Democrat seats in rural Scotland, as well as the one remaining Conservative seat, are there for the taking, while the SNP will still be reeling from the fact and scale of its defeat in the independence referendum. Hampshire and all parts west have been unable to vote for the Liberal Democrats against the Conservatives, or vice versa, since the Coalition was created.

The South East and East Anglia are being hit hard by the Coalition’s combination of spite and incompetence. Plaid Cymru is being taken over by Anglophone, sometimes monoglot, wannabe Trots, while lining up with the Conservatives against a rural working class the existence of which cannot be made to work in theory. That leaves the way open for strong local Labour candidates against the Liberal Democrats further north.

Every MP from Northern Ireland who is going to turn up at all is going to be a Labour ally, and in fact a force for keeping Labour economically on the mainstream, populist, hugely popular Left.

Everywhere, strong local candidates are the key, and the National Executive Committee needs to tell young persons putting up for practice that if they really wanted future careers in Labour politics, then they would take one for the team this time and stand aside.

But Labour is going to win handsomely, in any case. The point is to win as a truly national party, as truly the party of One Nation.

As to who will be forming the Government in 2015, however, there is no doubt. Sincere though they undeniably are, even the Anglican Bishops of Leicester, Sherwood, Buckingham, St Albans, Salisbury, Truro, Oxford, Lichfield, Gloucester, Derby, Swindon, Rochester, Chichester, Bristol, Taunton, Chelmsford, Tewkesbury and Brixworth know with whom it is necessary to keep well in, as it is going to be for 15, 20, or even more years.

Who will be next to issue such pointed, and pointedly non-partisan, criticisms of two parties out of three?

The National Farmers Union? It members and their communities are now experiencing the practical reality of an ideology in which this country would have no agriculture whatever, exactly the same ideology that applied itself to the pits. The Women’s Institute? Its members and their families are in no small measure the same people. The Scouts? The Girl Guides?

All of those belong to the world of Anglican Toryism. The political vehicle for that always used to be the Conservative Party, with a Liberal standby. Goodbye to all that.