Assets

I am all in favour of the national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom in the face of all challenges.

From the United States or from the European Union. From Israel or from the Gulf monarchies. From the Russian oligarchs or from the rising powers of Asia. From money markets or from media moguls. From separatists or from communalists.

From over-mighty civil servants and diplomats (including in the intelligence services) or from over-mighty municipal officers. And from inappropriately imported features of the economic and political cultures of the Old Dominions.

This list is not exhaustive, and it is out-and-out hypocrisy to object to any of the threats on it without objecting to all of them.

The national and parliamentary sovereignty of the United Kingdom is, with municipalism, the only means to social democracy in the territory that it covers, and is thus the democracy in social democracy.

Correspondingly, only social democracy, and not least the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, is capable of safeguarding that sovereignty, national and parliamentary, and that democracy, parliamentary and municipal.

All of this includes a realist foreign policy, itself including strong national defence, and precluding any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran or anywhere else.

It includes British military intervention only ever in order to defend British territory or British interests.

It includes a leading role on the world stage, with a vital commitment to peace, and with a complete absence of weapons of mass destruction.

And it includes the subjection both of Islamism and of neoconservatism to an approach defined by our proud history of equal opposition to Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.