British Commonwealth, Indeed

Nigel Farage loves the Commonwealth? Does he or his party know anything about it?

He and his supporters no doubt think of it as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which in turn they imagine to be the Britain, and especially the England, of the 1950s. Only, one must assume, without the National Health Service. They are completely and utterly deluded.

More than that, they are wholly out of step with their own political tradition. Back when the New Right was New, it hated the Commonwealth with a burning passion.

Enoch Powell despised the Commonwealth. Figures such as Simon Heffer and Andrew Roberts advocated British withdrawal, with much of the latter's Eminent Churchillians given over to attacks on the whole concept and on its prominence in post-War British politics. Margaret Thatcher came close to making that withdrawal a reality.

It was Labour that was strongly pro-Commonwealth, and it was the traditional Labour Right that more than anyone made the Commonwealth case against European federalism along with the Keynesian one.

Perhaps neither of them would particularly have welcomed, or would still welcome, the "right-wing" label. But Peter Shore continued to advance that double case to his dying day, while Bryan Gould continues not only to advance it, but to embody it. Great lost Leaders, both.

Commonwealth membership no longer depends on even the most tenuous of historic ties to Britain. It is enough to feel an affinity with one's neighbours based on the common liberation struggle against white rule in Southern Africa in the 1970s.

Hence, Mozambique is now a member. In view of that fact, consider that Zimbabwe currently is not a member.

British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens (and the second ought to be among the third) may vote and stand in British parliamentary elections, while they and EU citizens may stand in local and European elections.

So long as parliamentary candidates had to be British in Great Britain, or British or Irish in Northern Ireland, then the franchise ought to be extended to all legal residents, regardless of nationality.

Neoconservatives who objected might be asked why they wished to deny the vote to Americans, Israelis, and subjects of the Gulf monarchs. Paleoconservatives might be asked why the vote ought nevertheless to be enjoyed by citizens of every Commonwealth country, even if their country had no historic ties to this one.

One of the most abiding fallacies of British political discourse is that the Right is patriotic while the Left is not.

We all know about Nazis sympathisers and so on, although very few people know quite the scale of such things. Those oddballs who screech that the Nazis were left-wing need to consider, among so very much else, that Hitler's supporters in Britain were drawn from the Conservatives and from their various satellite parties, and that those supporters were organised in something called the Right Club.

There is much emphasis on the erratic career of Oswald Mosley, but he was little more than a noisy sideshow. Hardly anyone has heard of the astounding case of the 19th Lord Semphill, a paid spy for Japan throughout the 1920s and 1930s, who continued to assist the Japanese even during the War.

He was never prosecuted, nor was he even exposed until 2002, despite his having died in 1965. In addition to his duties in the Upper House, he had served as President of the Institute of Advanced Motorists and of the British Gliding Association.

As to Ministers of the Crown with links to Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies during the Cold War, precisely two have ever been proved. Curiously, both were in the pay of Czechoslovakia.

John Stonehouse had a reasonable claim to have been economically the most right-wing person ever to have sat as a Labour MP before the Blair years. And Ray Mawby was not only a Conservative, but an ardent Thatcherite. Beyond that, nothing has ever been substantiated against anyone.

A certain type of saloon bar bore goes on about Harold Wilson, but the most that can be said about that is that the Soviets ought to have demanded their money back. Whereas the likes of Sir Roger Hollis and the Cambridge Apostles could have slipped effortlessly into Tory politics. Who knows how many others did?

After all, it was considered bad form to ask a sound enough chap his politics. No lower-middle-class Conservative activist would have been so impertinent to a potential MP with all the right polish and connections. The closed doors of the highest society guarded the only environment in which it was always perfectly respectable to profess oneself a Communist as just another aristocratic eccentricity.

Today's British Right is very largely defined by how much it hates Britain. It is the Left that believes to the marrow of our bones in what is far and away this country's most popular and unifying institution. It is we who love the railways. It is we who bemoan the fact that key parts of our national infrastructure, which we as a people used to own, are now owned by foreign states, as such.

It is we who do not regard the Royal Family as scarcely British at all, whereas that must be the view of those who subscribe to the UKIP and, for want of a better word, the Blukip view of who is or is not an immigrant. It is we who agree with the DUP about the Bedroom Tax, about uprating the minimum wage in line with inflation, about the need to protect defence spending, and indeed about controlling immigration properly in concrete terms.

It is we who have spent a Parliament opposing stringent cuts to defence. It is we who, in the forms of Sylvia Hermon and the SDLP, actively include MPs from both "sides" in Northern Ireland, whereas the Conservatives are not even allied to any from either, nor will they be on 8th May. It is we who do not secretly, if secretly, yearn for Scotland to leave the United Kingdom. It is we who do not regard Wales and the North of England as hilariously despicable and despicably hilarious.

It is we who are prepared to stand up to America, to Israel, to Saudi Arabia and her circle, to London's Russian oligarchs, to Rupert Murdoch, to transnational capital, and to the non-doms, including the ones who own several newspapers.

Not to make enemies of them. If that were to happen, then it would be their choice, not ours. But to remind them whose country this is.