Arguably The First

“Before Red Tory and Blue Labour there was David Lindsay. He was arguably the first to announce a postliberal politics of paradox, and to delve into the deep, unwritten British past in order to craft, theoretically, an alternative British and international future. It is high time that the singular and yet wholly pertinent writings of this County Durham Catholic Labour prophet receive a wider circulation.” Professor John Milbank, Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, University of Nottingham.

That was in 2012. But where are we now? The Labour Party is led by the personification of the metropolitan liberal elite, backed up by the violently anti-intellectual right-wing Labour machine of old. The Conservative Party, which is almost always led by the Prime Minister, which defines itself as having no fixed ideology, and which is untroubled by the endless committees on the other side, has if anything been taken over by the Revolutionary Communist Party, meaning that there is at least hope for us all yet.

But the Postliberal opportunity risks being lost in a fog of ambiguity, banality, vacuousness, platitude and waffle. If anything is to be salvaged, and more than salvaged, then there must be no more talk of vague “values” or of an abstract “community”. God has revealed all that the Holy Roman Church professes Him to have revealed. That revelation defines the comprehensive and coherent ontology, epistemology, ethic and aesthetic that, as an indivisible whole, makes possible an economy and a society, a culture and a polity, the fine arts and the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, each informing, and informed by, all of the others.

Each and every individual human life is absolutely sacred from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death, and that principle is the foundation of all morality. The numerous practices that it precludes include direct abortion, indirect abortion at least except where any other course of action would result in the loss of both lives, euthanasia, assisted suicide, destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings, human cloning, human-animal hybridity, the creation of “saviour siblings”, capital punishment, and unjust warfare, if any war be just, but certainly including total war, as well as the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons, together with the international trade in arms.

That principle therefore further entails the active struggle against numerous underlying evils, including poverty, ignorance, squalor, illness, idleness, racism, sexual promiscuity, pornography, eugenic ideologies, the alienation or marginalisation of people with disabilities, the lack of due respect for old age, the failure or refusal to celebrate the infinite beauty of every human being as the image and likeness of God, the classification of human beings solely or primarily as economic units, and the pursuit of policies likely to give rise to armed conflict. Neither of these lists is anything approaching exhaustive. Truly, being pro-life is an entire way of life. The victims, both of the direct crimes against life, and of the evils giving rise to those crimes, are disproportionately working-class people and people of colour.

Since there cannot be a politically chosen “free” market in general, but not in drugs or prostitution, so there must not be a “free” market in general; the reverse also holds. In order to uphold the sanctity of life, it is necessary to secure economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. 

In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class, much of which is Catholic, and at least two fifths of which has always been Tory at any given time. In the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most as a result of its absence, namely the working class and the youth. Unity must therefore be maintained within and between the working class and the youth, including against any separatist tendency in England, Scotland or Wales. We are not “For the Many, Not the Few”. We are “For Everyone”. We reject class conflict in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. The working class and the youth could not fulfil their leading role if they were in a state of stupefaction. 

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. We have never not been “cancelled”, and we need no lectures on “cancel culture” from those who have always silenced us, but who now take to their newspaper columns and to the airwaves to bellow that they themselves are being silenced.

Brexit is the double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States, with no use of military force except in self-defence, if at all. With an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, the leading role in building One Nation belongs to the people and places whose votes have decided the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, of the 2017 General Election, and of the 2019 General Election, namely the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that are either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them. Since there cannot be the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital but not of people, so there must not be the unrestricted movement of goods, services or capital; the reverse also holds.

The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally. The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases. That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to encourage certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and to discourage others. They are not where the State’s money comes from. There is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. 

Armed with this understanding, and shielded by a strict statutory division between investment banking and retail banking, large amounts of central government credit, at low interest rates and over a long term, must be used to build great national projects, notably enormous expansions in infrastructure. Those would then pay for themselves many times over, ably assisted by pro-business tariffs and subsidies, and by a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation.

Any approach to climate change must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working classes and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We regret the defeat of the miners in 1985.

The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. We celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That expansion and development must now include space exploration, fuelled by, and fuelling, fusion power. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System.

But if a scientific fact as basic and as obvious as biological sex can be denied, then so can any other scientific fact, to the ruin of human progress. It is contrary both to whole history of human experience, and to the plain facts of biological science, to suggest either that sexual orientation is fixed, or that “gender” is “fluid”. Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone. No one is “born in the wrong body”. Gender self-identification is a ludicrous theory. Women-only spaces must be defended, while the “gender reassignment” of children and adolescents must be resisted, as must the silencing of free speech on these issues. One such issue is basic fair play in women’s and girls’ sport.

We must be no less vigorous in fighting for a legal presumption of equal parenting, and for due process of law, including the presumption of innocence. We must be no less vigorous in seeking to rescue such issues as male suicide, men’s health, and fathers’ rights, from those whose economic and other policies, including their warmongering foreign policies, have caused the problems in the first place. We must be no less vigorous in resisting the increasing criminalisation of male youth as such.

And we must be no less vigorous in harnessing the righteous rage against deindustrialisation, and against the harvesting of young men in endless and pointless wars, on the part of a growing number of young men who have discovered for themselves the traditional Great Books and the various schools of heterodox economics. Those Books and those schools have always been fundamental to the radical change of which those young men are now the vanguard.

It is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. There are now fourth generation Israelis. The Oxford English Dictionary defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”, and that definition is sufficient. Whereas the IHRA Definition is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. Since BAME and migrant communities tend to be working-class, there is also a clear connection to the injustices at Shrewsbury, Orgreave and Hillsborough.

In forbidding or curtailing criticism of a particular foreign state, the IHRA Definition is incompatible with national sovereignty. The denial of the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, where it created modern Palestinian identity, contributes significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians. One’s attitude towards the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one’s attitude towards the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain. The Liberal Establishment has imported the New York practice of branding as “anti-Semitic” any uppity black or other criticism of its hegemony, including its hypocrisy where that violence was concerned. 

The ties to Israel of some, but not all, communities of British Jews are among the links that Britain now has to every inhabited territory, as can be seen in every city, town and village. It would be incompatible both with national sovereignty and with equal citizenship to privilege some foreign states over others. Global Britain must have “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” since, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” 

Christian witness in Britain today depends on communities with their roots in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and increasingly also in Asia and the Pacific. The rapidly growing mixed-race population, and the BAME presence in every locality, give every family in Britain some level of stake in the liberation struggles of the Global South. The overwhelmingly white communities that rose up and overthrew the right-wing Labour machine in 2019, or which are on course to do so in 2024, are natural parts of the global networks of internal colonies, and of potentially revolutionary villages that surround the cities both literally and in geopolitical terms. 

These are the principles on which to work with Conservatives and others in order to bypass the Liberal Establishment and the right-wing Labour machine, so as to secure direct representation on public bodies, create and sustain our own media, develop and deliver our own educational programmes, and so on. These are the principles on which the Labour Party ought to field a candidate in every seat that it had lost in 2019. And these are the principles on which the Conservative Party ought to field a candidate in every seat that Labour had retained in 2019. Watch this space.