Slow-Motion Regime Change In Britain
Once upon a time, there were the Two Conservative Parties. One was Tory: agrarian, socially conservative, staunchly Christian (especially Protestant, and most especially Anglican in England and Wales, Presbyterian in Scotland), patriotic, highly cautious about intervention abroad, at least skeptical about an American influence so often very far removed from anything to the taste of TAC readers, pro-Commonwealth, and Arabist if anything in relation to the Middle East. The other was Whig: capitalist, libertarian, broadly or strongly secular, globalist, committed to making the world anew even at the barrel of a gun, uncritically supportive of America when defined in those terms, scornful of the Commonwealth, and ferociously Zionist in the original sense of secular Ashkenazi nationalist. The Tories supported exactly as much State action as was necessary in their preferred causes. So did the Whigs. But the Tories made no bones about it, whereas the Whigs insisted that they were anti-State. They therefore had very different attitudes towards those who worked in or otherwise depended on State action. Other than, of course, State action that benefited Whigs.
And there were the Two Labour Parties. One was Marxist, indeed probably the single broadest Marxist party in the world. The other was Old Labour, an expression of the Methodist social conscience and of Catholic Social Teaching, powerfully open to mutualism from one of those streams and to Distributism from the other. In its redemption of the legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, Old Labour saw nothing wrong in strong support for the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy. On that basis, it really did deliver the Welfare State, workers’ rights, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation (not environmentalism), fair taxation, full employment, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and, albeit up to an insufficient point, a base of real property from which every household could resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. The Marxists duly hated it.
The Two Conservative Parties and the Two Labour Parties were both marriages of convenience in circumstances long since vanished. But most people thought of them as old-fashioned marriages, in that they might one day end in murder, but never divorce. Such has indeed turned out to have been the case. Following academic Marxism in changing the means while leaving the ends intact, the Marxist Labour Party has overthrown the Old Labour Party, excluding it from parliamentary selection and disenfranchizing its huge electorate. Meanwhile, the Whigs have done the same to the Tories. To cut several long stories short, there is little or no political difference between the two monolithic parties thus created, but very little popular support for their shared principles and policies. Such as the Iraq War, or the war in Afghanistan these days, or the handing over of vast sums of taxpayer money to the banks so that they can pay out bonuses for failure while spitting in the faces of the taxpayers themselves.
Whereas there is huge popular support for the many principles and policies common to the Tories and Old Labour, and perhaps considerable popular support for the principles and policies particular to each of them, although I sincerely struggle to see what those are or might be. Yet there is no way of voting accordingly. The self-styled defenders of “freedom and democracy” have made sure of that.
David,
I find your analysis of the British left/right divide very interesting. I know your advocacy of a particularly European conservatism–willing to incorporate government in the maintenance of traditional society–grates on many here on the TAC site. That is understandable, because it is a world away from American conservatism. Indeed, in my opinion, the European Right might have much to learn from limited-government conservatism.
But you are undisputably correct that the Tories and Labor have both largely bought into a globalist, progressive paradigm. We see much of the same dynamic at work in the U.S., where genuine traditionalists of Left (however few of them there are) and Right have little political and media representation.
I appreciate the bursting of the Thatcherite myth as much as the next skeptic, but wasn’t Britain in the late 1970s really in an economic and social funk? We certainly can see the devastation that capitalism’s “creative destruction” wreaked on old Britain, but how much of that was inevitable? Was the post-war consensus just too cozy? I’m genuinely asking, because this is really something about which I know little.
What was the difference between Tory and Old Labour?
Class, mostly. Plus religion and locality as functions of class. Or was (and is) it the other way around?
“The other was Whig: capitalist, libertarian, broadly or strongly secular, globalist, committed to making the world anew even at the barrel of a gun, uncritically supportive of America when defined in those terms, scornful of the Commonwealth, and ferociously Zionist in the original sense of secular Ashkenazi nationalist.”
How can one be both libertarian and “committed to making the world anew even at the barrel of a gun”? A comma might be appropriate in that sentence, too.
Oskar,
What some here call American-conservatism is liberalism in Europe. The Old Southern and Atlantic conservative traditions in the US still have something to do with old Toryism (and the term was in occasional use until recently). I think some of these libertarians who appear on here occasionally would not know or care about that, since the old Southern Agrarians pre-dated Von Hayek. Indeed, some here don’t understand the fundamental principles of conservatism generally, which need not be defined via national characteristics.
Trent Hill,
Nobody would suggest the Whigs could be consistent Libertarian Party members. I believe David was drawing attention to their free-trading, enterprising capitalist spirit, which, contrary to the a priori pronouncements of some, typically faces a greater temptation to imperialist adventurism than Anglo-Catholic Toryism and its approximations.
David Lindsay, it’s pretty silly to suggest that New Labour is more “Marxist” than the Labour Party of former decades. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The Labour Party was never a a Marxist party, but it has never been less Marxist than after the neoliberal blairites captured the party about 15 years ago. Remember Clause 4?
What off it? It didn’t say what people like, I suspect, you think it said. It was phrased in such a way that, already having that in mind, you would assume that it did. But it didn’t.
Labour never used to be run by people with Communist, fellow-traveling or Trotskyist backgrounds. On the contrary, it existed not least in order to keep such people out of power.
But New Labour contains few or no other people. They have followed academic Marxism from economic to social, cultural and constitutional means. But their ends are unchanged. And those ends have now largely been achieved.