The 4 Freedoms Party: The UK EPP, by Dirk Hazell

Reforming Europe matters for Londoners’ jobs: IT, finance, services, and others.

It follows that Londoners need a strong voice in the European Parliament to safeguard jobs, pensions and public services.

Europe’s strongest political party is the mainstream EPP European People’s Party.

The EPP is the party of Germany’s Angela Merkel, Ireland’s Enda Kenny, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt.

These are leaders who should be Britain’s closest friends and allies in reforming Europe. Unfortunately for Britain, the Conservatives left the EPP in 2009.

In the 2009-14 European Parliament, there were more EPP MEPs than in the Tory plus UKIP plus Green plus LibDem groups combined.

This matters for many reasons.

A study by the London School of Economics shows the Conservatives in the European Parliament are weak and marginalised.

The bigoted anti-women, anti-gay and anti-green views within the Conservative group’s odd collection of fringe parties clash with London’s openness. Indeed, since January 2013 in two votes out of three, the Conservatives’ group sided with UKIP’s.

As at the time of writing this article, disturbing revelations have come to light about the Tories’ discussions with hard right parties in an attempt to save the group they created on leaving the EPP.

VoteWatch Europe’s data reveals that the UKIP and Tory lead candidates in London have missed so many roll call votes they are in the bottom 10 per cent of MEPs.

As for the Liberals’ EU group, the British and Germans currently form the largest delegations. But YouGov surveys suggest only 1 in 4 of those who intended to vote LibDem in 2010 intend to do so in 2014.

In Germany’s 2009 General Election, Liberals had won 93 seats, but they lost every single one in 2013. London needs not a declining, but a strong and growing, voice.

The EPP is not only by far the strongest party: it is the best available party.

In the last five years, the EPP secured billions of pounds to get young people into work, help 4 million Europeans to train, and help 300,000 small firms.

The EPP simplified rules for small firms but strengthened consumer and health rights, environmental protection and external border controls.

We support the 4 Freedoms in President FD Roosevelt’s iconic 1941 Address: freedoms of speech and faith, freedoms from want and fear.

We also support the 4 core EU freedoms of movement of people, goods, services and capital. This is no licence to defraud social security.

We believe government should be local to people. People know best what works for them and Brussels and Whitehall must listen to them.

More broadly, the EPP believes every person deserves the greatest chance of fulfilment.

This includes both helping businesses to offer good and sustainable jobs, and also offering protection with dignity to the vulnerable.

It is a harshness sapping the soul of society when billionaires are richer than ever but others are having to turn to soup kitchens.

British politicians, not “Brussels”, are responsible for problems like housing shortages, educational and training shortfalls, archaic transport, aircraft carriers without planes, and substandard cancer care.

The truth is London needs Europe and Europe needs London: we all need reform!

In this election, we offer a strong team with real business experience and knowhow on getting results in Brussels.

Our candidates include an Irish woman, a British man with a Polish father, a French woman, and native Londoners.

As MEPs in Europe’s strongest Party, we will restore London’s strong voice: Europe’s leading city, Europe’s leading party.

We a strong economy with opportunity for the young, alongside protection and dignity for the vulnerable.

Although this is not a General Election, others dwell in their Manifestos on issues for the British Parliament to decide:  sterling, referendum, and opt outs.

We will focus on safeguarding millions of Londoners’ future jobs. We have five priorities:-

• help Londoners to do more business anywhere in Europe and beyond. We agree with the CBI and TheCityUK: Europe must be more open and complete major trade deals with, for example, the USA.
• digital union not digital divide: 1 in 4 new jobs for Londoners comes from technology. London needs an EU single digital market. We support free WiFi across Europe.
• improved education, skills and training for all Londoners, regardless of postcode: we will help you to benefit from open opportunities for education, training and work experience such as the 40 per cent increase secured by the EPP in the Erasmus+ scheme.
• lighter regulation for smaller firms: most Londoners work for smaller firms. We agree with what the Federation of Small Businesses says that they need.
• safeguarding freedom, justice and the environment: Thames winter floods reminded us that London depends on a healthy planet. All Europeans need affordable, secure and sustainable energy.

Treating people with dignity includes safeguarding freedom and human rights such as privacy and protection, for example from terrorism and crime.

We offer what people want: we are experiencing exceptionally high correlation between awareness and support.

While the converse is also true, it is certain that if sufficient Londoners know what we offer, we will do well.

The Pirate Party, by Andy Halsall

There is something slightly strange about politics in the UK at the moment. Something that doesn't get that much coverage in the media hubub. It's something that isn't upfront in most politicians' election campaigns.  If you take a moment to look, you can see it almost everywhere.

During last year's local elections, the one thing that Pirate Party activists were told time and again by the people we spoke to, whether on the doorstep, in their flats or on the street, was:

"I don't vote, because it doesn't change anything."

There is a sense of powerlessness over the forces that shape our lives and the space around us. A feeling that decisions are made but we aren't included.  That governments whether local, national or European can do what they do regardless of what we want.

 

Ever increasing privatisation means many aspects of our society, from housing to the NHS, are being divided up and parcelled out. It can be impossible to find out who is responsible for the most basic aspects of our environment, public space and services, let alone get anyone to do anything. 

Huge companies, vested interests and foreign governments seem to get more of a say than we do in the agreements that shape our economy and society. We are left out, where we should be at the heart of decision making. We are kept in the dark, when we should be being kept informed.

There are plenty of problems.

In the UK, we are constantly scrutinised and monitored, whether it is by Europe's biggest array of surveillance cameras, or by our own and 'friendly' intelligence services. Here in the UK, companies like ATOS are paid to check we are ill enough to be off work. 

 

When it comes right down to it, in a country of physical barriers, many of us look to the internet as a place where we might retain some freedom, some control. But here too, as we have heard from whistleblowers and from our own governments, we are increasingly to be watched, restricted and monitored. The result of that snooping is targeted advertising, social analysis, and intelligence reports. The product is you.

We never hear about freedom of movement anymore. About the ability to live, work and play anywhere in Europe. Remember, it cuts both ways. All we hear is how one party or another may deal with the 'problem of migration'.  The same isn't applied to the free movement of goods or services. Of course not!

Do we want to live in a society where our jobs can be sent abroad to the lowest bidder, but we can't follow? Where European workers can't come to the UK to improve their lot and give us the benefit of their skills? Limiting that one freedom changes the balance, but not in our favour.

Oh, and the customs queue at Manchester airport will be murder.

That can't go on.

Our government has created a state where the default answer is 'No'.  In this 'No' cultur,e it's not surprising that people begin to feel that nothing can change. This is, more than anything, what the Pirate Party wants to change. 

 

Yes, people know us best for talking about digital rights, yet at the heart of our politics is the right of everyone to share knowledge, to innovate and to prosper. That is the way to take control over the world around us.

This is especially true when it comes to the European Union. Too many of our politicians are doing what they think might win them votes. Rather than talking about policy, they are shouting about personalities.  Rather than fixing the problems with the European Union, and there are many, they would rather use them as an excuse to do nothing. Our politicians prefer to say 'No' to change, 'No' to innovation and 'No' to building a better Europe.  

There are solutions...

The Pirate Party isn't like that. We want Europe to work, and we want the chance to convince you to be part of a Europe that works.  

 

For us, that means holding a referendum on our membership of the EU. It means making the case for the changes that are needed so that we remain a member. We need to be part of a better European Union.

We don't accept that the European Union can't be fixed, or that it is broken beyond repair. We know that our elected representatives in Europe need to hold the balance of power, to be able to make the changes needed, to introduce legislation and to respond to the need of those who elected them. Right now, they don't.

Vote Pirate

We know that we can help to build a society which breaks the feeling of powerlessness.  A European Union where our voices are heard and our concerns addressed.  This won't be an easy task. 

 

In Europe, we will need to curb the influence of lobbyists.  We will need to cooperate with other European countries to address the democratic and structural issues we see. 

The ideas are right here, they shouldn't come from pure ideology, dogma or think-tanks. Every policy is just an idea, a way to do it, and evidence that it will work. Everybody can get involved in that, everyone has something to contribute. 

That is why we are standing three excellent candidates in Dr Maria Aretoulaki, Dr George Walkden and Jack Allnutt. Maria is a small business owner in Manchester, George is a University Lecturer and Jack is a committed civil liberties activist.  We know that they can help bringout the ideas that we need, share them, and work to have them implemented in the European Parliament.

We have enough experience to know that it won't be easy; we are not naive. But it can and will be done. The test will be to see if the same voters in years to come feel that they really can change something, because by voting Pirate on the 22nd of May they will.

Lend No2EU Your Vote, by Bob Crow

The Lanchester Review is grateful to Brian Denny of No2EU for this, the late Bob Crow’s last ever article:

On May 22, we are asking you to lend us your vote and back No2EU: Yes to Workers' Rights, an electoral coalition that supports workers' rights, decent public services and peace. The European Union is a threat to all those things.

Across Europe, unemployment is exploding while the EU intensifies its attacks on workers' and trade union rights and the public services they rely on.

On top of that, the EU is deploying troops in Africa on the pretext of humanitarian intervention while funding fascists in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government.

All these imperialist antics are being carried out in our name as, under the Lisbon Treaty, we are now EU "citizens."

Public services, including postal, transport, energy, education and health services, are being privatised as part of the EU austerity agenda being imposed on member states by unaccountable EU institutions.

But the voices of working people are not being heard.

The failure of the major parties to represent them has led to a political vacuum which is being filled by Tory outriders like Ukip or, worse, groups like the British National Party.

Yet the major parties, including the Green Party, continue to tell workers to put up with EU membership because of alleged benefits from EU legislation such as the working time directive and the agency workers' directive.

But these very limited and fast-disappearing "rights" represent little more than a sugar-coating for the EU liberalisation and privatisation agenda.

Moreover, none of these "rights" deal effectively with mass unemployment or the introduction of zero-hours contracts and low-paid workers being forced to work in multiple jobs.

So why haven't the much-lauded EU Agency Work Regulations defended these vulnerable workers?

First, the regulations that claim to ensure agency workers enjoy the same basic pay and conditions as permanent workers only kick in after 12 weeks on the same temporary assignment.

Then the so-called "Swedish derogation" in the regulations assists employers to avoid any obligation for workers to receive basic pay and conditions comparable to a permanent worker.

The directive is actually normalising casualised labour as a new reality for millions of workers.

The EU is also stripping workers of their rights through harsh anti-trade union EU court rulings and strict bailout conditions on many states.

For instance, in Romania the EU has demanded an end to collective bargaining. In a country where 98 per cent of workers were previously covered by collective agreements, that figure has been reduced to little over 20 per cent.

The EU is imposing endless austerity on hundreds of millions of people through series of treaties, diktats, directives and bailouts at the behest of big business and the banks that caused the current financial crisis.

This is driving millions into poverty across Europe by imposing austerity measures particularly in countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus, among others. The pro-EU Tory-Lib Dem Coalition is happy to follow suit.

The EU and the US are also currently secretly negotiating a treaty designed to open all service sectors, including health, to so-called "competition."

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) poses a severe threat to the very existence of our National Health Service.

TTIP opens all public services to competition, and healthcare is treated the same as education, construction, transport or waste disposal as another opportunity for profit.

Under TTIP, lawsuits can be brought against national governments, and a panel of lawyers will award damages based solely on commercial considerations.

This is being imposed without democratic discussion, negotiated by the EU and requiring no approval of national parliaments.

This EU business model of liberalisation, privatisation and fragmentation is already doing a lot of damage to our transport and postal services in the name of corporate profits.

Under the EU's fourth rail package, the EU is pushing for the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering and privatisation for all rail services across Europe.

But No2EU wants to see a different Europe - one made up of democratic states that value public services and do not offer them to profiteers, states that do not put the interests of big business above that of ordinary people. We believe that EU structures and rules make this impossible.

Vote No2EU on May 22 to say:

Yes to workers' rights;

Yes to an exit from the EU on the basis of socialist policies;

Yes to keeping Britain out of the eurozone;

No to austerity whether from Brussels or from Britain;

Yes to the rejection of all EU treaties and directives that curtail democracy, encourage social dumping and demand privatisation;

No to EU trade agreements like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the US which threaten our NHS;

Yes to scrapping EU rules preventing member states' control over economic policies;

Yes to the development of sustainable manufacturing, agriculture and fishing industries in Britain;

Yes to the repeal of anti-trade union EU court rulings;

No to racism and fascism, and Yes to international solidarity of working people;

No to EU militarisation and an EU army; and

Yes to the restoration of democratic powers to EU member states.

Looking Back at The Radical Tradition, by Taym Saleh

The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature (edited by Rita Hinden, Penguin, 1964) is a series of pamphlets, speeches and newspaper articles given over a 40-year period, from 1914 to 1953, by RH Tawney, the eminent economic historian, Christian ethical socialist, and Labour intellectual.

The essays cover much ground: the first three are profiles of the nineteenth-century radicals William Lovett, Robert Owen and John Ruskin; four discuss the problems of public school education, and the promises of secondary education reform and adult education; another four discuss the real meaning of economic and political liberty, and how the State and the market relate to true liberty; and the final piece examines the capacity of literature to express the age’s social conditions.

To read it today is to peer into a world where the Left had to justify itself thoroughly, truly had to build something in opposition to the objects of its assaults, for before 1945 the Labour movement lacked the resorts of habitual loyalty, clichés and stultifying habits of mind.

A few choice glances of this volume will, I hope, prove enough to understand some of the differences and continuities in the development of Labour thought between then and now, and between him and us.

In 1919 the government set up a commission chaired by a High Court judge, Mr Justice Sankey, to examine the state of the coal industry. By a narrow majority, it recommended that the industry be nationalised. Tawney sat on the commission, and wrote a pamphlet explaining the case for public ownership.

In describing the iniquities of private management of the industry and the advantages of the alternative, he goes through the usual arguments of exploiting economies of scale and transferring profits from shareholders to consumers and workers. But he also says something else:

‘The difference between its [the coal industry’s] conduct under public ownership and its conduct today is threefold. In the first place, it would be administered, not in order to pay dividends, but in order to provide an economical service of coal for the public. In the second place, each unit would be part of a team, and would not aim at cutting its neighbour’s throat. In the third place, the workers themselves would have a direct responsibility for its efficiency, and sufficient power to make that responsibility a reality.’

The workers would participate in the decision-making processes of the industry and sit on the committees concerned, ‘but not as mere critics, but as men who can translate their ideals and experience into practice, and who bear the liability for making them a success.’

It is unsurprising that an advocate of nationalisation would try hard to counter the wariness of stifling bureaucracy and of the overbearing state. Nevertheless, Tawney’s description of his (and the commission’s) preferred model for a publicly-run industry is striking for modern inhabitants of this post-nationalisation world.

Whitehall is conspicuous by its absence. The government sits in a detached position as a guarantor. The real initiative rests with the Pit Committees, the District and Regional Councils, and the National Mining Council. At each level workers sit with technical experts and managers, with power emanating from the bottom level up.

It is a proposal for state intervention whose objective is not merely redistributive – instead it seeks to engineer a situation in which workers may improve their lot (not just their purchasing power) through their own efforts.

Of course, any serious statist must also contend with arguments that bind markets to political liberty. Tawney’s attempt to do so is recorded in a contribution to The Christian Demand for Social Justice, first published in 1949.

In it, he refers to FA Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and its argument that the Planning and Organising State’s activities must entail an erosion of civil liberties that, if unchecked, will eventually lead to a Totalitarian State.

Much of his criticism of this causal chain lies in rejecting the tendency of Hayek to attribute to the State properties, powers and motivations that exist unchanged regardless of the context of time and place.

Why, in other words, should the Russian State be expected to behave in the same way as the British State, when they are such different creatures living in such different environments? A perfectly sensible question, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But the defence of state economic activity goes further than that, and is, for our present purposes, more interesting.

First, there is the keen awareness of the potential for tyranny within the market economy:

‘It is still constantly assumed by privileged classes that, when the State holds its hand, what remains, as the results of its inaction, is liberty. In reality, as far as the mass of mankind is concerned, what commonly remains is, not liberty, but tyranny. In urban communities with dense populations … someone must make rules and ensure that they are kept, or life becomes impossible … if public power does not make them, the effect is not that every individual is free to make them for himself. It is that they are made by private power – by landlords interested in increasing rents or by capitalists interested in increasing profits. The result is not freedom, but a dictatorship, which is not the less oppressive because largely unconscious, and because those whom it profits regard it, quite sincerely, as identical with liberty.’

The market economy is attacked, and its opposite defended, not solely in terms of providing people with a more comfortable or desirable state of being, as one would be concerned for the welfare of a cow in a barn; rather, as with the nationalisation question discussed above, the motive impulse comes from an altogether better-rounded estimation of the worth of man.

But the most succinct and straightforward defence of government intervention comes a couple of pages later, when he tells us:

‘the State is an important instrument; hence the struggle to control it. But it is an instrument and nothing more. Fools will use it, when they can, for foolish ends, criminals for criminal ends. Sensible and decent men will use it for ends which are sensible and decent. We, in England, have repeatedly re-made the state, and are re-making it now, and shall re-make it again. Why, in heaven’s name, should we be afraid of it?’

I cannot help but find this a little dated. To call its sentiment naïve is perhaps too pejorative; ‘confident’ seems closer to the mark. It is of the same age as George Orwell’s remarks in The Lion and the Unicorn, published in December 1940:

‘What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism … does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. … The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.’

It is too unfair to hold the power of 1940s socialism’s pioneering zeal against it. The difference between the statist objectives of the likes of Tawney and those of later times’ less discerning Leftists must not be ignored. But it is still the case that his case required a faith in the viability in the extensive involvement of government in economic affairs, and that faith was rather easier to maintain then than it is now.

Who now, even after the Recession of 2008, can honestly say what Orwell was getting at – ‘the question’s settled now, a planned economy is obviously better than a laissez-faire one’? On the matter of economic organisation, this is perhaps the greatest difference between the Left now and then.

Taking a broader view, however, the key is what we can call the ‘moral dimension’ to socialism, or more tellingly the ‘moral unity’ of Tawney’s socialist world-view.

The best glimpse into the power and nature of this belief can be found in his great history Religion and the Rise of Capitalism – an explanation of the Reformation’s destruction of the medieval attitude to social questions and its replacement by what would later become classical liberalism and rational materialism.

It concludes ‘what requires explanation is not the view that these matters [economic relations and social organisation] are part of the province of religion, but the view that they are not. When the age of the Reformation begins, economics is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activities are treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; the appeal of theorists to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic transactions is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the traditional teaching of the Christian Church; the Church itself is regarded as a society wielding theoretical, and sometimes practical, authority in social affairs.’

Now, in his advocacy of the nationalisation of the coal industry and so on, Tawney is not pressing for a return to this particular order as such.

Rather, he asserts the moral quality of man’s existence as immovable and irrepressible, and therefore holds that people must be expected to behave accordingly, whether they are in the counting house, in Parliament, or in the home.

It is especially apt that the believer in these notions should have written so affectionately of John Ruskin, whose slogan in his economic treatise Unto This Last – ‘there is no wealth but life’ – rings in such harmony with them.

Ruskin, as Tawney wrote in an article published in The Observer in 1919, considers questions of art, industry, society and politics not to be compartments, but facets of a whole.

It therefore follows that it is insufficient and a dereliction of duty, when considering economic matters, to dismiss moral concerns regarding human existence as unrelated to the supposedly objective task of discerning the course and product of mechanical human interactions.

While applying this idea to conditions in the labour market, Tawney unintentionally makes a prescient remark on the industrial strife that would later undermine the post-war consensus:

‘when a society by precept and practice has fostered the doctrine that its foundation is the pursuit of personal pecuniary advantage, it will not be able to appeal to men to forgo that advantage when it happens to find the application of the doctrine inconvenient.’

As I said at the beginning, RH Tawney’s was a time in which the Labour movement had no soft bed to relax on, no intellectual shortcuts to resort to. This prevents us from being too sweeping in our didactic comparisons with the present day.

Nevertheless, there is a difference in attitudes that cannot be entirely attributed to this particular difference in historical circumstance.

The chief shortcoming of the modern Left’s attitude to economy and society is most seen in the way in which a proposal to redistribute wealth from one sort of people to another is too readily justified as taking money from the Bad (bankers, corporations, utilities companies, etc.) to the Good (the disabled, single mothers, nurses, etc.).

Some of this can be put down to the reductionist proclivity to sloganeering and clichés apparently innate to most frontbenchers, on both sides.

But the nub of it is, I suspect, related to the instinct to treat public money spent or wealth redistributed as in themselves markers of good deeds done, a little like the way some Calvinists took each unit of wealth accumulated to be a sign of divine favour.

This is not to dismiss the case for state intervention in the economy out of hand – much of it is very good, including the proposed interventions in the rental and energy sectors, but some of it, like tax credits in lieu of wage increases or housing benefits substituting public housing, less so – it is to point out the fragility of the holistic world-view underpinning it.

In modern times the temptation to avoid such questions and to treat GDP or unemployment figures as the bottom line of politics, and politics itself as a great exercise in accountancy, has proven overwhelming.

The antidote for this is not easily found. Just as economics and ethics are false compartments, so are politics and ordinary life.

Answers to such questions as these are not to be found in the policy recommendations of think tanks or government inquiries, but in the full rhythm of thought sustained by the mass of people in their lives.

In our irreligious age the basis for such commonalty is hard to discern. Indeed, the problem may prove genuinely insoluble.

The One Nation Society

On this twentieth anniversary of the death of John Smith, the One Nation Society seeks a broad alliance between the confidently urban and the confidently rural, between the confidently metropolitan and the confidently provincial, between the confidently secular and the confidently religious, between those confident in their liberal social values and those confident in their conservative social values. It seeks that alliance across all ethnic groups, across all social classes, and across all parts of the country: One Nation.

The basis of that alliance includes the contribution-based Welfare State, with contribution defined to include, for example, caring for children and caring for elderly relatives. It includes workers’ rights, with the trade unionism necessary in order to defend and advance them. It includes John Smith’s signature policy that employment rights must begin on the first day of employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked.

That basis includes community organising. It includes profit-sharing and similar arrangements: not “shares for rights”, but shares and rights. It includes the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, not least in the provision of financial services, especially following the loss of the Co-op Bank precisely because it was not itself a co-operative, but was merely owned by one.

That basis includes consumer protection. It includes strong communities. It includes fair taxation. It includes full employment, with low inflation. It includes pragmatic public ownership, including of the utilities, of the postal service and of the railway service, and always with strong parliamentary and municipal accountability. It includes publicly owned industries and services, national and municipal, setting the vocational training standards for the private sector to match.

That basis includes local government, itself including council housing, fiscal autonomy, the provision as well as the commissioning of services, the accountability provided by the historic committee system, and the abolition of delegated planning decisions.

That basis includes the State’s restoration of the economic foundation of the civilised and civilising worker-intellectual culture historically exemplified by the pitmen poets and the pitmen painters, by the brass and silver bands, by the Workers’ Educational Association and the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, by the people’s papers rather than the redtop rags, and so on. In order to restore a civilisation in continuity with it, that culture must be rescued from “the enormous condescension of posterity”.

That basis includes the Union, the Commonwealth, and the ties that bind these Islands, recognising that only social democracy guarantees the Union and that only the Union makes possible social democracy in these Islands, so that the erosion of social democracy is the most powerful of separatist arguments, despite the fact that the separatists could not possibly deliver social democracy, and very largely would not wish to deliver it, in the entities to which they aspire.

That basis includes economic patriotism, itself including both energy independence and balanced migration. It includes the recognition that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level.

That basis includes an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which upholds the right of the working classes and of non-white people to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

That basis includes the full compatibility between, on the one hand, the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and, on the other hand, 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 basis includes the organic Constitution, with the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes. It includes 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.

That basis includes the understanding that 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. It includes, no less than the previous point, the understanding that 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.

That basis includes conservation and the countryside, especially the political representation of the rural working class. It includes personal freedom through superb and inexpensive public transport, ultimately free at the point of use. It includes academic excellence, with technical proficiency, refusing to compromise on either.

That basis includes civil liberties, with law and order, including visible and effective policing, and including an end to light sentences and to lax prison discipline through a return to a free country’s minimum requirements for conviction.

That basis includes fiscal responsibility, of which neoliberal capitalism is manifestly and demonstrably the opposite. It includes a strong financial services sector, with a strong food production and manufacturing base, and with the strong democratic accountability of both. It includes a total rejection of class war, insisting instead upon “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”.

That basis includes a large and thriving private sector, a large and thriving middle class, and a large and thriving working class; all depend on central and local government action, and with public money come public responsibilities.

That basis includes very high levels of productivity, with the robust protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, including powerful workers’ representation at every level of corporate governance. It includes a base of real property for every household, to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. It includes an absolute statutory division between investment banking and retail banking.

That basis 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.

That basis 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.

The One Nation Society exists in order to debate and research these issues.

Founding Signatories:

Nic Dakin MP, Member of Parliament for Scunthorpe;

Jim Dobbin MP, Member of Parliament for Heywood and Middleton;

David Drew, Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Stroud, former Member of Parliament for Stroud (1997-2010);

Roger Godsiff MP, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath;

The Right Honourable George Howarth MP, Member of Parliament for Knowsley;

David Lindsay, Director of the One Nation Society;

Iain McKenzie MP, Member of Parliament for Inverclyde;

John Mills, Co-Chairman of Business for Britain, Founder and Chairman of JML;

Ian Paisley MP, Member of Parliament for North Antrim;

The Right Honourable Keith Vaz MP, Member of Parliament for Leicester East, Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

International Patron:

Professor Bryan Gould CNZM, former Member of Parliament for Southampton Test (1974-1979), former Member of Parliament for Dagenham (1983-1994).

Intended events include Peter Shore at 90; One Nation, One Struggle: Ascension Island, the Chagos Islands, the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar; The Case for Public Ownership, including in terms of national sovereignty, the Union, and support for fatherhood; Towards A Realist Foreign Policy; Learning from Germany: The Mittelstand, Regional Banking, Workers’ Representation; Neither Washington Nor Brussels, especially in view of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership; Bringing Social Democracy to the City of London; The Role of the Radical Traditions within the Organic Constitution; Catholic Social Teaching and British Social Democracy; and British Social Democracy, the Ulster British Culture, and the Ulster Protestant Tradition.

Intended projects include shaping the social economy, forming a realist foreign policy, restoring local democracy, reasserting the pre-eminence of Parliament, responding to climate change without compromising on well-paid employment and its benefits, renewing respect for working-class culture, and sharing with the rural working class the urban and the ethnic minority experiences of identifying and promoting community leaders.

theonenationsociety@yahoo.co.uk

@OneNationSoc

A Small Family Business, by Alan Ayckbourn, National Theatre; reviewed by Ian Oakley

This Alan Ayckbourn revival is great fun: it is well cast, funny but also with a darker underpinning of exposing widespread crookedness.

When A Small Family Business was first performed in 1987 it was taken as a critique of the ‘Greed is Good’ era.

The fact that it feels so relevant and timely in 2014 tells you how embedded a culture of greed, corruption and double dealing has become in British public and private life.

If you doubt that just think of the lies over the Iraq War, the phone hacking cover up and the massive insurance frauds for ‘whiplash’.

The plot revolves around Jack, an honest, hardworking (in the phrase beloved of our not so hardworking politicians) family man, who takes over the running of his family’s business and is shocked to find out what is going on.

What particularly shocks him is that the double dealing and crookedness is not being done by strangers, but his own family and in-laws.

As the play progresses he is increasingly sucked into the very corruption that he sort to prevent.

The only things that date the play is the teenager daughter reading a book, whereas today she would be on her smart phone, and the fact that the family business is a furniture manufacturer; to reflect today’s deindustrialised world it would have to be a haulage firm instead.

The portrayal of some of the less conventional marriage arrangements is as funny as ever, but probably more familiar to a generation brought up on television docusoaps and BBC 3 series such as My Dominatrix Wife.

The play makes great use of the Oliver Theatre’s revolving stage. As the play opens, we see the front of a normal detached house and the set revolves to reveal the goings on within.

There is not a weak performance in the cast, but the standout actors are Nigel Lindsay in the main role as Jack and Matthew Cottle as a creepy, but highly effective, private detective.

As I left the theatre, I could not help but reflect that with the laughter there was a serious underlying point that was more effectively delivered with humour than it would have been with tragedy or outrage.

I also reflected that this is but one of seventy plays that Alan Ayckbourn, a staggering achievement that I cannot think that any other major dramatist comes close to matching.

I just hope that Sir Alan has many more plays in him.

Defining Conservatism, by Arthur Gwylim

Political language has become detached from objective meaning. Conservatism is now synonymous with liberalism.

Yet the two are radically different.

If we are to retain a conservative tradition, then we must re-establish a coherent and accurate definition.

This is surprisingly difficult. What is its foundation? The answer suggested here is both radical and simple.

Conservatives place great importance on conserving the best from past generations.

They mourn the passing of the shopkeeper, the farmer and bus conductor. They distrust their replacements: the supermarket, more supermarkets, and the train manager.

They seek law and order; they are patriotic, but not nationalistic.  They defend the family.

They are sceptical of the state, but also of the market: they don’t want their lives run by politicians or by big business.

They believe in fairness, but do not like discrimination in the name of that fairness.  They respect others, but hate the demand for rights at every opportunity.

These may be mere instincts, in no way amounting to a coherent strand of political thought.

There are of course those who are merely sentimental. But to dismiss all such views as being little more than a regretful sigh over the rising of a lesser sun would be intellectual cowardice. Beneath these views is a coherent foundation.

Liberalism’s foundation is the individual: his freedom; his desires; his rights.

Much of modern socialism in Britain has its foundation in equality through state intervention.

By focusing on what he can demand from the state or from other individuals, people are encouraged to look inwards, replacing a man’s relationships with his peers with the state.

The liberal’s campaign for individual choice destroys his community.

By putting himself first, he will act to the detriment of others: the relationship between him and his neighbour weakens.

This creates a vacuum for state intervention: to do what the community used to do. Individualists end up with bigger government.

The UK government now spends the same proportion of GDP as it did just before the Thatcher experiment, despite each of her predecessors promoting her economic legacy.

Since 1945, it is only in this economically liberal climate that it is acceptable to nationalise a bank.

Whether one follows liberalism or socialism, the experiment ends up with a bureaucracy doing for people what they can do for themselves.

They need not rely on each other and so have no need for loyalty, self-sacrifice or charitable love.

Such attributes are outward looking, while the relationship with the state or relationships within a market economy are inward looking.

The man bred on feeding from the big state will ask what that state can give him. The man bred on feeding from the market will ask what the market can give him.

If selfishness is not conservatism’s basis, then we must look to its opposite.

The foundation of true conservatism then has to be this: love.

Love is meant in a broad sense: outward looking; selfless; charitable, familial and brotherly as well as romantic. Ultimately, this means putting others first.

This may confuse the left winger who sees himself as the ideologue of love.

But there is no love in putting all dependency in the state.  There is no love in giving bureaucrats and politicians god-like power.

It will inevitably prompt sniggering to think of a starch-collared; tweed clad Colonel Blimp basing his politics on love.

However, love is neither soft-nosed nor inherently left wing. Conservatism’s foundation in love is best illustrated by its fundamental principles.

The most obvious element of conservatism is that it is intergenerational. Why do conservatives so often look backwards?

Conservatives respect those who have gone before: they do not always know better than their predecessors; they are not inherently more enlightened.

Their social contract is one with other generations: those passed and those to come. So the question could just as easily be put: why do conservatives look so far forwards?

Conservatives are trustees: they inherit a society from their forefathers; they preserve it and improve it for their children.

This is a form of love. It is a refusal to ‘live for today’ and an avoidance of the temptation for each generation to return to ‘year zero’.

It is an act of collective love when a generation sacrifices its own comfort for the good of its successors.

Today, it is never experienced. If it was, our attitudes to our natural surroundings would be radically different.

This trusteeship demands conservatives protect institutions.

Be they state organs, constitutional concepts, or other bodies, they are greater than any one man or government.

They are the anchors at the bow and the stern: keeping us fixed to the wisdom of our fathers and the wellbeing of our children.

An institution is not bound to market interests or profit and should be quite distinct from the state.

There is always a danger of traditionalism, but progressivism passes without criticism.  In the last thirty years, we have despised our constitutional heritage, tearing down idols such as parliamentary sovereignty, the unitary state and the absence of enshrined human rights.

Yet we find our constitution breaking apart: devolution is uncertain and unstable; the EU has more power than most understand; accountability seeps away like spilled water through the floorboards.

Our politicians have squandered our inheritance and have shattered the delicate balance. This balance, it turns out, carried more wisdom than we realised.

The greatest of these institutions is our country itself. Conservatives are patriotic.

The country is inherited, its history, its legends and its shame.  It unites and causes people to look to their common interest.

The conservative is more apt to see themselves in the context of a hundred generations before and the generations yet to come.

It also makes people more aware of their culture.

Liberalism and statelessness threaten us with a ‘cultural free market’ of sorts, sacrificing cultural beauty and its quirks on the altar of the most dominant cultural forces.

Love for a country and its culture can defend its people against this. The French for instance, do this better than most.

Another element of conservatism is community.

With an ideological scepticism of excessive state and market, it follows that the conservative prefers community.

Conservatism sees the best society as the one which stands by itself: without being engineered by either the state or by ‘market forces’. Such a society is not composed of self seeking individuals or automatons.

Community encourages and embodies a form of love. Very simply: “love your neighbour as yourself”.

It is when you have this love, or respect, that people see wrongs in their true light: harm against themselves.

When you do not love a person, it is easy to put them in the hands of the state.

It is easy to be kind and nod with approval when they are given subsidies rather than a job, or allowed to follow some dubious moral choice: it does not affect you.

But when you love someone, you see the enforced idleness that will kill them ten years early; the horror of addiction and the desolation of emotional damage.

Only when this love exists are we moved to act, we personally look after our weak.

This is why conservatives believe in a strong approach to law and order: the community must be protected.

Crime is not viewed as something which merely does harm to individuals.

It is a refusal to show respect; the criminal deems himself more important than the community: he is content to harm others to get what he wants.

It is both an exalting of his self and a refusal to give to others, which are ultimately the same thing: a lack of love.

“The law” can be seen by the conservative as having an almost spiritual significance. He is deterred by the very prospect of breaking the law.

It can be explained by the everyday remark: “well if we all did that, where would we end up?”

But beneath this lies the very wise realisation that community can only survive where restraint is exercised out of respect for others.

It is also why conservatives believe in the family.

Family is the first instance of love that the fortunate will experience.

It teaches us not to think of ourselves; to love and to be loved. It is the first community. It is also our first trust: we inherit from our parents; we maintain and improve; we pass on. We live out these ideas in the family, and then in our community.

The family is not simply something to which conservatives have a sentimental attachment; it embodies precisely the values that are fundamental to conservatism: love; respect; selflessness; trusteeship and community.

The big state, small state dichotomy has failed because it arrives at the same liberal consensus. True conservatism has the power to break this orthodoxy.

It may be surprising to speak of conservatism as based on love, but it is consistent with its principles and is radical enough to realign left and right wing conservatives against the liberalism dominating British politics.