In the narrow ground of liberal party politics that is all that exists in Parliament at the moment, it looks as if Labour under Ed Miliband have pulled off a clever stunt by donning the mantle of Disraeli and representing themselves as ‘One Nation Labour’. Cameron and the Tories have foolishly ceded this terrain to Labour by allowing themselves to be branded once again as the party of the rich. They will probably pay dearly for this in electoral terms in the next three years.
However, an adroit manoeuvre on the narrow ground of parliamentary politics most certainly does not guarantee that anything of substance has changed within the Labour party. Since the election Labour has flirted with ‘Blue Labour’, which nodded in the direction of continental style Christian Democracy and in his conference speech last year Miliband attempted to distinguish responsible from predatory capitalism. So what progress has he made in moving beyond the shameless liberalism of the Blair and Brown era?
We can start with looking at the substance of ‘One Nation’, mentioned by Miliband 46 times in his speech. The term dates back to the Toryism of Benjamin Disraeli in the mid Nineteenth Century, which sought to give some expression to the working class and agricultural labourer interest against the ruthless liberalism represented primarily by the Whig oligarchy. It finds striking expression in his novel ‘Sybil’ which depicts a class alliance between Egremont, a Tory, and Walter Gerard, a Chartist militant during the late 1830s and early 1840s as the industrial revolution developed. It is interesting to contrast the robust nature of Disraeli’s politics with the flim flam of Miliband et al. Laughably, Miliband was accused by the BBC’s Nick Robinson of trying to reconcile two incompatibles, ‘one nationism’ and class war (ie taxing the rich a bit more). But let’s hear it from Disraeli. Early on in the novel a stranger remarks:
“There were yeomen then sir: the country was not divided into two classes, masters and slaves; there was some resting place between luxury and misery. Comfort was an English habit then, not merely an English word. “
A prime remedy for this state of affairs was the renewal of the Tories as a party of Crown and people;
“Toryism will yet rise from the tomb over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back the strength of the Crown, liberty to the Subject, and to announce power has only one duty – to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE. “
A far cry indeed from the retoxifying liberalism of the current Conservative Party and from the careful managerial phraseology of Labour. But Disraeli didn’t think that the working class should just sit back and wait for the one nation Tories to come to their rescue. They had to form trade unions, agitate, call a general strike (a national holiday) and if necessary go to jail or get killed by troops for their beliefs. ‘Moral force’ would not be enough. Devilsdust, a Chartist agitator, says:
“I never heard that moral force won the battle of Waterloo. I wish the Capitalists would try moral force a little, and see whether it would keep the thing going. If the Capitalists will give up their red-coats, I would be a moral force man tomorrow.”
To prevent the ‘mutual ruin of the contending classes’ in Marx’s phrase, there would have to be a strategic alliance between socially responsible factory owners and landowners and the Crown on the one hand, and the organised working class on the other. At the end of the novel, in a remark that has contemporary resonance, Disraeli remarks:
“In the selfish strife of factions two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England – the Monarch and the Multitude; as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the People have disappeared; till at length the sceptre has become a pageant, and its subject has degenerated again into a serf”.
Then as now British politics was dominated by contending varieties of liberalism and the working class interest did not get a look in.
So how does Miliband measure up to his new mentor, Disraeli? Certainly not by ruffling the established interests of Capital as Disraeli advocated! A good example is his ‘policy’ for addressing the needs of the 50% of young people who do not go to university. As this journal has pointed out for some time, a critical issue is the availability of high quality apprenticeships for young people. Miliband proposes a payroll levy for vocational education in economic sectors where employers demand it. This was tried in 1964, in far more favourable political and economic circumstances, by the then Wilson Labour government with the passing of the 1964 Industrial Training Act. It failed because employers did not want to provide training and the trade unions did not press for it. There is not the slightest reason for it to succeed now. We have high youth unemployment and a European labour market which provides ample skilled and unskilled labour from all over the world. Why should an employer bother to train his own?
A compulsory levy would provide an incentive to train through obliging employers to recoup a payroll tax by providing apprenticeships. The issuing of licences to practise would progressively crowd out unskilled labour from jobs that require skill. Then British young people might begin to be able to compete with workers from abroad. They might even have an incentive to work at school as well, thus solving another problem that Labour claims to be exercised about. Of course we know why all of this will not happen – it would involve tangling with employers, which is something that Labour would never dare to do, even if it meant putting ‘predatory capitalism’ in its place. Miliband is happy to indulge in high-sounding verbiage to the adulation of the delegates at the conference, but as to measures to do something to bring about ‘one nation’, which as Disraeli pointed out, would involve hard struggle, he offers a form of words which, as postwar British history shows us, amounts to nothing. The Labour Party has just engaged in an elaborate public relations stunt at its annual conference and has successfully conned a large number of people with it. This does not alter the fact that they are frauds and likely to remain frauds. Spin, just as in the Blair-Brown era, takes precedence over substance. Miliband follows the New Labour focus group trick of finding out what he thinks people want and then pretending to provide it, instead of offering leadership by challenging powerful interests that are harming the welfare of working people. We see no reason to swerve from our view that, as in Disraeli’s time, British politics is dominated by liberals who wish to serve capitalism and that there is no true representation in the current party system.
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