Though Cowards Flinch

Phil at AVPS brought this short article by Douglas Carswell to my attention. In it, Carswell claims that we don’t need to import the American revolution, but  “we need to complete the English one.” This seems to follow a line of thinking on the part of some academically aspiring members of parliament (and their liberal intelligentsia luvvies) wherein the Tories are the natural successors to the Levellers and Thomas Paine, and, in the reckoning of Daniel Hannan and David Cameron, Anthony Wedgwood Benn the younger.

It’s easy for the more urbane Conservatives to make such pretences. For example, religious tolerance, a key demand of the Agreement of the People, is a well-trodden path these days. Of course lurking behind the urbane exterior of the Conservative Party are those who would violate everything the Levellers asked for and would force their moral judgments down the throat of the people of this country. That is true from such decaying relics as Norman Tebbit all the way to David Davis or the Cornerstone Group of Family, Faith and Flag.

It was the conclusion of the Leveller Agitators ‘that  matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power’. So much for an established church! Will we be seeing proposals to abolish it from this incoming Tory government? Unlikely. Perhaps the abolition of the House of Lords? We managed it, on March 19th, 1649 – and the Levellers were in the vanguard of that decision. No? The execution of the monarch and dissolution of the monarchy? No I thought not – but again, the Levellers were to the front of such a demand.

So really the Conservatives can only lay claim to such radical heritage when it has been denuded of everything that made it radical to begin with. There is not a scholar alive who would claim that the Levellers, or even the Diggers, were radical through and through. Within the Leveller tradition, there were those who argued that English government should be based on the Bible, or natural law or ‘common right’ – and there were those argued against, but to predicate a Conservative-Leveller affinity on any of this is to ignore all the history in between.

In effect, it is to ignore the radical praxis of the Levellers during the English Revolution; a radical praxis, we should note, that was clearly recognized by the Army Grandees during the debates at Putney. “If you admit any man that hath a breath and being…why may not those men vote against all property? … Show me what you will stop at; wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.” Thus begetting the entire history of Tory opposition to the popular franchise, of Old (i.e. Tory) Corruption and so on down through the centuries.

At the time, Colonel Rainborough himself made an apposite remark. “Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty, but all property must be taken away…but I would fain known what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” Sexby was angrier still. “It seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right…I wonder we were so much deceived.” Despite its couching in terms of natural law, here are two sides – one showing its true regard for property and lack of regard for democracy, one showing its true regard for democracy against all comers.

This, I think, is a good idiom for the modern Conservatives – except it is the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats who now take on the role of the Grandees. What’s different, is that three hundred and fifty years later, the parties of the propertied classes have learned a trick or two about couching their intent. Hence we have the liberal intelligentsia confusing Tom Paine – one of the greatest English Radicals – and David Cameron. We have Dan Hannan, capitalist superhero, citing Tony Benn on local democracy.

Missing from each of these paeans to English historical heroes, however, is any mention of the propertied, material basis out of which real power grows. What do we hear about democratic checks on the wealthy? Only complaint!

In their book, “The Plan”, Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan say, “The elites have altered in character and composition. The citizen is far less likely to be impacted by the decisions of dukes or bishops than by those of Nice or his local education authority.” And they are right – but it should be fairly obvious that they neglect to mention other instances of elites. More likely still than imposition by the elites of Nice or the LEA are impositions by local supermarkets and the concomitant corruption of our local planning laws – wilfully aided and abetted by both Labour and the Tories. And it bears mentioning that these new elites pull the old ones around them – dukes and bishops rub shoulders with the capitalist elites at benefits events, Oxbridge colleges and all sorts of venues.

Yet these new elites can have much greater effect than the old one. Mass unemployment, the devastation of whole regions, the decking out of towns and cities like garish prostitutes while the muscle and sinews of civil society that keep people (workers!) together are under attack from the most sophisticated industrial enterprise all the way back to the farms that ultimately sustain them. Neither Nice nor the LEA have much say here. Local government should be devolved – but the last time local government disagreed with the Tory consensus on letting the rich get richer while the poor remained poor, local government was eviscerated, centralised. And so everything done by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with that power, the Tories have only themselves to blame.

If in truth the poorest he that is in England hath a live to live, as the greatest he, then in the modern era there flows from that all sorts of corollaries: the conditions of life, a productive job, a home, safety to live and bring up a family. And if that’s what the Tories are after, then I want to hear a little bit less about their comparison to the Levellers and a little bit more about how Thatcher, the icon of both Carswell and Hannan, fucked things up so bad – mass unemployment, rising homelessness, rising crime, rising inequality and so on ad infinitum. Talk about bad judgment – but then this is the same Dan Hannan who managed to miss the glaring racism at the Washington march against universal healthcare.

We won’t, of course. And in truth the opposition by the Right of the Tory Party to centralisation and bureaucracy is opportunistic. They oppose these things only insofar as these things hamper the growth of business – never mind the welfare of workers! Where huge government spending and excessive bureaucracy is conducive to business, the Right support it, either by letting it pass unremarked upon or by railing against it in word and going the other way in deed. Such as Thatcher and government spending.

Which, to bring us back to our starting point, is what this talk of the Levellers, Tom Paine amounts to (I’ve got to ask, what next?  The Jacobins? David Cameron on his love for Robespierre? Osborne on Lenin?) – a wily ploy, likely to fool those who want to be fooled, due to their total disillusion with New Labour, illusions which they should never have had to begin with. It’s unlikely to carry much weight with the average voter – but I suspect that such hollow claims will ring true in the hollow brains of the liberal commentariat. Pity.