About The Article
Let The People Sing l What's The Big Idea? l Is It Allowed? l How Does It Work? l Is It A Good Idea? l What Will Others Say? This is the second of three articles...or perhaps the third of four articles if Yes To A Nobler Europe written in 1996 turns out to have been the first. The previous article, entitled Trapped Agenda: Beyond The Referendum Party was written in May 1998, a year after the party polled a miserly 3% in the 1997 British elections to the Westminster Parliament. In 'Trapped Agenda' I argued that Sir James Goldsmith, who died of cancer in 1997, would not have sat on his hands and done nothing after the victory of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson's New Labour in 1997.
Instead he would have opened a second front, built upon the analysis in his book 'The Trap' and his experience of founding a new party. And I conjectured that this second front would have been a 'full policy party' that blended the politics of J.B.Priestley...'the road not taken by the British Labour Party'; the deep conservatism of Quintin Hogg presented in 'The Case for Conservatism'...the road not taken by the Conservative Party...and the thinking of 'Real World' a new grouping of activists in the UK gathered around some of the founding members of the UK Ecology Party...the road not taken by the British Green Party.
John Papworth read the article and had this to say:
'Trapped Agenda does not fulfil its promise...such a pity your conclusion to some brilliant and badly needed analysis is so nebulous and fails to suggest any positive steps the reader might take'.
John Papworth went on to suggest that 'All Power to The Parish' might be one response:
'...perhaps a conference called on the basis of a draft statement of intent might serve? A statement suggesting, instead of joining a new national body, that people form among their friends a local community association as a self-governing building block - an association with the avowed intention of restoring local power to local people.'
John Papworth was right. The trouble was I had no instant 'policy response'...nor am I a believer in calling a war in a Hampstead drawing room, because my experience is that nobody shows up except the few that are frog-marched in. The truth was that I didn't know what to do...and this was obvious from the article. So I limited its circulation among Sir James' people to his elder brother Edward Goldsmith and passed a few copies around to colleagues in Cesc, a policy group I started in 1994 with Anton Pinschof in Brittany.
In the Summer of 1998 I was in Gotland working with Connie Lindqvist on the Academic Inn Books Linnaeus Project and took a week off from July 12-17 to sit in on Sweden's 'Almedalveckan'...the traditional Swedish equivalent to America's New Hampshire Primaries...which kicked off their 1998 election campaigning season. This involved attending seminars and listening to the speeches and the 'live shows' put on by all the major political parties taking part in the elections two months later. It is incidentally an excellent model for 'citizen political education' that would translate well to 'county towns' throughout Europe.
The Swedish Green Party impressed me but they did not do well in the election. Instead there was a surge of support for the Socialists and the Christian Democrats who were better able to exploit the very weak position (following the stringencies and cut-backs of the 1990s) of the powerful Swedish Social Democrats. After the election I read furiously all the books written by Per Gahrton and Birger Schlaug, the Swedish Green Party's two principal political theorists and strategy designers and went through the party's policy documents with a fine tooth comb.
Quite remarkable! Here was Sir James' new party but started as a breakaway from the old Swedish Liberal Party in 1971. After being up and running for a quarter of a decade and making steady progress through local elections and national elections it entered the European Assembly in Strasbourg in 1995.
So in September 1998 I signed up and in November began a campaign (stretching over several years) to persuade my newly adopted party to adopt Job Sharing as party policy. This article Job Sharing for Beginners thereby became the next article in the series.
The fourth article is unlikely to be written for a year or so. It is tentatively entitled 'The New Conservatives'. It struck me that John Papworth's local associations would take upon themselves the character of the group that G.K.Chesterton gave fictional life to in 1904 in his 'Napoleon of Notting Hill'.
'...this legend of an epic hour
A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
Under the great grey water-tower
That strikes the stars on Campden Hill.'Now a national confederation of thousands and thousands of local napoleon parties could look remarkably like an invigorated Conservative Party...but with its membership drawn from a Countryside Rally rather than from the dining rooms of The Savoy.
The Tories polled as many votes in their 'landslide defeat' by Tony Blair's New Labour of 1997 as in their 'unexpected victory' under John Major in 1992 and have a core support in the UK which is of a completely different scale of magnitude to that of the UK Green Party.
The Referendum Party at its peak had 300 000 members, the UK Green Party has 5 000 members (2 000 less than the Swedish Green Party in a country with six times Sweden's population). The UK Green Party argues that proportional representation will change everything...as does the Liberal democrat party...and fervently believe the Green tactical voters of the past few elections 'first past the post' elections will return to the fold in droves for the Strasbourg Assembly elections in June 1999. I would rejoice were it to be so but I think they are whistling in the wind...we will see.
I believe that a better strategy in the UK for the European Green Movement could be to put their trust in William Hague, the new leader of the British Conservative Party, to lead his Conservative & Unionist Party forward to Quintin Hogg's...and Edmund Burke's...conservatism. If William Hague's New Tories can be persuaded to graft onto this the political philosophy of J.B.Priestley and the political activism of 'Real World' then there will be no need to start up a new party in the UK, nor any need for a 'Four Percent Forever' Green Party in the UK. These New Conservatives would put real meaning back into the word 'conservation' and would be the second party in Europe to find the keys to unlock Sir James Goldsmith's 'Trapped Agenda'...after the Swedish Green Party.
The son of a former Liberal Lord, Sir Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, known to a whole political generation as Old Labour's Tony Benn, could then cross the aisle in the House of Commons, reclaim his title and defect from New Labour to take the New Conservative Party whip in a New House of Elders. And what a stir this would cause.
This Conservative Party could hold power at Westminster for a quarter of a century ...working closely in the Strasbourg Assembly with the Swedish Green Party...originally a breakaway from the Swedish Liberal Party. Both parties would campaign with other clear-sighted politicians in Europe for a revival of a new liberalism that combined the traditional liberal ideas of accountable government (democracy), the rule of law and sound money with the new sustainable economic idea that not only does the land belong to the people but the people themselves belong to the land...in a deep spiritual sense... as children to their mother.
Let The People Sing l What's The Big Idea? l Is It Allowed? l How Does It Work? l Is It A Good Idea? l What Will Others Say? ws12/11-98