The Burkean Dilemma – and The Need for Constitutional Vandalism
Cast your mind back to your infantile beginnings on the internet – do you remember when a mix of teenage dissent and good taste brought you upon hours and hours of Peter Hitchens clips? The talking points remain engraved in my brain at least. Scorning Elizabeth Truss for being a Liberal Democrat, lamenting the decline, smugly enjoying being the most right-wing man in the room; these old YouTube clips are foundational for many of us. It is through this canon that many reading, I’m sure, found themselves on the Right. Thereby the ideology of Hitchens and the most searing of his convictions have necessarily branded our convictions – and made sour many aspects of reformation.
Ironically, the Burkean is a Tory in its most visceral, honest conception. There is no mistaking the conservatism of this sort, it conserves – it is the noun made verb with very little impurities included. You know the lines, ask why the fence is there before you knock it down. You know the policies, maintain the Lords, maintain the Monarchy, maintain above all; the Constitution.
The Constitution of England is a truly beautiful phenomena; it is our unique testament unto this world. No other people over millennia could produce such a sprawling web of good governance and sound law. Furthermore, the fact it was never sat down and written, but came forth from our historical experiences over a thousand years further adds to its splendour. Through the test of time, it has not only secured this nation but irrigated the unique liberties afforded within it.
It is the Constitution, and adoration for it, that makes a Tory. These sentiments are in-born, and felt from a young age before one has even been acquainted with the exacts of the Constitution. Hence, Enoch Powell as a young boy would take off his cap entering the chamber wherein the first Prince of Wales was born. Such a thing is but second nature to an inherently Tory character, it is an inseparable feature of their character to revere what has come before them – thereby their politics becomes a ritual of removing one’s cap and bowing.
It is natural then that not just a principled opposition but a genuine disgust is exhibited when the foundations of our governance and law are tinkered with. It is felt that to damage the beams built over thousands of years that have maintained Britain’s Constitution is to risk a cave falling in on itself, and a millennia’s effort being destroyed in the process. Therein, the Tory is daunted to even mutter the name Blair.
Removing privileges of the Lords and creating an American-style Supreme Court would likely have been enough to make Enoch Powell croak ten times over – and to this day continues to drive Peter Hitchens into the ground, and it’s clear to see why. The whole Blairite infrastructure continues to allow the spectre of New Labour to linger endlessly. Almost any attempt to combat mass immigration is smashed by some grotesque machination of an early 2000s civil servant.
We have been shown time and time again that the subversive elements of our political class have no regard for these ancient precepts. It is no vice to bend the very structure of this nation in order to inject Liberalism through it. It is for this reason, that we on the Right find ourselves within a Burkean dilemma.
Our base instincts warn us against any constitutional reform. Whether we even express this fact outwardly, this feeling that what has worked for millennia should not be fiddled with is, as mentioned, a petit-pathology of ours. However, if we are to combat a force willing to bend these rules, then we doom ourselves if we do not adapt to this landscape. There is no virtue in taking off our caps to a nation in flames, safe in the knowledge that it was the good timber set alight.
The Blair Cabal was willing to entrench a vapid, corrosive anarcho-tyranny within the fabric of this country, and Starmer will only bolster it as he takes up the torch. On these matters, we must unfortunately get our hands dirty.
Let us use the debate regarding first-past-the-post as an example. Our nature appreciates this institution, it works reasonably well and has done since we thought voting would be a jolly good idea. However, as the Tories and Labour are both infected with the corrosive modernity of our day – what good is the thing? Reform, despite their best efforts, poll in some indications third in terms of vote share, yet are projected to gain not a single seat. The classic UKIP effect, a deliberate design of our voting system to ensure that radical sorts and ruffians can’t steer us on a path of destruction whenever a good demagogue comes about. This is a sound principle . . . when England was a nation of civil, well-mannered people. Hitchens reminds us – ‘there is an inch between Labour and the Conservatives, but it is within that inch we all live.’ This principle rings true when the key debates of a society concern marginal tax rates and the exacts of social spending. It rings a tone of death for a nation embroiled in the debates of our day.
This constitution of ours is unique to us. It could not have come about among any other people, no other nation has matched our wonderful system of civil existence, and those that came close certainly did not happen upon it as we did. The English Constitution is nothing without the Englishman, thereby if the Englishman be doomed then so be his systems of governance and law.
If we can determine that the threats that face us are existential, then the truth of the matter is we must bite the bullet and do away with some of these constitutional features. What good is maintaining first-past-the-post if we are to be a minority within our own homeland by the middle of this century? Why would some among us sooner see the passing of the Englishman than the reformation of what he has produced?
It is the nature of our folk that produced these things; if we lose our nation we lose everything. If some of our dearest institutions must be cleared out it is a price worth paying for our survival. If a fence in the forest impedes us, we have no time to consult a passerby on the reason for its presence when behind us a bear looms.
The Burkean dilemma is this – the Constitution or England. First-past-the-post or our survival. The House of Lords or English children with a future to look forward to?
What we must take from Marx
Britain is a nation that enjoys making light of its peculiarities and eccentricities. We enjoy having a laugh over a slightly self deprecating and scathing analysis of the fine-points of our society. We are keenly aware of the little things that set us apart – most famously the class system.
Unblemished by the tumults of the continent, we never saw fit to put whole socio-economic stratas to death, and such, on this isle has evolved a range of economic classes; that at times can seem whole cultures within themselves. The topic of a good Harry Enfield sketch, the plethora of verbal inflections in dialect, or what one tends to do on a Sunday, to general mannerism and pattern of speech – there is much that can set one into working, middle, or upper class. We view class not through a reasoned analysis, nor through a simple review of how much money is in one’s wallet – in fact, these tend to be quite secondary thoughts when judging someone’s place in the hierarchy.
Class is understood through a range of social signifiers, all of which have their root in one’s upbringing, which have their root in the upbringing of one’s father, and his father, and his father, and so on.
No matter how much money you win for your coffers, no matter how noble and high your method of work is, no matter how much you may put on a rendition of received pronunciation – you cannot really change your class. You may own a country estate, go shooting pheasants with the lads on Sunday, you may call your son Tarquin, but if your Dad came from a pit village, and passed down the speech, mannerism, and sentiments of said pit village to you – you’ll never leave the place. You may be able to win your son a jaunt up the social ladder, Joseph Chamberlain’s little known son called Neville transcended his father’s position in the middle class by growing up far away from his Dad at Eton, managing something of a different upbringing thereby.
The ultimate result of this strange institution is an utterly cartoonish understanding of class. It is entirely possible in this view of things, that a well-born feckless son from a manor in the home counties could spend his days shepherding pit-ponies around mineshafts in South Wales, and still outrank Gwyn Jones who was born in the pit village just adjacent, and made enough money to buy that very country estate mentioned.
Do not suppose that I write against such cartoons, they are quite wonderful, and I wish not for some Jacobin iconoclasm to mandate state-approved classes based upon occupation. These things make brilliant Harry Enfield sketches, however, when we seek to understand British society, and thereby create a successful right-wing movement, we have no time for the twee cartoons of such a sketch. We can not begin to engage in a successful right-wing, or nationalist political program without a firm understanding of how social classes interact in this country, every political movement must find itself between a class antagonism, lest it fail. Hence, we must begin to integrate Marx’s view of class into our thinking. Marx, despite standing in near complete contradiction to us, is the only thinker from which we can concretely define and analyse the real and tangible class divisions within the British people, beyond the thesis of a sketch.
Marxist class analysis centres around how one relates to the means of production. Totally ignoring someone’s salary or mannerisms – Marx defines class purely through the manner in which one works. We all know of the two main classes of industrial capitalism he expounds upon – the proletarian, and the bourgeois. The bourgeois class owns means of production (in Marx’s time this could be a cotton mill or a steelworks) he holds this capital, and purchases wage labour in order to produce goods with it. The Proletarian class are the folk from whom wage labour is purchased, not owning any means of production themselves, the working class sell their labour-power in order to make a living.
Furthermore, Marx introduces the petit-bourgeois class. Marxists (who cannot for the life of them agree on anything) disagree on what exactly this class is, and whom makes up its ranks. Simply, it could be said, the petit-bourgeois class may own alternative forms of capital (such as a small shop) but are unlikely to purchase labour power in the working of this capital, and wherein he does, he likely works side by side with the proletarians he pays.
Now, Marx does not ramble on like this all day, and he eventually gets to the point: antagonism. The ultimate purpose of delving into these social relations is getting to grips with the separate desires and interests each class works toward. To put it simply, the proletarian seeks to labour as little as possible for the greatest wage. The bourgeois, inversely, wishes for the proletarian to labour as much for the smallest possible wage.
In this, we find Marx’s most valuable lesson. In taking up his understanding of class, we need not blanketly throw his particular analysis of the Victorian urban sprawl onto our day, we need not even use the word bourgeois and such – in fact, the economic relations of our day can be said to have deviated so much from Marx’s day that such terms are useless. We must centre in on the antagonism between the classes, while also putting key caveats on our understanding of it.
If one is to ignore this doctrine of antagonism, then one is to ignore nearly all of British political history. Is not the rift that has dominated our nation since even before the Civil War that of Whig and Tory? One cannot separate these two groups from their diametric class antagonism. The Tory of the country, who profits from agriculture, who finds himself well off in the ancient landed hierarchies. The Whig who profits from the city, who thrives in more modern and capitalistic relations of the mill and steelwork. There are few debates of British political history that can be fully understood without getting to grips with this specific sociological battle. We cannot look to Peel’s full thrust support for the abolition of the corn laws, and championing of free trade thereby, without understanding that the Whig sought out this reform in order to ensure the flow of cheap grain into urban centres, and the mouths of their proletarians, at the expense of the Tory landowner and his tenant. Without this economic antagonism, there is no movement to abolish the corn laws.
Now, this is not to say that all hitherto history is that of class struggle, we should not assume that Peel was consciously plotting to pull the rug under the Tory landowner – no one thinks this way, in fact, class antagonism while informing these political disputes can sometimes enter the sub-conscious. We can understand this doctrine without becoming totally affixed to it.
Principally, we must maintain that class is not the prime fraternity of man. There is no international working class or the like, and such is a fanciful idea. Ultimately, one’s nation and ethnicity trump their class identity. Leftists like to imagine that they have more in common with a working class Chinaman than a billionaire of their ethnic kin, but while Richard Branson may have vastly different economic interests; you can share a conversation in your mutually native language, you celebrate the same festivities every year, you probably share the same cultural references and tidbits. Man is much more than his economic interests, and his identity goes much beyond what he’d like to be paid at work – such a totalising view of class ignores the depth that makes up men’s lives.
Nonetheless, we can simultaneously hold that ethnos is the prime fraternity of man, while recognising the inherent divisions within such a thing. Without a comprehension of these differences, we will remain ignorant as to how to effectively mobilise our people in a political movement. Blindly assuming that if we put forward a political program that broadly seeks to better the condition of the native Briton, that such will rally all sections of our people will lead us to ruin.
While it is true that in ‘diverse’ societies, democracy simply becomes an ethnic headcount (see South Africa) such diversity is concentrated in certain areas of our country. Areas such as Bradford fit this model much more, wherein the diametric antagonism between the native and immigrant groups naturally trumps the bounds of class, however in other areas of the nation this is not such. (Ironically, it is class antagonism that brought this into being. Former industrial areas are highly saturated with immigrant groups due to the importation of cheap labour into mills and cotton works, for example.) Thereby, we must understand the class antagonisms we can ride, and the classes with whom we have appeal.
To illustrate this, let us think to the average voter in the 1983 general election, the man who voted for Thatcher, and the man who voted for Foot. The man who voted for Thatcher, 38 years on, has likely benefited from the deindustrialisation of the country, much more attuned to a neoliberal regime of international finance and services. He is likely insulated from the demographic issues of the nation, perhaps he will scoff at some anti-social behaviour on the tube, but he is not bound by public transport. Let us think now to the man who voted for Foot, he has seen the industries his family worked in for generations crumble before his eyes, and the economic impetus of his town dry up. Equally, he has seen an unprecedented swamping of its demographic character in mere decades. He has lost his home, and his work at the behest of short sighted, shock doctrinaire neoliberalism.
Who is more likely, do you think, to support a nationalist cause? We all know that the working class tend to be more right-wing in our day, but if we do not understand the antagonism (being in this case, deindustrialisation) that this tendency has its roots in, then we shall fail to harness this support. Once we comprehend this, we will understand that nationalism has no future among the jungles of the free market, it must entail economic nationalism, and an active role of the state in economic affairs in order to steer the economy toward the national interest.
Without being at the parapet of class antagonism, that fuels all successful political movements, we march aimlessly into bogs and marshes. We must understand that nationalism has to be a movement in the interests of the disenfranchised native working class, that acts in the interests of that class. Without this, we are but ideologues barking into the wind.
Photo Credit.