01/07/2013
Tenured Lecturer of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid
Benjamin Disraeli, twice prime minister of Great Britain in the second half of the 19th century, was the father of "Tory democracy", a political project that provided the conservative party with some audience among the working class, having been estranged from it until then. He structured this conservative democracy around the idea of a united nation being above any class differences. And he contrasted this "one" nation to the source of conflict and dissent: the existence of two nations, that of the rich and of the poor. Since then, this project of a united nation has formed part of the Conservative Party's tradition and has found different incarnations throughout history. So as not to go too far back, the Conservative Party made this idea of a united nation where the rich succour the poor because they're all part of a joint project the argument which supported the British Welfare State until its crisis in 1979.
For his part, David Cameron, trying to remove the stigma of Thatcher's policies being inhuman, has also exhumed this tradition to portray his measures. Surprisingly, both his Liberal-Democrats government partners but, above all, the main opposition party, the Labour Party, received the answer that the conservatives did not embody the defence of a united nation in difficult times but they did. For Labour, Cameron is only the leader of the party of the rich. Having won for their cause the claim of the "one" nation spirit, the Labour Party led by Ed Miliband has made the one nation idea the flag of a new Labour project: "One nation laborism".
There's a joke circulating in Britain that Ralf Miliband, the famous Marxist thinker, landmark image of the new British left, had prophesied in his works that the working class would never rule in Britain. That said, they add that his children are working strenuously to make this prophecy come true. David Miliband, the eldest, was a member of Blair's New Labour, that attempt to take social democracy to liberalism, and joined Gordon Brown's cabinet as Minister of External Affairs. All forecasts made him the future leader of the Labour Party. His father's prophecy would be protected in the hands of a liberal Labour.
So it seemed until his brother Ed challenged him in the race for the Labour leadership. With the support of the party's left wing, and with the powerful support of the trade unions, "Red" Ed won the Labour leadership. His father's prophecy tottered because Labour seemed to be once again tilted toward the class struggle populism. Once the Third Way was abandoned, it was thought that the working class would become again the party's favourite subject.
But ever since the end of last year the old prophecy was confirmed. Ed stopped being "red" Ed to claim instead the legacy of old Benjamin Disraeli, and plunged pleasantly to speak in the confident Victorian language: "Every time Britain has faced a great challenge, it has overcome it because it was a united nation (...) we won the war because we were a nation, we built peace because we were a nation. To endure the storm, to overcome the challenges we face, we must rediscover that spirit that the British have never forgotten, the spirit of a united nation".
It remains to be seen whether Ed Miliband's ideological pirouette has any campaign trail, but this race toward the political centre raising the banner of Disraeli, appealing to a nation of which all are a part, cannot cease to surprise coming from a politician whose leadership was forged by the unions. Maybe the explanation to this change is that Labour sincerely believes that a national discourse is what the afflicted Britain of the crisis needs. But it could also be that the change in Ed finds its basis in the fact that the British workers are dropping out of the class struggle populism to embrace nationalist populism and that, therefore, maybe Milband's new talk of the nation doesn't really seek to forge that integrated community with which Disraeli dreamt, but to make the easy populism of nationalism resonate in Labour. In any case, whether with a national or nationalist discourse, in order to step in office he will need to achieve a cross-class solidarity that will make his father's prophecy be safeguarded again.