Robert Blatchford (1851-1943) was one of the founders of the Labour Party. But his ideas and writings show just how far the Labour Party of Blair, Brown and Milliband has sunk from the high and patriotic ideals and genuine concern for ordinary working-class White Britons of its founders.
A former Army Sergeant-Major, Bob Blatchford founded the Manchester branch of the Fabian Society in 1890. The following year he launched a weekly Socialist newspaper, The Clarion and helped set up the Independent Labour Party, forerunner of today’s Labour. He went on to set out his ideas in two important books, Merrie England (1893) and Britain for the British (1902).
As the titles of these works suggest, Blatchford’s Socialism, like that of many of the other Labour Movement pioneers, was of a robust patriotic kind rooted in a concern for the well-being of ordinary British folk. Utterly unlike the canting cosmopolitan Political Correctness of the millionaire lawyers and plutocrats who were to hijack Labour later.
Unlike modern socialists who think everyone is the same, Blatchford argued that:
“Men are made what they are by two forces: heredity and environment. Your intellect and character are at birth what your forefathers made them”. He praised the British people for being “intelligent, industrious, strong, and famous for their perseverance, their inventiveness and resource”.
On economic issues, Blatchford slammed the soulless materialism of Capitalism: “Your Manchester School” – the forebears of Thatcher’s economic liberalism – “treat all social and industrial problems from the standpoint of mere animal subsistence. They do not seem to think that you have any mind. With them it is a question of bread and cheese and be thankful”.
As a socialist patriot Blatchford slammed the Free Trade dogma that was to take over the Labour as well as the Tory Party years later:
“My ideal is that … people should make the best of their own country before attempting to trade with other peoples.”
He warned the people of Britain:
“Don’t you see that if we destroy our agriculture we destroy our independence at a blow, and become a defenceless nation? Don’t you see that the people who depend on foreigners for their food are at the mercy of any ambitious statesman who chooses to make war upon them?”
He is still right there!
This founder of the Labour Movement also stood up against cheap immigrant labour undercutting the native British worker, supported strengthening our defence forces and backed the Britons of Ulster.
Inevitably Blatchford and the patriotic wing of the Labour movement fell out with the cosmopolitan internationalists who were infiltrating and taking it over.
In 1915, along with H.G. Wells and other leading British Socialists, he founded the Socialist National Defence League to support “the eternal idea of nationality.”
As the National Democratic Party, the League won ten seats in the 1918 General Election. Sadly it subsequently folded, instead of forming the base for a genuinely British Socialist patriotic movement, free from both Marxism and Fascism.
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Thank you for these interesting articles about Nationalist sentiment in the Labour and Conservative Parties prior to their deliberate corruption, co-option and destruction by the “canting cosmopolitan” plutocratic flotsam who have wrought so much damage to our system of Government and Nation.
Seems an idea British leader to rally behind.
Andrew, please pick up his torch and carry it high for all our sakes
(Party Member) The Liberals are continuing their policy of getting everything the wrong way round with Business Secretary Vince Cable saying that ” leaving the European Union is not a realistic economic option for this Country.” We would still trade with these Countries so he is again talking nonsense.With a slightly larger amount of our exports being with the rest of the world, despite years of institutionalised European Unionism, the way forward is to reduce imports as much as possible by growing and making everything we can, ourselves.Together with trading within the British Democratic Party trade area, otherwise known as the World !