Heraldic Beasts

It is fitting that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's daughter was born on the day that The Guardian carried this interview with Dennis Skinner.

Nothing could be more British, and perhaps especially more English, then to have the criticism and even the mockery built in and expected.

The tradition that is Radical and republican, populist and at least de facto pacifist, largely (but not exclusively) Celtic and regional, is an integral part of the organic Constitution.

In and with the full ceremony and pageantry of the parliamentary and municipal processes, that Constitution, including that tradition, has delivered social democracy before, and could deliver social democracy again.

Hence the octogenarian figures of the Queen and Dennis Skinner at the State Opening of Parliament, each with a specific role, and each the latest, but not the last, in a long, long line.

The regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and “time out of mind”.

That regime anticipated the bourgeois capitalist Revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789. Our own Radical tradition does not derive from those Revolutions.

Rather, it predates them, and it opposed them and their consequences, making common cause with Tories for the abolition of slavery (by very specific appeal to the Ancient Constitution), for factory reform, for the extension of the franchise, for action against substance abuse and gambling, and so on.

Something similar presents itself in opposition to the neoconservative war agenda, and through that to the neoliberal economic order. But that opportunity has yet to be taken.

The ostensibly irreverent, undeniably irascible, utterly indispensable tradition of Radicals and populists, republicans and pacifists, is as old as anything else in these Islands, and it is a great deal older than the present reigning dynasty.

That tradition is as much a safeguard of our liberty and democracy as is the Crown, and as is the full pageantry and ceremony of the parliamentary and municipal processes. No more so. But no less so, either.

In his memoirs, Skinner correctly points out that both his opposition to Scottish and Welsh devolution in the 1970s, and his opposition to European federalism from the very start, have turned out to have been correct. Everything that he and others predicted has come true.

One should add in the current climate that the Radical tradition is an ongoing product of an uncountable number of what turn out to be illegal exercises of “undue spiritual influence”.

Without such influence, we should still have opium dens, a limited franchise, sweatshops, and slavery. Indeed, without such influence, forms of all of those are rapidly returning.

That Skinner should have become an expected and celebrated aspect of the State Opening of Parliament is entirely as it should be, and not at all a betrayal or even a dilution of his position.

Related to his working-class strand is a decidedly posh one, of Tony Benn, of Tam Dalyell, of Michael Foot, and, beyond the House, of figures ranging from Foot's nephew Paul, to Auberon Waugh, to Richard Ingrams and to Ian Hislop.

Paul Foot identified as a Trotskyist, and he was even a member of the SWP. But beyond his party card, he showed not the slightest sign of being anything other than an upper or upper-middle-class Radical, predating Marx by an enormously long way.

Such are distrustful of those who exercise authority, but they are profoundly convinced of its inherent value, and they are therefore determined that those who hold office be held to account and found worthy of their eminence.

Thus was Paul Foot like the rest of the Private Eye boys, at least back in the day. Like his uncle and several other relatives. Like Benn. Like Dalyell. Like figures from different backgrounds, such as Alan Watkins and Michael Wharton (Peter Simple).

Radicals and reactionaries are often closer to each other than either is to the centre as conventionally and conveniently defined.

Both in its Common Room and its dead common room aspects, there is the unshaking and unshakable sense that if Ministers, MPs and others are not good enough, then they damn well ought to be, and that there is a positive duty to call them out for not being.

Parliament, especially, is worthy only of those who are worthy of Parliament, and Ministerial office is worthy only of those who are worthy of Ministerial office.

That is because of those institutions' capacity to do harm in the wrong hands. But it is also because of those institutions' capacity, and therefore their duty, to do good in the right hands.

Skinner has devoted his adult life to Parliament, just as Foot and Benn did.

It was three of the other working-class warriors who sat on the bench below the gangway with him – Ronnie Campbell (who still does), Dennis Canavan and the late Bob Parry – who flew to Baghdad to secure the release of British hostages in 1990.

In April 1992, Parry, whom the “anti-totalitarian” Oliver Kamm describes as “among the thickest parliamentarians I can recall”, was arrested in Tiananmen Square for unfurling a banner in protest against the 1989 massacre there.

He, Canavan and Campbell were all pro-life Catholics, a stance that Campbell maintains, just as he, like other resolutely working-class figures such as Joe Benton and George Mudie, voted to uphold the traditional definition of marriage. Benton and Mudie have retired at this Election. But others are on their way, not all of them for the first time.

That is all a long way from Skinner's views, yet Campbell speaks of Skinner as a lost Leader. The Irish Catholic heritage does of course coalesce very well with English, Scots or Welsh Radicalism in many cases.

Parry turned up to vote against Maastricht one day after he had had quadruple heart bypass surgery. He had discharged himself for the purpose.

His Liverpool constituency neighbour, Eric Heffer, turned up to speak against the first Gulf War in the final stages of terminal stomach cancer, and to vote against it in a wheelchair.

It is quite easy to imagine Steve Rotheram doing that, as it is to imagine him or, say, Ian Lavery staging a Baghdad-like mission.

Heffer straddled the two wings of the Radical tradition, in that he could have passed at times for Skinner, or for another of that brotherhood, yet, in a shining example of the vanished world of worker-intellectualism, this joiner son of a boot-maker, who had himself left school at 14, had a personal library of some 12,000 books. That's right. Twelve thousand.

That said, Skinner is better-read than he often lets on, in the way that Benn was possibly a touch less so than his accent and demeanour might sometimes have led one to assume.

Yet both belonged to the tradition that Skinner continues to make felt by everything from State Opening one-liners to searing questions of swanky Cabinet Ministers.

I say again that that tradition is as old as anything else in these Islands, and that it is as much a safeguard of our liberty and democracy as anything else is, including the Crown. No more so. But no less so, either.