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Christian Democratic Party in the UK

Something that breaks the two party system in the Thirties, introduction of STV and the mass departure of Christians from the existing parties particularly Labour due to people they see as extremists winning the leadership so you end up with a soggy centrist/left of centre CDP.

At least that was where I was heading with my timeline on AH? Which still has a couple of big chunks that haven’t been posted but which also needs editing and retconning...

Certainly I remember reading a really good book from the library about how the European tradition of Christian Democracy was best represented by the Methodist’s, Irish Catholics, and Anglicans of Labour.

I was also inspired by working in the NHS and being the only non Christian union rep in my workplace.

I haven’t been able to find it again.
 
KingCrawa said:
Would there be a POD that would allow for a CDU equivalent to emerge in the UK?
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There's a few major hindrances to this.

1) Christian Democracy tends to spring from societies where the Church is intrinsically linked with social provision, whereas parish councils and the like had been secularised in Britain a long time before Christian Democracy really became a thing. The most fertile societies are 'pillarised' ones, where you can spend your entire life in close contact with the Church - Christian trade unions, Christian schools, Christian universities, Christian sports clubs (in the Netherlands, Catholics played football on Sundays and Protestants played on Saturdays) and, as an outgrowth of these things, Christian political parties. This did not exist in the UK in the early 20th century (note also that France is similarly bereft of a CDU equivalent, because they introduced laicite previous to Rerum Novarum).

2) The social market economy and solidarism are the core economic tenets of Christian Democracy, and are seen as being a third pole, distinct from both socialism and laissez-faire liberalism. In the UK, we tend not to see it that way, and all alternative economic theories are judged to be somewhere on the scale between Right and Left. See the reaction to Liz Kendall's proposal of a social market economy in 2015, which was largely met with "why are you a tory now". Changing this probably requires PR, but it might also be integral to the Anglo psyche.

3) Christian Democracy tends to come from the Catholic side of the aisle, which has historically been a lot more involved in the daily lives of its members than Protestantism (see point 1). So in Germany, Zentrum and the CDU have traditionally been the party of the Catholic middle class, while most other countries with strong Christian Democratic parties tend to be those which are predominantly Catholic. There are, naturally, exceptions - Switzerland (but its Christian Democrats are mostly Catholic, with the exception of the small Evangelical People's Party), the Scandinavian countries (but these are very small parties whose christianity is based largely on Culture War issues) and the Netherlands, which is just weird. Catholicism is obviously quite rare in the UK, so you're looking at this CDU being strongest in Glasgow, Merseyside and Northern Ireland - side note: I wonder if the NI Nationalist Party could be characterised as Christian Democratic? There's certainly a case for certain sections of the SDLP.

So without solving these problems, you're probably not going to get a CDU even if the Tories shit the bed at the appropriate time. What you might get is what I would characterise as Protestant Christian Democracy (e.g. the Norwegian and Swedish Christian Democrats, the small Dutch parties CU and SGP, the Swiss EVP, the NZ and Canadian Christian Heritage Parties, the Australian Family First and others, and the American Evangelical Right - all but the last of which, you will notice, are very small and only survive due to PR where they survive at all). Protestant Christian Democracy co-opts Christian Democrat economic policy, a cheeky bit of environmentalism - ahem, 'stewardship' - from the Greens, and a whole heap of sex-related hatred, which is their main focus. This is what we have IOTL with the Christian Peoples Party, the Christian Party, David Alton and various others, but obviously without any major success.
 
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While I don't argue with your analysis UM, I think it's unnecessary to assume that English Social Democracy would follow the same route as other countries

I would argue that what is needed for a party to be successful is a time when there's space for it, a few seats it can claim, enough central organisation and ideological consistency to push it forward, and maybe half a dozen seats it can compete for. What is needed for a Christian Democrat party to get started, then, is a point when there's a power vacuum creating space between the two parties, an MP or two with enough popularity to keep their seat in a general election following defection, and enough organisation coming along with it that it gets established.

There's so much that can then go wrong, of course. The most likely outcome is internal dispute and death or incorporation into another party. It takes some stabilising to end up with a party that chugs along in the background for decades picking up seats every so often. And it takes considerably more to take the place of Labour /Conservative /Liberal
 
I wonder if what you need is something which could be portrayed as a 'culture war' emerging.

Perhaps, for various reasons, very-lefty radical Labour takes power in the immediate post-WWI era with a large majority and immediately starts dismantling aspects of the establishment- monarchy reduced formally to a figurehead, the Lords replaced with an elected Senate, disestablishment of the Church for example- while also bringing in not just universal suffrage, but legalising abortion, making divorce easier, all that jazz.

Now obviously all that happened gradually IOTL, but perhaps it happening all at once might be enough to see a backlash from those in Parliament with strong Church links?

Not sure, spitballing a bit there, but a possibility perhaps?
 
Sideways said:
While I don't argue with your analysis UM, I think it's unnecessary to assume that English Social Democracy would follow the same route as other countries

I would argue that what is needed for a party to be successful is a time when there's space for it, a few seats it can claim, enough central organisation and ideological consistency to push it forward, and maybe half a dozen seats it can compete for. What is needed for a Christian Democrat party to get started, then, is a point when there's a power vacuum creating space between the two parties, an MP or two with enough popularity to keep their seat in a general election following defection, and enough organisation coming along with it that it gets established.

There's so much that can then go wrong, of course. The most likely outcome is internal dispute and death or incorporation into another party. It takes some stabilising to end up with a party that chugs along in the background for decades picking up seats every so often. And it takes considerably more to take the place of Labour /Conservative /Liberal
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I have just explained why there wasn't space for it in British society at the time we're talking about IOTL. If you want a CDU-analogue, you do need at least one of PR, a Catholic Britain, or for the CofE to be effectively in control of your life once you walk out of your front door. Otherwise, you have, as you seem to understand, just a Christian micro-party. Which is, of course, plausible. At best, you might get a minor party of the Protestant sort which I outlined in my final paragraph.
Alex Richards said:
I wonder if what you need is something which could be portrayed as a 'culture war' emerging.

Perhaps, for various reasons, very-lefty radical Labour takes power in the immediate post-WWI era with a large majority and immediately starts dismantling aspects of the establishment- monarchy reduced formally to a figurehead, the Lords replaced with an elected Senate, disestablishment of the Church for example- while also bringing in not just universal suffrage, but legalising abortion, making divorce easier, all that jazz.

Now obviously all that happened gradually IOTL, but perhaps it happening all at once might be enough to see a backlash from those in Parliament with strong Church links?

Not sure, spitballing a bit there, but a possibility perhaps?
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This has legs - one of the major motivating factors for OTL Christian Democratic parties in Europe was the fact that a lot of these countries were experiencing their first secular liberal governments (while being threatened from the other side by socialism) and these governments were putting reforms in place in a few years that had taken decades in the UK. Later, of course, a similar rate of progress gave rise to the cult of Mary Whitehouse.
 
Alex Richards said:
I wonder if what you need is something which could be portrayed as a 'culture war' emerging.

Perhaps, for various reasons, very-lefty radical Labour takes power in the immediate post-WWI era with a large majority and immediately starts dismantling aspects of the establishment- monarchy reduced formally to a figurehead, the Lords replaced with an elected Senate, disestablishment of the Church for example- while also bringing in not just universal suffrage, but legalising abortion, making divorce easier, all that jazz.

Now obviously all that happened gradually IOTL, but perhaps it happening all at once might be enough to see a backlash from those in Parliament with strong Church links?

Not sure, spitballing a bit there, but a possibility perhaps?
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Not a bad idea. In the 1920s disestablishmentarianism was divisive enough an issue that there were calls for a referendum on this issue (Hansard has been moved to a new system and the search is buggered for now, sadly, so I can't find the references in question). Have a government determined enough to push through a separation of church and state and they could split their own party on those lines easily enough.
 
RyanF said:
I think a Christian Socialist Party might be a whole lot more doable in the UK.
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I've done something based on this before, but again, it really doesn't have legs without PR. I would also argue that in GB, the Catholic Church didn't dominate the lives of its members to the point where joining an expressly socialist part would be stigmatised, although I'm willing to hear counter-arguments.
 
Uhura's Mazda said:
I've done something based on this before, but again, it really doesn't have legs without PR. I would also argue that in GB, the Catholic Church didn't dominate the lives of its members to the point where joining an expressly socialist part would be stigmatised, although I'm willing to hear counter-arguments.
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I almost take for granted an assumption that whenever we discuss alternate parties in the UK proportional or semi-proportional representation is a given.
 
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