The sun is shining, the economy is booming, unemployment is falling, test matches have been won-and the ruling party is cruising to a comfortable... defeat. David Willetts finds this puzzling. Dissembling David (his reference in the preface to "my debt to my fellow MPs" is one of his best jokes) claims a mystical affinity between the Conservative party and the people of "middle England (and Wales and Scotland)"-what magnificent brackets-yet offers not a clue to the perverse inability of people to recognise such affinity.
Maybe I can help. A long time ago, perhaps as much as two years, middle England fell out of love with the regime. They put together a mixture of the great tax lie and Neil Hamilton, threw in BSE and Cedric Brown, and did not like the smell of the stew. They decided it really was time for a change, a decision made easier by the fresh aroma of New Labour. The firmness of opinion since then suggests that nothing has happened to change their minds. It is rather like deciding to move house. Once decided upon, the defects of your present house come to seem more irksome than ever, while there is a growing sense of the potential of the house you are moving to. So the Conservatives are spending this campaign trying to make people forget why they decided to move house in the first place, while Labour is busy reminding them. I suspect the truth is that contracts were signed and exchanged long since.
Willetts offers no hint of a collective nostra culpa for mistakes made, merely some bad-tempered railing against commentators and bien pensants who do not appreciate free markets. Like Labour in the 1980s, the Conservatives will derive much benefit from a prolonged period of reflective opposition. The beginning of political wisdom is to understand why people do not like you.
It is not easy being an apologist for the current Conservative party and Willetts performs the task as well as it can be done. His case may be summarised thus: before 1979 Britain was a stagnant collectivist hell, but since then it has been transformed into a dynamic land of enterprise by the application of free market principles, a transformation now threatened by a Labour party in thrall to an obsolete "continental model" and constitutional militants.
The attempt to portray Britain as the economic flagship of the EU is ludicrous, as a glance at comparative GDP per head, inflation and borrowing figures shows. And even on job creation we are still only sixth best in the EU and behind countries which are supposed to suffer from chronically inflexible labour markets. A recently published study from the Social Market Foundation, Britain's Relative Economic Decline 1870-1995, by Nicholas Crafts of the LSE, provides a balanced assessment of the post-1973 period: "'National competitiveness' has probably improved slightly. However there has been no 'miracle.' In today's conditions the UK would do very well even to recapture its pre-1973 growth rate. Some might see the cost of the whole experience, paid in terms of rising inequality, as 'too high.'" Thus there is room for argument about a growth in competitiveness, but there is no argument about the fact that income inequality has increased more sharply in the UK than elsewhere. The new right thesis about inequality as the route to competitive success is in ruins.
What of Willetts's claims about the "continental model"? The glee with which the Conservatives have greeted the recent sharp rise in German unemployment is shameful. Again, a balanced assessment is available, this time in a careful study by Wendy Carlin and David Soskice in the January issue of the National Institute Economic Review. The problems of profitability and employment in Germany are real enough, and more labour flexibility is required, but the authors are clear that "Radical deregulation is not the answer: for it would throw the baby out with the bathwater by threatening those institutions which provide German companies with comparative institutional advantage." The technological innovation and export strength of the German economy is rooted in institutional structures of labour co-operation and vocational training, of corporate governance providing longterm finance, and of networks for technology transfer. In fact, in many of the practices and institutions whose absence is identified by Crafts as central to Britain's postwar economic failure.
A sensible conclusion might be that Germany needs to become somewhat more like Britain, while Britain needs to become somewhat more like Germany. But the Manichaean world inhabited by Willetts leaves no room for such judgements. It is easier to invent a world in which funny foreigners with their obsolete "continental model" are opposed by a fearless native model of "traders and developers, entrepreneurs and speculators, freebooters and buccaneers." The attempt to link Labour with foreigners and foreignness-"Labour want to change us into a different sort of country-Bundesrepublik Britannien"-is the insidious thread running through this book, as it has run through Conservative propaganda throughout history. And the kind of civilised xenophobia peddled by Willetts somehow leaves an even nastier taste in the mouth than its upfront street version.
Claiming to appropriate the nation for the Conservative party, and then to shrivel both into an identification with the freebooting market, produces such an "abridgement" (as Oakeshott might say) of our history that its ideological basis stands out in all its unbalanced vacuity. What kind of history is it that omits all reference to a tradition of public service and public purpose? Or that fails to consider whether some of our greatest achievements (such as the NHS) have been victories over the market and not of the market? Markets are the most expedient way of organising economic life; useful servants but lousy masters. In promoting them beyond their station, Willetts confuses ends and means in a manner reminiscent of old clause four collectivism. Thus his dismissal of the stakeholder argument seems to be on the a priori grounds that it could not possibly be true, for this would mean that red-blooded native capitalism had some structural infirmities. Likewise, the omission of green issues can only be explained by an ideological blind spot to the limitations of market solutions.
Where such blindness leads is perhaps best revealed in this passage: "If you have suffered as a result of a fraud perpetrated by a financial institution to which you entrusted your savings and you successfully get compensation from the government, then the message to everyone else is clear. They can relax. They do not need to worry about whether the absurdly high returns being advertised are genuine because they will always be bailed out by the taxpayers." Does this really mean what it seems to mean? I fear it does.
The book may be a pi?ce de circonstance, but it deserves to have an extended life as a source book for those in search of the agonies and contradictions of fin de si?cle conservatism. Willetts presents the post-1979 Conservative party as a dynamic, transforming force: "Since 1979 Conservative governments have moved forward like ice-breakers, ploughing their way through the frozen wastes of state control." Yet later on he proclaims that "the itch to transform is what distinguishes parties of the left from the Conservative party." Well, which is it David? Here is the dilemma of a Conservative party that does not want to conserve. It also undercuts Willetts's attack on constitutional reform. Not only does it appear inconsistent to warn of the dangers of radical change in one area while embracing it everywhere else (it's a funny kind of ice-breaker that grinds to a halt in the face of hereditary peers), but it ignores the fact that it is the Conservatives who have been the constitutional militants in their ruthless march through the institutions of British life. Ironies abound. The Conservatives have done more to promote the cause of constitutional reform than all the efforts of the constitutional reformers, while it is the "interventionist" left that now wants to limit winner-takes-all government through an array of checks and balances.
But the contradictions of new conservatism are as nothing when set against its agonies. Willetts has thrashed around in this territory before, in trying to shore up the defences of a "civic" conservatism against the charge that his party's conversion to market individualism has left it painfully exposed on the community front. He now claims there is a "creative tension between these two principles." On the evidence of this book there is no tension at all, only a gaping disconnection. The more Willetts thrashes, the more the fissure is exposed. He seems to think it can be bridged by a bit of constitution-defending and foreigner-bashing, with a pat on the head for the British Legion.
Just how radically Willetts has abbreviated the Conservative tradition can be seen by comparing this book with Quintin Hogg's The Case for Conservatism, published exactly 50 years ago and the first of this Penguin genre of "party" books. For all its delicious self-mockery ("Conservatives do not believe the political struggle is the most important thing in life... The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting-the wisest religion"), Hogg represents a genuine civic conservatism that repudiates a narrow identification with market liberalism. Moreover, it was Hogg's account of our "elective dictatorship" a generation later that still provides the best Conservative reason for treating Willetts's defence of the constitutional ancien r?gime with the disrespect it deserves.
"Our cry must be: 'social democracy without socialism.'" This, too, is Hogg from 1947. Strangely, it takes us nearer to contemporary post-ideological politics than the market triumphalism of Willetts. For it is in the still developing politics of the "radical centre," mixing state and market, public and private, in new ways that an emerging consensus can be sighted. It enables us to combine a robust attachment to public interest values with a radical imagination in applying them to new circumstances. We do not have to choose between a market economy and social responsibility, as Willetts claims. It is reported that his book has been bought up in bulk by Conservative central office and copies dispatched to all the party's candidates and agents. If they read it carefully, they may discover why middle England has deserted them.
Why vote conservative?
David Willetts
Penguin 1997, ?3.99
