State of the argument
Dear Dominic Hobson,
Thanks for the letter. I have been finishing my own book (Ruling Britannia) and am now sinking into Harold Wislonism, so apologies if this is less considered than it ought to be. First, I agree with your point that our difference may be a matter of perspective; the modern state might seem relatively impotent to us, but it would seem highly intrusive to our Victorian forebears.
We can also find some common ground by agreeing that "politics" has lost power over bureaucratic or otherwise unaccountable "statist" activity; a lot of Christopher Boo-ker's journalism, for instance, shows what happens when politicians, submerged in paperwork and small decisions, are unable to control and monitor self-serving public administrators. All organisations tend to be interested first in their own survival and growth.
I also agree that welfarism has had an impact on self-reliance; though one of the interesting things happening at present, as the welfare state reaches and falls back from the boundaries of what can be financed and delivered, is a great growth in self-help and support groups.
So far, so consensual! But in the end, I think the harking-back to levels of taxation and state involvement of the Victorian period is excessively romantic. There are simply so many of us, equipped with so much noisy, fast-moving gear-so much human velocity-that higher (than Victorian) levels of regulation over everything, from how we use the internal combustion engine, to river pollution, to child abuse, are not only inevitable but also good. Food hygiene inspectors, left to themselves, become madly bossy and intrusive; but as someone who endured hepatitis after eating in a fish restaurant last year, I can confirm that it will be hard to convince the country that the mere existence of food hygiene laws is a form of "oppression." This is not to say that the state should, or could, grow; nor that it should not be cut back. I think Whitehall is incompetent and ignorant about so much of the country that it should cede far more to local politics...
But I am running away, and must get back to Harold Wilson, apostle of the corpulent state...
Yours ever,
Andrew Marr
25 May 1995
Dear Andrew,
Thank you for taking the time and trouble to write back while so busy.
It was a relief to find that there is at least some measure of agreement between us, both on the question of historical perspective and on the question of the moral consequences of welfarism. As you point out, it is in precisely those areas of life from which the state is withdrawing that voluntary, independent, charitable and private activity is now beginning to revive. We [Dominic Hobson co-wrote Saturn's Children with Alan Duncan MP] believe the effects will be equally gratifying wherever the state can realistically be made to relinquish its responsibilities.
Your observation that ministers are almost invariably the creatures of their departments, and that it is usually the bureaucrats and not the politicians who are actually setting the agenda, is equally valid. Matt Ridley made much the same point in his review of the book for the Sunday Telegraph, in which he described politicians as little more than convenient scapegoats for the less popular antics of the bureaucrats.
I was pleased to find several passages in the book supporting these arguments. For example: "The Inland Revenue today exhibits every symptom of a bureaucracy broken free of all constitutional constraints, and working to a self-interested agenda of its own. It is assisted in this by the pusillanimous attitude of Treasury ministers, who are generally disinclined to resist Revenue advice on apparently 'technical' matters."
The recent furore over the taxation of mortgage insurance policies was a classic instance. Elsewhere in government, it may even be that the Next Steps programme, far from increasing state efficiency, is encouraging bureaucratic aggrandizement of this kind.
But I am not sure the proliferation of rules and regulations is due entirely to the absorption of politicians in pettifoggery devised by civil servants to waste their energies and cloud their dreams of a better world.
It may also be due to a fundamental change in the philosophy of government, from the defence of the natural rights which pre-date the formation of the state to the provision of civil and welfare rights which are wholly dependent upon the state and (in the "communitarian" world now promised by Tony Blair) set to be enforced by it.
This is the legacy of the utilitarian bureaucrats you have identified as the villains. Their whole philosophy of government is one of expediency rather than principle. Once government was reduced to the solution of social problems without reference to any underlying principles of social organisation, it was bound to spawn a morass of taxes, rules, regulations and bureaucracies.
As you point out in your penultimate paragraph, the vital question is not whether this intrusive state exists or whether it is corrosive of liberty-manifestly, it both exists and does prevent people from doing things-but whether it is oppressive. My use of this adjective in my first letter was careless, and you were quite right to pick up on it. Our real task is not to describe the over-mighty state, or even to advocate its abolition, but to describe a reliable method of deciding where its role ends and that of the individual begins.
This is much more difficult to do. In fact, try as I might, I cannot think of any grand principle which would enable us to decide where the line should be drawn. Your brush with hepatitis is a case in point. Is the regulation and inspection of food a legitimate or an illegitimate extension of state power? State involvement in this area is certainly longstanding. I think the first legislation was passed under Benjamin Disraeli, in the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875-all subsequent legislation merely updating on the original objective.
But neither Adam Smith's three duties of government, nor Keynes' agenda and non-agenda of government, nor the modern distinctions between public and private goods, yield any reliable rule by which we can decide whether state interference in the quality of food is justified. John Stuart Mill's golden rule no doubt argues in favour of regulating and inspecting food-for self-protection-but it always does. Mill, though he addressed the question directly, is quite useless for deciding what the state ought and ought not to do in modern conditions.
What is obvious is that no principle is at work in the modern legislative process. The Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1875 was introduced because people were eating food supplied by unscrupulous caterers, and they expected the government to stop it. This is the origin of almost all law and regulation in a modern welfare democracy, where the raison d'?re of politics is to remedy human misfortune as it arises. The Dangerous Dogs Act of 1990 originated in the same way.
What has occurred since Disraeli is the heightened sensitivity of the state to public concerns, and the enlargement of public faith in the ability of the state to tackle them. The system has become self-reinforcing because the range of public concerns is unlimited and the ability of the state to satisfy them limited. A vast and long-standing apparatus of state regulation and inspection of food, covering ever more aspects of the catering industry and its suppliers in the world of agriculture and fisheries, did not prevent you contracting hepatitis in a restaurant.
State failure encourages people to think that more laws, taxes, regulators and inspectors are needed to ensure success. In cases of market failure, people resort instinctively to the alternative remedy of the state. But in cases of state failure, nobody questions whether there are limits beyond which the state ceases to be effective. Instead, the failure is plugged with a new regulation.
It isn't clear from what you wrote whether it was the kitchens or the chef or the fish which was to blame, but the wise utilitarian legislator would want to cover all three. The kitchens would need to be told to use a different disinfectant; the chef would be obliged to submit to regular testing for hepatitis; and if it was the fish, then water regulations would need to be tightened up.
There is a famous story of a dinner held at one of the royal colleges of medicine, at which all the doctors went down with hepatitis. The outbreak was investigated and it was traced eventually to a gardener who had urinated on the raspberries consumed by the doctors. Should the law insist raspberries be washed before serving, or ban gardeners urinating on raspberry bushes?
We desperately need some new way of deciding where state power ends and individual freedom begins. Some people think you can set it all out in a constitutional document. It would be worth writing if we could be sure that it prescribed a minimal state confined to the protection of life and property. But I fear the bien pensants would soon fill it with all manner of "social" rights as well. That is why Saturn's Children ended up in the world of natural rights, searching for a principle of liberty. Others are looking in the same place for a principle of equality. In the end, I suppose, you just have to take your pick. My instinct is for liberty.
That is because the best solutions are rarely political solutions. I agree with you that we need to localise power, but we need to privatise power too. Of course Whitehall is ignorant about local realities and individual aspirations, but so is the Town Hall. We need alternative sources of ideas, such as financially independent universities. We need welfare and other organisations which are not, in the current mantra, "democratically accountable," but which are founded, owned and controlled by real people. We need to end the politicisation of life.
Many people will share your view that a minimal state of self-owning, self-reliant and self-governing individuals building their own welfare states and educational foundations is excessively romantic. Will Hutton dismissed it as "wild posturing."
It was in order to remind people that a society of the kind we would prefer not only could happen but had actually begun to happen that our book so admired the private lives and public virtues of late Victorian and Edwardian society. The mischievous naturally misrepresent it as advocating a return to a Dickensian world of chimney-sweeps and child-labour. We know full well that it is impossible to "go back" even if we wanted to. But the task is to go forward towards a newer, freer, more prosperous and more virtuous way of life than anything we have known before. In other words, the political choice we face is not between the devil-take-the-hindmost society of Dickens and the welfare state of today, but between what we have today and what we could have tomorrow if only the left would stop trying to take us back to some romanticised conception of the Middle Ages and the "practical men" would stop saying meaningful change is impossible.
I do not know what that society will be like but, for the first time in history, we have the means to let the possibilities choose themselves. The gross national income is now at least seven times larger, in real terms, than it was a century ago-which gives us a far greater range of options.
Turning the ambition for sweeping change into practical policy is not an aim in which we can claim complete success. But our book begins and ends with a frank recognition of its own intellectual shortcomings. Not the least of these, I fear, is the recommendation of policies which will take 20 to 30 years to implement.
I can see why governments cannot think beyond the next day's newspapers. But I don't see why people shouldn't be protected from such short-term thinking. As Gladstone said of the English farmer at the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws, the modern citizen has "a claim to a very gradual and cautious transition out of the artificial state in which the law has placed him."
I agree with you that we live in a faster, more crowded, increasingly complex and interdependent world. Unlike you, I would say that argues for less, not more, direction of private individuals and organisations by the state. We need more diversity, spontaneity, originality-in a word, individuality-to thrive in the new world. The model spelt out in Saturn's Children is not a doomed attempt to recreate the past but a vision of the future.
I hope you will believe we are not just another pair of right-wing libertarians but two authors genuinely interested in finding a middle way between the irresponsible libertarianism of the New Right and the oppressive moral authoritarianism of New Labour. In the Guardian Michael White called us Tory Cavaliers. In The Times Oliver Letwin called us Puritan Libertarians. If we have lunch, I promise to turn up in Cavalier mode.
Yours sincerely,
Dominic Hobson
1 June, 1995
Dear Dominic,
Damn, damn. I had not intended to write again, but it seems sensible to get a bit more down on paper.
Where to start? Perhaps with more agreement: the state is almost always at its most oppressive when bureaucracies are not controlled, particularly with the gleam of science in their eyes. The best example of it is the Highways Directorate, which, between the early 1950s and, say, 1993-94, was using illogical-nay, mad-statistical gobbledegook to justify perpetual roadbuilding. All ministers went along with it.
There are political failures which could, and should, be remedied to rein back some of this bureaucratic power. The ministerial culture is skewed to the production of mostly useless legislation as the key virility test for a rising politician. There are no (or too few) political Brownie-points for good administration.
Second, the whirligig of reshuffles and sackings ensures that the ambitious, theoretically most "able" ministers are never in one department long enough to understand what the bureaucracy is really up to.
Third, the system of private offices without much political input ensures that ministers thought by the civil service to be "troublesome" are so drowned in paperwork they eventually lose perspective.
Fourth, as you say, agencies seemingly designed to blur lines of accountability (Michael Howard and the IRA breakout from Whitemoor is a classic example) should be under direct control of Parliament. I think there is a lot to be done in stripping down, scouring and repairing the political system, which would produce real and useful results.
None of which, of course, answers your philosophical point. Before trying to, let me put, briefly, my idea of what has happened to the state. I think it has lost huge amounts of macro-power, not simply to Europe, but to a host of multi-national bodies, to the bond market, to international corporations, even to cyberspace. Its powers over the price of money, the movement of people, censorship, tax rates, industrial policy, the rate of unemployment, have been blown away. To compensate, the state has interfered more and more with local and near-at-hand functions-school timetables, the spending of local councils, the organisation of urban regeneration, the details of local training-about which it is ignorant and which it is incompetent to deliver.
Over time, it's inevitable that the nation-state's powers will continue to diminish, and that the total tax take will fall, and not just for technological and demographic reasons; the taxpayers' revolt isn't going to end, simply because the state is no longer offering full employment, a generous welfare state, etc. The old contracts are broken; as a result, I am much less worried about state oppression than you are.
You search for "a principle of liberty" which would allow you to determine where state power should end. I think you should stop looking; it's a wraith. In a complex modern society, the oscillation between regulations which help people in their daily lives, and too-intrusive bureaucracies, is constant. So is the swaying between politicians inclined to wash their hands of avoidable misery-it could be Bosnia, it could be slum housing-and politicians who blunderingly interfere. Your freedom to set up a private school which draws away the cleverer children I'd been relying on to help my child prosper at a state school can be my oppression. Your freedom from tax may be my inability to travel by train, or be well-defended by the police. Your freedom to earn wealth and create jobs may mean I swim in polluted seas.
These are real dilemmas which are unresolvable by formula, but which are constantly adjudicated, in a rough-and-ready way, by any effective democracy. When taxes rise unbearably, there is a tax revolt.
Our democratic system needs wholesale reform. But I believe that to pull out of political life, to call into being a world composed of market forces and families alone, would be unsustainable and intolerable. We need a sense of common values, linking generations and groups larger than families, in order to keep providing well-educated and "grounded" people with enough faith in contracts and the future to defer gratification, save, etc.
Originality, yes. Spontaneity, too. But these can be common and in-deed communal qualities, as well as individual ones. Modern Britain was built by political initiative as well as by private endeavour. Clean piped water was an original idea when the burghers of Glasgow introduced it and helped wipe out cholera from that city-which doubtless increased the experience of liberty for those who would otherwise have died. Libraries and parks were brought about by what you call "the relentless politicisation of life;" in terms of experienced liberty, both have mattered a lot. The fervour with which politicians then leapt ahead, convinced that they could calibrate and improve all aspects of life went, I agree, far too far.
But I think we have passed through the dark Orwellian tunnel, during which the growth of state apparatuses and philosophies were the greatest threat to liberty. Political and communal choices, balancing the huge power of global markets, can now be advocated without the threats you identify.
We have moved on. Political or state power may not always produce benign results but neither does it always produce oppression. I really don't think this makes me a proto-fascist or latter-day Stalinist; not, at least, until I come up with a system which stops gardeners pissing on strawberry plants!
