Is the right drying up? It is evidently not shutting up-the voice of the right remains fearsomely audible all over the place. But while the right's lungpower is undiminished, how about its brainpower? Has the right begun to lose its intellectual fertility? As always, the first to express their uncertainty were those such as John Gray and John Casey, whose minds are unconstrained by party loyalty. But the unease is now spreading to the plodders.
This unease is caricatured by the left as a recantation, a revulsion against Thatcherism. But the principal insights of the Thatcher years are embedded as conventional wisdom (in economics anyway): the free market, the open economy, lower income tax rates, privatisation, bringing the trade unions back under the law. The serious left has acknowledged the debt to Margaret Thatcher with remarkable grace; so has Tony Blair; the soft left finds it harder to get the words out, being afflicted with an incurable distaste for her. But almost everyone is huddled together on the new common ground. I don't think Thatcher need worry about a lurch to the left. Rather, the danger is of getting blocked on the right. Just as the soft left remains in denial about the achievements of the Thatcher years, so the right now seems to be in denial about a host of other problems. There is a narrowness, partly wilful, partly unconscious, about its approach to life and politics-a narrowness alien to traditional conservatism.
I first had such inklings while reading Norman Tebbit's Unfinished Business (1991). Although the old devil's bite was still there, there just didn't seem to be that much business to finish. The feeling re-surfaced when John Redwood unveiled his alternative manifesto for the party leadership last summer. True, he had to cobble it together in a couple of days. But most of what he had to offer was our shared mother's milk: low taxes, reductions in public expenditure, more privatisation. What he has had to say since has been in the same vein. There does not seem to be much gold left in those particular hills. Having been a bubbling fount of invention and enthusiasm for two decades, the right now seems to have little to offer us, except imitation of the East Asian Tigers. Fine, so far as it goes, but is that all we want out of life? "Save the Royal yacht and get on the Internet" scarcely constitutes a programme for the Whole Man.
The right's intellectual exhaustion is most evident in the growing number of questions it simply refuses to address. It is precisely when politicians pretend to be bored by a subject and brush it away with a superior smile as the concern of people who aren't real people-"the trendies," "the cosmopolitans," "the chattering classes"-that one should sit up and pay attention.
This phenomenon of right wing denial (what the late Lord George Brown called "a total ignoral") loomed larger when I began to take an interest in local government and, by extension, in Scottish and Welsh devolution. I had opposed the abolition of the Greater London Council and later opposed the poll tax. But these, it was charitable to assume, were accidental blots on Thatcher's record; all those who called themselves Conservatives, from an alderman's daughter downwards, must surely understand the importance of strong, independent local government. It took me some time to realise that Margaret Thatcher was by no means alone in the party in her hostility to local democracy. Clarke, Baker, Redwood, Major, Portillo, Patten-left, right, wet, dry -all seem quite unrepentant centralisers.
Simon Jenkins's excellent book, Accountable to None, has gone down like a lead balloon with most Conservative reviewers. They simply will not accept the reality that power has been draining away from local government throughout this century and at a greatly accelerated rate during the Thatcher years. This goes against what ought to be the decentralising instincts of Conservatives; yet even Oliver Letwin, one of the brightest of the younger Tories, can write airily in his review in The Times: "Authority in Britain has for centuries lain firmly at the centre; every power possessed by local councils has been given them by parliament in an act of delegation."
This attempt to dismiss the anxiety misses the point, just as Dicey missed it. Of course, parliament makes the laws, but the counties were there before parliament, and even when there was a parliament, for centuries it largely left the counties to run themselves. This reluctance to interfere operationally continued even after Victorian parliaments started laying fresh duties on local authorities by statute.
The day-to-day interference by Whitehall is a modern development. Together with the virtual destruction of locally determined revenue, it has left Britain with the most centralised system in Europe. Less than 20 per cent of local authority revenue is now under local council control. Britain is run by a more dogged bunch of centralists than at any moment in peacetime since Cromwell's rule of the major generals in the mid 17th century-the most notable difference being that our modern major generals are directed not by the religious Ranters but by the tabloid ranters.
Can any genuine Conservative pretend that none of this matters, and that we can watch our institutions decay into irrelevance? Those British Conservatives who now claim to be following the Newt Gingrich example should bear in mind that the "Contract with America" is based on a constitution which entrenches decentralisation, and that Gingrich stresses the need to return power from Washington to the states. He would be puzzled by the Conservatives' decision to abolish the GLC because they couldn't stand Ken Livingstone's teasing.
Nor will it do to say that these constitutional issues are of no interest to ordinary voters. It is obvious, for example, that there will never be much of a Conservative revival in Scotland until the party returns to devolution on the scale of the Heath-Home years. Right wingers argue that devolution is a fad provoked by 16 years of Tory rule. But the first powerful upsurge of Scottish Nationalism was Winnie Ewing's victory at the Hamilton by-election in 1967, after only three years of Labour government.
Such refusal to face realities seems to me symptomatic of a more general disease on the right: a fear of politics. This aversion is proudly avowed by the paladins of the Institute of Economic Affairs; Lord Harris and Arthur Seldon have always regarded politics as a dirty business which tends to subvert the wishes and distort the preferences of ordinary people, especially the less articulate; for them, "exit"-the right to shop elsewhere-is always a more effective means of realising one's wishes than "voice"-the right to vote for slippery politicians who have their own agendas and personal interests to pursue.
This view has spread throughout the new right, which prefers to keep politics-argument, negotiation, scrutiny, voting-to a minimum (or, better still, at both supranational and subnational level, to do away with it altogether). No United Nations; no European Union; no Scottish Assembly; no county councils. A couple of years ago, we are told, a Conservative cabinet actually debated whether to abolish local government altogether. A few weeks ago, a Conservative cabinet debated whether to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The natural corollary is that such government as does exist must be a single power to keep us in subjection, a decidedly Hobbesian thing: all-powerful, entitled to reach into every corner of our lives, a jealous god brooking no rival. Of course, the new right also claims to believe in minimal government, but it cannot see that, in a country where the power of the central executive is boundless and uncontested, minimal government is very unlikely.
Flesh-and-blood Conservatives who actually have to manage these neutered institutions are rather less complacent. Conservatives in Scotland, on local authorities and in the House of Lords have all been agitating for reform. In public they keep up a sort of muted loyalty, but in private they are highly impatient with the government's dogmatism. For local Tories, the debate now is not so much between right and left as between what they see as traditional dispersed government and a Whitehall which has no patience with intermediate institutions such as police committees and local education authorities.
In response to their complaints and, rather more, in response to the dismal standing of the government in the polls, a trickle of concessions has begun. Lord Cranborne is eager to beat Labour to a sensible reform of the Upper House. John Gummer has cautiously raised the cap on local authority spending, in order to allow a little more of the education bill to be met locally. But to remove the cap altogether remains heresy among ministers; only to be contemplated as a negative propaganda move designed to highlight the extravagance of Labour councils. In Scotland, by contrast, Michael Forsyth did allow local authorities extra discretion over a whole range of services. He also unveiled something like the old Heath-Home scheme for the Scottish Grand Committee to sit as a separate chamber, in London or Scotland, to conduct the committee stage of some Scottish Bills.
This was meant to be a highly circumscribed concession. Westminster would conduct both the second reading and final stages of the Bill, thus allowing the full House to overrule the Scots; it would also reserve the right to decide which Bills should go to the roving chamber. In practice, though, the new scheme is likely to work out in a more radical fashion than its authors intend. Westminster would find it difficult either to deny important Bills to the new chamber or to overrule the Scots, without fuelling the cry for a full-scale independent parliament.
In the right's view, all this activity is pretty futile, fit only for wimps who have never met a payroll. The system works; it delivers; all we need are enough policemen and decent roads, and you can leave the rest of the business to business. This seems to be a rather shrivelled notion of what politics is for. Even if our guiding principle is limited government, most of us want the political process to do several things beyond collecting enough taxes to pay for the army and the police. We want the system to display, publicly, disagreements and grievances; to give expression to our fellow feeling; to negotiate compromises; to give an audience to the underdogs; to allow a voice to the geographical and social fringes; to call on expert counsel for second opinions and technical assessments. In theory this can all be done, as the right claims, in a single forum like the House of Commons; but in practice a system which has several distinct forums allows more voices to be heard; disagreement between powers-whether the powers be clearly separated, as in the US, or blurred, as in the UK-is not a weakness but a sign that such a system is working. Some of the voices that one wants to be heard are rougher-tongued, but others will be more thoughtful, refined, disinterested: judges, accountants, auditors, senators, even economists.
It is true that in recent decades the House of Commons has tried to make space for other voices: by elaborating the committee stages of Bills, by allowing existing select committees to range further to hear evidence, and by setting up new select committees to "mark" ministries whose work had not previously been scrutinised. But these efforts have come to little. The iron law of single chamber government-that the government must get its business through-has degraded all committees into creatures of the whips. A useful amendment survives only by accident. Anyone who wants serious scrutiny of the administration, or serious amendment of legislation, must look elsewhere-to the courts for judicial review, to the European Court of Human Rights, or the House of Lords.
Euro-sceptics of a nervous disposition may want to read no further. But the reality is that almost anyone in Britain who feels aggrieved is coming to look on the European Court of Human Rights as an effective court of last resort. Did my eyes deceive me, or was even that doughty defender of our national liberties, Norris McWhirter, at one time to be seen in the queue for Strasbourg? The natural way to save time and money is to incorporate the convention into English law. After all, most High Court judges already behave as if it was part of our law. My purpose here is not to defend this or that finding of the Human Rights Court (although the findings normally seem fair to me), but rather to point out how most British people warm to the idea of an additional court where justice may be sought and which is independent of our government (or anyone else's).
Government ministers are almost as narked by the increasing resort to judicial review at home. It was never like this in the old days, they moan. But the old days were different in other ways; government didn't interfere in nearly so many fields, nor did ministers take anything like as many powers to govern by statutory instrument. The renaissance of judicial review is a healthy reaction, not a gratuitous interference. The judges have moved in to remedy the deficiencies of an overmighty, overwhipped, single chamber parliament. The majority in the House of Commons is, of course, the ultimate rule-making authority; but that does not license it to act as an unconstrained authority. Parliament makes the laws; it is not itself the law.
The right shrugs off these concerns as confined to the chattering classes, while real people in the real economy mind their own business. Well, all right, but we cannot help noticing that something must have gone badly wrong with the real economy if, even at the peak of the cycle, about two million people are registered as having no business to mind. Even if many are scroungers, it would surely be better if they weren't scrounging; and although we would not dream of saying that the rate of unemployment had any connection with the crime rate, family break-up or any other social evil, the present situation is not exactly-how shall we put it?-satisfactory.
The right is willing to concede that the tax benefit structure might have some relevance here: we all know of people who are better off not working. Yet there is nothing very mysterious about the rudiments of a least-bad solution to the "poverty traps" and all the other traps which are caused by the interaction of tax and benefit. Hermione Parker of the IEA and Graham Searjeant of The Times have been quietly pointing them out for ages. What you do is to raise personal income tax allowances, including the married couple's allowance, to a level where the working poor don't pay income tax. You also relieve employers of their national insurance contribution on lower paid workers. And you keep child benefit up to a reasonable level, so that a modestly paid man can support his family without his wife having to work.
Yet although some new rightists are disturbed by the moral hazard generated by disincentives to work, what the new right always clamours for is a cut in the standard rate; it tends to regard the married couple's allowance as old-fashioned; it wants to help the better paid employees by keeping an upper earnings limit on their contributions; and it wants to freeze or phase out child benefit.
If the right won't see how its preferences tend to make unemployment worse-and social security spending higher-it is even more clueless about the ill effects of its distrust of local government (Peter Lilley is an honourable exception to almost all these strictures). In the US or Switzerland, say, the power of local government helps to foster local patriotism and a sense of local responsibility. This in turn imbues local firms and banks with a willingness to help and temper the shocks of industrial closure and economic depression. In Switzerland, the cantons adopt a "pastoral" attitude towards the unemployed, chivvying them back into work. Where local authorities have had the opportunity here, in the Welsh Valleys, say, or Corby, or the Don Valley, the results have been no less impressive. The shorn lambs need the winds of insecurity to be resisted not only by the nation state; they also need local shelter and shepherds. But still the government prefers to run things through its absurd ministers for the regions, with their bogus competitions for public money.
none of my suggestions are alien to Conservatism, however you define that slippery word. Pre-war Tories would have thought it barmy to expect the poor to pay income tax, just as they would have thought it crazy to abolish the rates, or nationalise the police force. Rather, it is the right which seems to have introduced an alien element: centralist, interfering, paranoid (and that's before we mention the EU); the new British right is strangely reminiscent of the continental right of Maurras and de Maistre.
Another reflex of the contemporary right is to brush aside any of the old issues discussed above as trivial in comparison to the great threat to our sovereignty from Brussels. This seems to me pompous tosh. As David Howell said, announcing his intention to retire from the Commons, the danger of a United States of Europe is becoming "yesterday's story." Anyone whose knees are still knocking at the prospect should reflect: (a) in practice there's nothing to stop us leaving the EU if we want to; (b) it's still the UK government which spends or misspends 95 per cent of our taxes; and (c) two-thirds of the silliest bureaucracy comes from British officials administering British regulations; also (d), it was obvious about five years ago that the EU would approach its present degree of integration and then begin to settle down-obvious to all, that is, except those to whom political contact with foreigners brings on a prickly rash. The objections to a common currency are indeed formidable (though in my view more economic than political), but one would be more inclined to listen to those who bang on about national sovereignty if they had shown the slightest sensitivity to the traditions of the nation they think they are saving.
Excitable spirits on the right positively look forward to an election defeat, after which the incoming Euro-sceptics will lose no time in turfing out John Major and replacing him with some charismatic caudillo. All of which may yet come to pass-just as the left managed to get Michael Foot elected in 1980. But it seems to me that the outcome would be much the same: control by the "outside wing" of the party will block it from attending to the concerns of centre voters (the big majority), or even knowing what those concerns are. There are already a few signs of this; for example, the right talks feverishly of the public swinging against Europe. Yet the latest opinion polls show a slight majority of Britains in favour of more sharing of sovereignty with the EU.
Dogma-block is one of those psychological complaints which the sufferer refuses to recognise. It lasts for years (in Labour's case about a decade), and recovery is usually slow and painful. The cure begins only after the patient is prepared to admit that he or she might have been wrong. It may seem an unlikely paradox that at the very moment when it is refusing to ask any interesting questions or give any relevant answers, the right should have a goodish chance of taking over the Conservative party. But, after all, that was exactly the case with the Labour party; just when the left had become utterly irrelevant, not to say ludicrous, it took control of the constituencies, then snatched the leadership. There may be a kind of generational delay in the balance of parliamentary parties. Younger party activists are enthused by an older faction in the party (Bevanites, Thatcherites) which has failed to convert a majority of its contemporaries, so that the parliamentary party only really swings when a new batch of MPs arrives, which may not be until some years after the faction has lost much of its relevance to contemporary life. No doubt the larger dinosaurs always did the worst damage with a swish of the tail on the way out.
