An English-speaking union: the Tory way? Dear John
2nd September 1999
Over there, where you are, a Republican candidate is likely to be elected president. Over here, as a new political year begins, the Tories seem condemned to exile. They have trailed Labour in the polls for seven years. Tony Blair's command of Britain is awesome. Margaret Thatcher built a country safe for Blair to govern. The cold war was won. All those dragons-inflation, union power-were, if not slain, at least sent sobbing back to their caves. Her successor, John Major, bungled his term in office. The voters believed that it was time for a change. This story, suitably amended, is the story of the centre-right throughout the west. Clinton and Schr? replaced Bush and Kohl. The one survivor of the 1980s is John Paul II.
Where now? I detect four approaches on the right. The first is to wait for Blair-like Clinton-to mess up. You might call it the Rip Van Winkle option. But Tories can't wait upon the clock, any more than they can turn it back. Besides, there is the small matter of what happens to the country in the meantime.
The second is to gamble on one card: Europe. The questions-"Who are we?" "Who governs us?" "What is our place in the world?" -are pressing more insistently than at any time since the mid-1970s. The Tory view of a self-governing, free-trading nation, open to the Continent but not of it, is much closer to the voters' consensus than New Labour's vision of Britain in the EU at any cost, whether it becomes a fully-fledged superstate or not. I expect William Hague to make all he can of the differences: party policy now supports a renegotiation, and there will surely be threats to veto treaties and withhold contributions.
But Blair is keeping his distance from the euro and, in any case, an election cannot be fought as a single-issue referendum. Justice for England, the reining-in of judicial power, an end to appeasement in Northern Ireland-all these have a part to play in a Tory revival, but are unlikely to swing an election dominated by living standards and the quality of life.
The third option is to make liberty the cornerstone of conservatism. But it is not liberty as most have understood it-that is, individual freedom within the framework of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Rather it would try to build a coalition of gays, ethnic minorities and, above all, young, affluent, cosmopolitan voters, whose instincts are anti-state and pro-liberty. Drugs would be legalised and ages of consent lowered. There would be a written constitution and a bill of rights. It is based on the belief that New Britain is the Real Britain.
The fourth option, like the third, confirms that the big debates within modern conservatism are more cultural than economic. But option four is in the tradition of Burke, not Locke. It is for freedom and against liberty. By freedom I mean the trade-off between rights and responsibilities which makes civil life possible. This freedom isn't abstract: it is particular to Britain and its way of life. While the third, libertarian, option sees a country of fashion-led urban individuals, the fourth, Tory, option sees a fuller picture: of families as well as individuals, of country and suburbs as well as the city, of roots and prejudices as well as mobility and cosmopolitanism. In other words, the fourth option doesn't believe that New Britain is the Real Britain. It suspects that the London-based media has got it wrong: that the voters of 1997 wanted broad continuity with Thatcherism rather than radical change.
Above the desk, as I write, is a Gallup poll which set New Britain against Old Britain, Lords against the Millennium Dome, Laura Ashley against Vivienne Westwood, Country Life against Loaded, and so on. The poll contained 26 "contests." Old Britain beat New Britain 22-6. Which, then, is Real Britain?
What about policies? The Conservatives need-Europe apart-to have popular policies which Blair can't filch. This means promising to out-cut New Labour on tax, fight crime by freeing citizens to defend their own property (a measure surely too radical even for Jack Straw), introduce vouchers for schools (David Blunkett is wedded to centralisation), and back marriage in the tax system (Brown has scrapped all support for it). This is not a call to arms, from cold war to culture war. Rather, it is a new form of One Nation politics: Britain is a self-governing nation; although far from uniform, it finds unity in a common culture. Let us keep it.
Yours,
Dear Paul
7th September 1999
I felt suitably gloomy when I read your summary of Toryism's current prospects, and turned eagerly to see how they might be revived. But after I read your four possible remedies, my mood sank further. Not that I disagreed with all of them. But even when I agreed, they still seemed inadequate to the task-like a sticking plaster for a cancer.
So let me turn to the Rip Van Winkle option-waiting for Blair to mess up. As an unhyphenated conservative, I am more respectful than you are towards this ancient folk wisdom. It cannot be the whole response, but it is surely the necessary condition of a Tory recovery. For the moment, as you say, Blair's command of Britain is "awesome." And, still more formidable, his standing is the result more of a spell than of any normal political achievement. As Digby Anderson argues about the NHS, a spell exists when people desperately want to believe in something and get irritated with those who point to its unreality. People want to believe in Blair and to see him succeed. Such a mood cannot be changed by speeches, parliamentary questions or newspaper articles. It can and will be changed by events. One day people will realise that Blair is just another dessicated calculating machine. But until the government is in much worse shape, the Tories will not receive a serious hearing.
Is that too terrible? It gives them plenty of time, after years cocooned in office, to rediscover everyday reality, to forage for new political issues now that communism has evaporated and the market has been filched by New Labour. The fact that the general public is not receptive to new Tory ideas as yet is actually a benefit to the party because there are none.
Let me turn, out of order, to the third option-making liberty the cornerstone of conservatism. It is hard to disagree with your implied rejection; but we should first admit that non-radical libertarians have a role in the Tory coalition. They provide a lively intellectual yeast in debates on economics and social policy; they restrain the instinctive authoritarianism of many Tories on civil liberties; and they generally seek to liberate us from the gentleman in Whitehall. But to imagine that libertarianism could be embraced by the Tory party as an electoral strategy, or governing philosophy, is daft. Its political absurdity is simply explained: the Tories could never win enough hip urban voters to compensate for the loss of the country solicitors, small business owners, anxious parents, and the many members of ethnic minorities with traditional social values, who would defect if the party adopted this Time Out agenda.
As for its philosophical value, this kind of libertarianism runs counter to the core insight of conservatism as noted by Burke: "Men qualify for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is put somewhere on will and appetite, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without." A free economy requires the kind of self-starting, prudent and self-disciplined citizens who would tend to be corrupted by libertarianism; and the spread of drugs, illegitimacy, and a general anti-nomianism would produce large social evils likely to call into being a big bureaucratic state to pick up the pieces.
Your fourth option is that the Tories should campaign in favour of the Old Britain as a self-governing nation in all its traditional variety and social richness. Like you, I am disposed to favour such an appeal. But there also seems to me to be a fatal vagueness about it. How are we going to persuade down-to-earth British voters that they should vote Tory to save the British nation? The specific measures you recommend (fighting crime, educational vouchers, ending the marriage penalty) do not seem to derive very clearly from this theme or to offer it much support. And if the general message ever started getting through, Tony Blair would be starring in a misty Hugh Hudson commercial about the glory of unrebranded Britain before you could say "Hovis."
What, then, should the Tories do? An old New York Democrat once said to me: "Say what you like about negative campaigning, at least it is more honest than positive campaigning." In order to make their defence of traditional Britain persuasive, the Tories should not be ashamed to mount a strong negative attack on how New Labour is transforming the nation along anti-national and undemocratic lines. Labour is systematically removing power from institutions which are accountable to the voters, such as the House of Commons, and transferring it to bodies which are remote, bureaucratic and largely undemocratic. At home this can be seen in the continuing advance of the administrative state with its boards, agencies and quangos. And when we want relief from this state, we must rely increasingly on the judiciary, another non-democratic institution which is accumulating power at the expense of elected governments.
Moreover, when powers are transferred to judicial and bureaucratic institutions abroad, self-government is lost in a more direct sense. Today, British governments bind themselves in advance to accept the decisions of supranational bodies such as the EU (but not just the EU) on a wide range of economic, trade, environmental, judicial and other issues, from extradition to mining rights. Because we cannot amend the rules such bodies impose, our loss of sovereignty is also a loss of democracy. But the Tories seldom protest against the idea that the gentleman in Brussels knows best.
Furthermore, the Tory leadership actually promotes the idea that Britain is a multicultural nation. Not only is this false outside the Welsh and Gaelic-speaking areas and some inner-city concentrations of recent immigrants, but it also runs counter to the notion of democratic self-government. Multiculturalism denies that the nation should be the main focus of political allegiance or that there is a common culture encompassing all ethnic groups. It proposes instead that political rights should be allocated along ethnic lines. If that seems a remote danger at present, then ethnic "proportionalism"-the related doctrine that all institutions should include ethnic minorities at all levels in proportion to their numbers in the population-does not.
Taken together, these policies transfer power from the democratic institutions of a self-governing people to unaccountable political elites at home and abroad. "Re-branding Britain" gives symbolic expression to this drive by replacing familiar images of national unity (the monarchy, the House of Commons, Trooping the Colour) with other symbols which express generational, professional or clique interests (heroic pop stars, brutalist designers, and so on).
Here, then, is the New Labour leviathan and his date, Cool Britannia; large and vulnerable targets for Tory slings and arrows. Opposing them is a cause which would unite national sentiment and democratic principle. The downside is that it would require great skill and courage to launch a systematic attack on so many causes-judicial review, multiculturalism, Europe-which are entrenched in the affections of the media elite and the Great and the Good. Tories would also have to produce a convincing answer to the question: "Can Britain really survive outside Europe?" There is a large, obvious and overwhelming answer to this question. Despite its visibility, however, the Tories seem never to have seen it.
Best wishes,
Dear John
8th September 1999
We agree about much: the shallow adroitness of Blair; the shortcomings of libertarianism; the case for Real Britain. But let's get to the disagreements. Is it so terrible that the Tories won't get a hearing for some time? Yes, it is. Being out of office may be good for the Tories, but having Blair in office is bad for nearly everyone else. As for negative campaigning, sure-there is a lot to be negative about. But the quicker the Tories have something to say, the faster the progress they'll make.
The appeal, we agree, should be pitched to Real Britain, most of which lives outside the M25 media belt. Our disagreement is about balance. Tories succeed by delivering prosperity as well as patriotism. Tax cuts, school choice, support for marriage, better roads, stiffer sentences, more jobs, a fair but tough welfare regime-these touch the everyday realities of people's lives. There is a common theme: a strong but limited state which lets people get on with bettering themselves.
You are right about multiculturalism. The Macpherson Report, with its doctrine of collective guilt and ethnic quotas, was pernicious. And I have a feeling that, "out there," there is a deep but mute fury about the way in which Real Britain is always cast as the villain. But I can't see multiculturalism as our main problem. Rather I believe that our leading social difficulty is the conflict of values-the clash between those who believe in objective truth and restraint (don't steal; spraying graffiti is wrong; there is a difference between good and evil) and those who don't (go with the flow; do what you like; nothing means anything).
You are also right about the rise of the administrative state. Yes, the balance between safety and risk is askew-note the working time directive, parental leave provisions, and so on. But the compensation culture is strong; change will take time. And I get no sense of a furious public preparing to storm the Old Bailey and lynch the Euro-enthusiast judges.
By stressing democracy, you seem to have two objectives. First, to label New Labour as a tiny clique, which distrusts the people it governs. Second, to confront voters with the choice between the rationalist enterprise of European federation, and familiar Britain as it was and remains. But are you confident that they will jump the right way?
Yours ever,
Dear Paul
9th September 1999
I once had the macabre task of writing the Tory party's election manifesto. So I am more aware than most of just how many proposals and pledges have to be squeezed into the slim blue volume. But even manifestoes need a broad unifying theme. Indeed, successful parties are those whose central message the voters know through a sort of political osmosis.
You think that the central message should be One Nation Toryism and that it should promise prosperity as well as patriotism. Unfortunately, economic prosperity is the whole of the conservative message in almost all countries today. Mainstream conservative parties have been embarrassed out of even civic nationalism, through fear of being labelled racist, nativist, xenophobic, monocultural, and so on. As a result, fringe nationalist parties have emerged from Australia to Italy, taking up to 30 per cent of the vote, weakening the mainstream right, and ushering social democrats into power. And, further, while congratulating themselves on their victory over the Soviet Union, conservatives have failed to notice the growing power of another internationalist nomenklatura with interests opposed to their own.
This is the new class of international lawyers and bureaucrats. It seeks to deconstruct nation-states and replace them with multi-ethnic, multicultural polities in which, under a democratic veneer, the new class umpires disputes between nations, and fosters social peace through re-distribution. It is not self-consciously accumulating power. Like most rising classes, it blunders upwards. But it is increasingly aware of its own interests; it is developing the habit of cooperation across national boundaries. Its vanguard is in Brussels; and its branch office is New Labour.
My proposal is that we should focus attention on this new class, establish that its growing power weakens both democracy and the nation, and oppose it in the name of both. You reply that most people don't mind that supranational agencies and courts have expropriated decisions from Parliament. In so far as that is true, it reflects the fact that we are in the very early stages of this revolution. In the first few years of the French revolution, most conservatively-minded people were astonished by Burke's opposition, which seemed hysterical. They became Burkeans only as the nature of Jacobinism became clear. We should prepare for that more receptive state of public opinion by laying out the principled political case now.
I am surprised at your scepticism towards a politics of opposition to supra-nationalism. Where does that leave your second option of "a self-governing, free-trading nation, open to the Continent but not of it?" Or your confidence that this vision is "far closer to the voters consensus than New Labour's vision of Britain in the EU at any cost"? The Tory consensus is that Britain can push the EU towards Thatcherite deregulation and avert federalism indefinitely. But suppose that European federalism rolls on anyway. At some point the Tories could be faced with a choice between absorption into a federal Europe and negotiating a looser relationship with it. If they opt for the looser relationship against New Labour's "EU at any cost," they will be handicapped by one profound disadvantage: the defeatism of the British people that both parties have inculcated in order to make EU membership more palatable. There will be a great wailing of "how can we survive outside?" The Tories will be hard-pressed to stand against it. Yet the EU is based on antique economics.
The EU is the last of the great railway empires. It was founded on coal and steel, and it is based on the idea that geography determines political economy. The information age, however, is one in which culture trumps geography. While British politicians were looking admiringly towards Bonn and Paris, an English-speaking world civilisation of great richness and variety was springing up behind them: the Anglo-Indian novel; Australian films, American technology; West Indian music; Hollywood movies; BBC serials; Canadian and Australian world media empires; English editors in American journalism. It is not uncommon, for example, for a film to be financed by Wall Street, adapted by an English writer, directed by a Canadian, acted by an international cast, and distributed by Hollywood. This is an open and absorptive civilisation. The film, Sense and Sensibility, had a Taiwanese director. "Salsa" music entered world consciousness via the Latin community in the US.
This civilisation is not a self-conscious political unit like the EU. Because it is composed of successful (often multi-ethnic) nation-states, it is generally protective of national sovereignty. But it is significant how often it seems to act in concert internationally. As I write, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain are meeting in Auckland to discuss intervention in East Timor. And economically it is permeated by the liberal ideas of free trade and private property.
As individuals and companies, the British do well in this integrated Oceania (roughly, the Commonwealth and the US). We are a world tribe and always manage to have friends in local places. Only the politicians and corporate bureaucrats still suppose that closeness to Europe is the central economic and political fact about Britain. And only a few intellectuals, converted as adolescents to European integration by Juliette Greco's scowl, still imagine that the rest of the English-speaking world offers only cricket, sheep and suburban snobbery.
In the information age the choice is not between Europe and little England, but between a bureaucratic European empire and a world civilisation made in our own image. The nationalism we would embrace by choosing the second is no narrow set of exclusions, but the open cultural identity of a liberal people. If the Tories cannot make such a message sing, so much the worse for them.
Best wishes,
Dear John
10th September 1999
Our main disagreement is about the extent to which the EU should be the battleground on which the next election is fought. Hague's slogan "in Europe but not run by Europe" begs the question: is it possible to be in the EU, but not run by it? Your answer seems to be "no." When you write about a future "looser relationship" with Europe, you mean withdrawal, if renegotiation fails. Conservative policy is heading, with greater speed than many realise, towards a promise of just such a renegotiation.
It is a novel experience for me to be accused of lacking Euro-sceptic zeal. Like you, I believe that democracy-by which you mostly mean the nation-state-is under threat. Unlike you, I don't think that pointing this out will be enough, of itself, to persuade voters that Conservatives are the many and social democrats are the few. An election can't be fought as a single-issue referendum. You aren't placing enough emphasis on the economic and social parts of the Tory coalition.
There is a larger difficulty. I talk about appealing to Real Britain; you write that Blair would rush to star "in a misty Hugh Hudson commercial about the glory of unrebranded Britain before you could say 'Hovis.'" But if Hague sketches out a Britain for the big world, rather than for a little Europe, isn't there the same danger of Blair trumping him here, too? Won't Blair denounce the Tories as "extreme nationalists," while also swearing to put Britain's interests first and last? The claim may be rubbish, but hasn't he a good chance of getting away with it?
Yours ever,
Dear Paul
11th September 1999
Let me make myself clear. I do not favour withdrawal from the EU or think it inevitable. On the contrary, if everyone is sensible, I believe that a variable geometry EU could accommodate both the Franco-German drive to federal statehood and the reluctance of Britain and others to lose the degree of sovereignty which membership of the federal EU "core" would entail. Such flexibility would also make easier both the enlargement of the EU and an Atlantic free trade area encompassing the EU and Nafta. Of course, everyone may not be sensible; that sometimes happens. And if federalists try to force Britain into an ill-fitting constitutional straitjacket, then withdrawal might be forced upon us. But that is a worst-case analysis, not a solution.
Best wishes,
