St Stephen's chapel, in the royal palace of Westminster, is a collegiate foundation. Like college chapels everywhere it has pews facing each other, rather than facing forward to the altar as in a parish church. So when St Stephen's became the home of the House of Commons, the seating plan came naturally: friends sit together, and face their enemies across the aisle.
Today it is common to hear that the labels "left" and "right" have lost their meanings. And yet the terms stubbornly persist. All attempts to overcome them—by the practical expedient of a horseshoe-shaped parliament or by the more radical method of proportional representation—seem doomed. We are, it appears, naturally disposed to binary politics.
In British politics, imagine this division as a single axis, running between two points. On the left stands equality, and on the right stands liberty. These two principles are the signatories to the social contract that has underpinned our democracy since 1688. They are simple principles to grasp, for each is the function of a single, identifiable agent: equality is the function of the state (the representative of all), and liberty is the function of the individual (one). As Locke explained, the state exists to guarantee and enlarge the space in which we each may be free, by implementing the law impartially and equally.
Over the last century or so, the state has acquired further responsibilities beyond its role as guarantor of the rule of law, from the provision of public services to the more or less direct management of the economy. These new responsibilities have pitted equality against liberty in a battle that echoed through the 20th century, and still resounds today.
But equality and liberty are not the only principles at work in our politics, or even the most important ones. There is another principle, the third slogan in the triad of the French revolution: fraternity. Where equality and liberty are political abstractions, levered into reality by statute, fraternity is real and self-generating; it has no need of the statutory imprimatur. It is the function of another agent: not of the state or of the individual, but of society itself, the messy and plural mixture of our personal associations. Fraternity does not concern the freedom of the individual (the abstract one) or the equality of the people (the abstract all) but the quality of relationships among the communities we inhabit: the real some.
Fraternity is the sphere of belonging, of membership, the sphere of identity and particularity. It exists in civil society, in the arena of commercial and social enterprise, of family and nation. It concerns neighbourhood, voluntary association, faith, and all the other elements of identity that relate us to some and distinguish us from others. It concerns culture.
Fraternity has always been the submerged object of politics, while the battle between equality and liberty raged overhead. Every time that politicians invoke "community," every time they celebrate "tradition" or "solidarity," they are talking about fraternity. And yet there has been a general failure to admit or understand the place of fraternity in our politics. Equality and liberty are abstract terms, easily conceptualised. They can, in principle (and they work better in principle than in practice), be translated directly into law. Fraternity, however, representing the diffuse business, the multiple relationships of society itself, is harder to comprehend.
And so we make the mistake of imagining that the main topic of politics is equality versus liberty. This binary scheme is often encouraged by the parties themselves. The left frequently makes the category error of confusing the state with society, equality with fraternity. "Fraternity," said Allan Cameron, in the introduction to his translation of Norberto Bobbio's Left and Right, on which Anthony Giddens drew in The Third Way, "was perhaps just… a more emotive way of saying equality. Brothers are equal."
The right disagrees. What matters to brothers is not their notional equality but their relationship, their shared memories and common home—their fraternity. This is not the same as equality. Society and state are distinct. But for this reason, the right is reluctant for politics to get involved with society. It argues that fraternity is self-creating; that it consists of the voluntary association of free individuals.
And so, for all its talk of community, the left imagines that fraternity is just another word for equality, and the right imagines that fraternity will be taken care of by liberty. Yet these days fraternity is moving above ground. Francis Fukuyama has conceded that the premise of his book The End of History is limited only to economic and political structures. History has not "ended" in the sphere of culture—indeed, Fukuyama agrees with his antagonist Samuel Huntington that, as he puts it, "the chief issue in world politics henceforth will be the cultural issue."
Most obviously, our agonised debates about community cohesion, about the integration of immigrant groups and national identity, are debates about fraternity. How do we accommodate some, a cohesive and exclusive social grouping, if that grouping both suppresses one (the individual) and admits little allegiance to all (the nation, represented in the state)?
But fraternity is also the ghost in the machine of the debates about health and education, about housing and the environment, and about crime and its causes. In each of these areas the vital issue is how communities themselves, not the individual or the state, can address the challenges that face them.
Even in matters of apparently individual concern such as healthcare, research convincingly demonstrates how the influence of one's wider group, one's family and neighbourhood, determines one's propensity for good health and one's rate of recovery. The link between educational attainment and local social influences is also evident. Nor is crime solely an individualist phenomenon. The classical liberal position is that a criminal is a rational being who has weighed risk and reward and decided to break the law; the response must be to rebalance risk and reward so that a different calculation is made. By contrast, the classical egalitarian position is that poverty causes crime: crime is the consequence of national disparities in income and opportunity, which must be redressed by the state. Of course, individual rationality and glaring inequality both play their part in criminal behaviour. But a full analysis must take into account cultural factors. Crime is disproportionately prevalent in certain families and certain subsets of communities. There is, as we say, a "criminal fraternity"—the response must be to transform it into a law-abiding one. This requires work in local culture, the sphere of some, as much as in the sphere of individual rationality (one) and the distribution of income (all).
The language of fraternity—of community, solidarity, civic obligation—is not exclusive to the right. New Labour has said similar things. But the widespread sense that both parties now inhabit a soggy centre ground derives from the poverty of our political language, and our persistence in seeing things only in terms of equality and liberty, of statist left and individualist right, so that any move by Labour or Conservative away from their core principle must be a move towards the other and a betrayal of their philosophy.
In fact, the leaderships of both parties are being true to their party's principles. They are approaching the subject of fraternity from opposite directions, and the point of departure determines their approach to the subject. To understand how, it is helpful to employ the famous scheme of GWF Hegel. In the simplification of Hegel's dialectic, a thesis is established which is then challenged by the antithesis to produce the synthesis, which becomes the thesis of the next stage, and so on through time. The thesis is an abstraction, a pure idea, a blueprint which is only made real by its accommodation with the antithesis. The synthesis is the realised thesis.
In our politics, then, the thesis of the left—the pure governing idea that is realised through the dialectic—is equality. The thesis of the right is liberty. And for both, the antithesis—the messy reality into which they are accommodated—is fraternity.
The two parties appear close together in the competition for office only because the dialectic process—not to mention the electoral process that reflects it—requires them to accommodate the nuanced realities of society into their rival offerings. Hence the constant talk of community. But these offerings are based on divergent views of the way things are and should be, and this appears once the election is over, for each side returns repeatedly to its thesis. The right always honours the individual and the left always honours the state.
This helps to explain the paradox whereby New Labour, having renounced the ideal statism of its forebears, has presided over an enormous extension of the power and remit of the state. The abandonment in 1995 of the text of clause IV was prelude and prerequisite to the triumph of its spirit. But this required a shift from the economic or industrial sphere into the social or cultural sphere. Labour has relinquished its ambition to run every factory in the national interest, and so abandoned the "commanding height of the economy." But the retreat from the mountains has been an invasion of the plains, where ordinary people live. The New Labour government has involved itself in what Anthony Giddens in The Third Way called "life politics… a politics of choice, identity and mutuality." "None of these," he added, "is a clear left-right issue." True, for these are the issues of fraternity. And yet the left's approach to "life politics" is determined by its starting point.
In opposition, Blair and Brown reached back into their party's history—to the Labour movement before the Labour party. There they found a tradition of socialism that owed little to statutory action: the local socialism of trade unions and friendly societies, the mutuals and self-help clubs that supplied the collective needs of urban workers before the age of welfare. This enabled them to emphasise fraternity rather than equality, society rather than the state.
In government, however, they have done little to revive self-help. The history of civil society since 1997 has been one of steady encroachment by the state into the private sphere of voluntarism. As a recent paper by Richard Smith and Philip Whittington (Charity, Centre for Policy Studies, 2006) shows, there has been an enormous injection of taxpayers' money into charities, and a comparative falling-off in private donations. As the state takes over the institutions of society, individuals feel less confident in them. Egalitarian intrusions into fraternity are made at the expense of liberal attachments to it; and starved of liberty, fraternity suffers.
As a result we have seen the demise of many small charities and associations whose purposes or methods the state has found inimical to its own, such as grammar schools and private care homes. We have seen the suborning of large once-independent institutions, such as the NSPCC and the National Trust, to the imperatives of government. And more recently we have seen the creation of a raft of hybrid organisations, nominally independent but in fact symbiotic (or even parasitic) appendages of the public sector, such as public-private partnerships, Network Rail and foundation hospitals.
Gordon Brown is said to be preparing a range of new initiatives for the moment when he takes over from Blair. It is possible to sketch the outlines of his programme. He plans neither a leftward retreat into purist equality, nor a rightward shift towards liberty, but a further shift, upwards as it were, towards fraternity. And yet Brown's idea of fraternity is conditioned by egalitarian statism. For him, as for Allan Cameron, fraternity is another word for equality. Rather than respecting the particular some, the multitudinous local associations of society, he wishes to enhance the all. His appeal to fraternity is an attempt to apply its warm emotional overtones to the otherwise cold and rationalist state. His emphasis on Britishness is derided as a cynical attempt to dissociate himself from his own Scottishness. A kinder explanation is that he genuinely prefers the central to the local.
The most indicative recent emanation from the mind of Brown is his call for a revival of volunteering, which, he says, will help to tie the country together and give young people a sense of civic responsibility. Significantly, however, the form of volunteering that Brown commends is the cadet force, a national body closely modelled on the army. The chancellor has not been a friend to the army itself, correctly perceiving it to be the bastion of a culture and a spirit (a fraternity) very different to his own. The government's painful merger of army regiments has been driven by the treasury on cost grounds. But a more fundamental urge is to rationalise, that is, abolish, the eccentric subdivisions of the national unit. The idea of fraternity, based on platoons and regiments, counties and tradition, is being challenged by one based solely on national loyalty. Brown's support for Trident, Britain's nuclear deterrent, has dismayed some of his left-wing supporters. But in fact he is making an intelligent statement of his belief in the national principle—a belief mirrored in his declared scepticism about the process of European integration.
In these respects Brown is following the advice of David Goodhart, editor of Prospect, who has called in a recent Demos paper for the left to embrace the concept of "progressive nationalism." Goodhart's thesis is that multiculturalism threatens the basis of the egalitarian settlement. He argues that "national identity may be the best way to preserve the left's collective ideals." And so he encourages an extension of the concept of citizenship and a rallying of loyalty around the rights and services provided by the state.
Ironically, this approach reflects late Hegel, the Hegel who adapted his philosophy to the reactionary climate of post-Napoleonic Prussia. In the brief interlude between the French defeat of Prussia in 1807 and Waterloo in 1815, the idea of the nation had emerged as the ally not of the state, but of the individual. As Karl Popper, albeit uncomprehendingly, put it, "Modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel a revolutionary and liberal creed. By accident it had made its way into the camp of freedom." That was no accident: freedom and nationalism—liberty and fraternity—are allies. Yet after 1815, and thanks to the use which the Prussians made of Hegel, nationalism was co-opted into the service of the state: the loyalty that individuals felt to the nation was translated into submission to the government. In Bismarck's day the outlines of the modern left's domestic programme emerged. Anticipating Brown and Goodhart, Bismarck decided that one way to bind the German nation together was "progressive" state welfare (the other was militarism).
It is a staple of the left's ideology that, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, tradition is an invention, an imposition of collective false memory by the ruling class. True to this analysis, the left is determined to invent its own tradition, its own idea of fraternity, and impose it through cultural conquest. National identity, says the Labour MP John Denham, must be "created, not discovered." Brown's "Britishness" is not the Britishness that the British people know: it is an artificial one, which must be brought into law by statute and regulation.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn't work. Britishness exists already, in the form successive generations have fashioned. It is fraternal, not egalitarian—or as Orwell put it, communal, not official ("All the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when they are communal, are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'"). The nation is the greatest fraternity of all, yet it is liberal in nature. Contra Bismarck and Brown, the "nation" should not be invoked to suppress the smaller institutions that give us a sense of ourselves. When nationalism becomes a proxy for egalitarianism, when fraternity is suborned to equality, its value is lost.
For three centuries, well into the 20th, the state was small, and played a supervisory rather than an active role. In the famous metaphor, it was the umpire, not a player, in the game. The players were the individual (represented politically by the Whigs then the Liberals) and society (represented by the Tories then the Conservatives), one struggling for liberty and the other for fraternity in a process that progressively realised them both. The constant renewal of this dialectic is the task of the right, for the task of the left is to disrupt it.
It is central to the dogma of New Labour that the alliance of individual and society is an unnatural, indeed contradictory one. "Devotion to the free market on one hand, and to the traditional family and nation on the other, is self-contradictory," says Anthony Giddens in The Third Way, a sentiment echoed throughout the literature of New Labour. The myth is well established that liberty and fraternity are incompatible, that individualistic enterprise is incompatible with social solidarity.
Liberty and fraternity may be in tension, but they are not incompatible. The free market depends on the values of trust and reciprocity that are generated by the traditional family and nation, and these in turn are best preserved in a climate of freedom.
Indeed, liberty needs fraternity. At around the time that equality was discredited with the fall of communism, liberty also encountered its limits. Thatcherism saw a vast improvement in the productive power of the country by means of a liberation of individual initiative. This was partly achieved by the dismantling of the collective, fraternal institutions—city corporations, trade unions, local councils—which abused their powers to trammel private freedom. And at the same time a culture developed that celebrated iconoclasm, irreverence for all things established, and the gratuitous pursuit of individual wealth. By the end of the 1980s, despite the great improvements in personal living standards and overall GDP, the impression that many people had of the Tory government was that it stood for the destruction of established manners and neighbourhoods. For many voters, the phrase David Willetts heard on the doorstep during the 1992 election campaign summed up Thatcherism: "You lot are the wrecking crew."
John Major's government recognised the problem and tried to deal with it. The "back to basics" campaign was easily caricatured as a call for a return to the pre-permissive society. It was, more accurately, simply a recognition of the place of fraternity in politics. A more subtle statement was made by David Willetts in "Civic Conservatism" (Social Market Foundation, 1994). He attempted to reclaim the language of fraternity from the left, and to show that the institutions that stand between the individual and the state are central to the Conservative philosophy.
In this context it is easier to understand David Cameron's stress on social justice, following the route pioneered by Iain Duncan Smith. This is not, as unsophisticated critics imagine, a leftwards shift from liberty to equality. Cameron is not proposing an extension of state power. He is proposing an extension of social power, a move in favour of the voluntary institutions—the "social enterprises"—that exist in neighbourhoods themselves.
Glaring inequality is of course an affront to social justice. Yet the essence of social justice consists not in equality but in what Oliver Letwin has described as "right relationships" between individuals and among groups. The most entrenched social problems cannot be addressed solely by actions taken by the state towards the individual, for they are social problems, caused by, and only soluble by, society.
This is not to say that the state has no role to play in redressing social ills, any more than the individual is not ultimately responsible for his or her own life. But it does mean a certain scepticism about the efficacy of state action. New Labour is said to have created over 600 new criminal offences, and passed a new law for every day it has been in office. By contrast, David Cameron emphasises exhortation rather than instruction. He often quotes Edmund Burke's dictum that politicians "ought to know… what belongs to laws, and what manners alone can regulate." Laws are helpful insofar as they affect manners; they should not try to replace them. The state should not try to design, in TS Eliot's words, "systems so perfect that no one will need to be good." Cameron believes that politicians can play a role in the culture—not by extending the remit of government, but by leading the debate. Politicians can meddle with fraternity only if they do so on the basis of liberty.
Since he became leader, Cameron has been striving, with dogged persistence, to drum a handful of catchphrases into the public mind. The most important are "trusting people" and "we're all in this together." "Trusting people" refers to liberty—individuals should be trusted to make their decisions for their lives. And "we're all in this together" refers to fraternity, to the sphere of belonging.
Of course, "trusting people" is well known as a principle of Conservatism: the right stands for liberty. Therefore Cameron has also emphasised the shift he is making. His soundbite "there is a we as well as a me in politics" represents the move from liberty to fraternity, from one to some. Finally, "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state" explains that fraternity should not be confused with equality.
How do these ideas translate into concrete policy? The reports of the Conservative policy review are still some months off, but certain themes are emerging that illustrate the connection between liberty and fraternity. When Cameron says he is concerned about the power of some big businesses, such as supermarkets, he is not moving leftwards towards equality. Anxiety about the power of large corporations is prompted partly by a concern for liberty. State support for large retail developments restricts the freedom of both consumers (choice is limited by supermarkets driving out smaller rivals) and of the local community (farmers are rarely in an equal relationship with the big retailers they supply). The same might be said of housing, where large housebuilders provide identikit dwellings and neighbourhoods are impotent to resist large and ugly new housing developments. Local discretion, by contrast, will encourage more houses where communities need them, meeting individual aspiration for home ownership (liberty) and the communal desire for beauty and the settled order (fraternity).
Localism is one of the defining themes of today's Conservative party. The pursuit of equality—often made, in line with the left dialectic, in the name of fraternity and social solidarity—has tended to a wholesale centralisation of local institutions. Yet research from Switzerland, where the cantons allow varying degrees of popular participation in decision-making, shows how important direct democracy is in growing social capital. Significantly, even when people do not get their way, when they find themselves in a minority on a local issue, they tend to be happier with the result than if they had never been consulted (Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, "Happiness, Economy and Institutions," Economic Journal, October 2000).
Localism comprehends both liberty, the belief that people should be trusted to make the decisions that affect their own neighbourhoods, and fraternity, the recognition that a community is all in it together. Fraternity also explains why the Conservative scepticism towards nuclear energy should not be seen as a move leftwards towards equality. It is peculiar that nuclear power should ever have been regarded as right-wing, relying as it does on a monopolistic provider operating under licence from the state. The Conservatives are now in favour of a more various and local energy supply. Indeed, microgeneration might be seen as the policy trope of the Cameron project: decentralised, diverse and sustainable.
In the public services there is a new Conservative emphasis on professionalism. The professions represent small fraternities of their own—self-regulating clubs of experts. The pressure from Whitehall to conform to central priorities has diminished these fraternities. The Conservatives, by contrast, have pledged to reduce the link between the professions and the state. But professionals should not be left to get on with their job without external accountability. Fraternity on its own becomes stultifying, resistant to innovation and hostile to outsiders. So public servants must be accountable somewhere—not upwards to government but downwards and outwards to their clients and the community. Fraternity will be better served by a voluntary relationship with liberty than by a forced relationship with equality.
And yet the emphasis on fraternity also helps to explain why headline personal tax rates are less central to the Conservative message than formerly. It is certainly the case that personal taxes are too high. We are suffering what Keith Joseph long ago called "the pocket money society": a combination of high taxes, high house prices, expensive pensions and large welfare entitlements runs the risk of infantilising the population, leaving us each with just enough money to spend on pleasure but not enough to spend on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Yet the first priority should be social, not individual. That is why George Osborne has indicated his immediate priority is to relieve the tax burden on business, the fraternal glue that holds many communities together. With so much of the workforce currently employed by the state, and so many vital services provided by it, reductions in personal taxation will have to be introduced gradually, and only when conditions are propitious. "Fiscal stability before tax cuts" is not David Cameron's way of saying he will increase public spending, but simply a recognition of priorities.
Cameron's signature theme in recent months has been wellbeing, which he contrasts with politicians' traditional concern for gross domestic product. National wealth is of ultimate concern to all of us; yet few families concern themselves with it directly. What matters to us is our own wealth, and—just as important—the circumstances in which we earn and spend it. Surveys (and common sense) confirm that people regard their material standard of living to be merely a subset of their overall quality of life.
For most people, the key agent of wellbeing is the family. And here the left's tendency to equate society with the state is most apparent. Giddens has pointed to the similarity between the family and the public sector: both, he says, depend on equality, rights and "negotiated" (rather than "traditional") authority. Maybe so. But the effect of this equation in the leftwing mind has been an intrusion of government into the family. Distrust of traditional authority has caused the downgrading of marriage in the legal and fiscal systems, and the consequent involvement of the state in all the intricacies of family life.
The promotion of marriage will promote liberty. More importantly, it will also promote fraternity. The evidence shows that, more often than the alternatives, the institution of marriage binds a family together, helping children grow up happy and socialised.
Ultimately—thankfully—it is not the state which determines whether people get married or not. Laws and money are less directly instrumental than social factors, the attitudes and expectations that prevail in families and communities. Yet the state can send signals through society about what works and what doesn't. Currently the signals are against marriage; Cameron has pledged to reverse them.
The same egalitarian impulse that led to comprehensive education is now being applied to the care of children. One of Brown's most important domestic reforms has been the introduction of "universal children's centres." These represent a key plank of what Jill Kirby of the Centre for Policy Studies has called "the nationalisation of childhood." Rather than parents taking responsibility for childcare, they are now expected to hand over their children to state agencies. By contrast, Cameron has spoken of the need for a more flexible childcare system, allowing parents to make use of voluntary bodies, including the extended family itself. Social enterprises rather than government agencies should have the responsibility of looking after children outside the family.
Let no one imagine that we are in an age beyond ideology. The battleground has shifted, but the same armies are fighting, and ultimately for the same causes. Diehards of either side call in vain for a return to the old ways, when liberty and equality launched missiles at each other across the gulf of their differences. Now these principles are joined in close battle. The dim-sighted imagine that the parties are engaged in a mutual love-in. But that huddle is not a consensus. It is a passionate disagreement about who owns the ground of fraternity, and whether the state or the individual will lift its banner there.
