Thursday 29 January 2015

Where Are The Real Tories?

Simon Jenkins writes:
The trouble with David Cameron is that we don’t know what he stands for. How often do we hear this cry, not least from Conservatives? But what is he supposed to stand for?

Two weeks ago I argued the need for a “real Labour” party. It was relatively easy. Labour can be defined by its interests, its texts and proclaimed values.

A “real Tory” is harder to define. In our campaign quest for choices not echoes, what might we find?

The first trouble is that there is a rich variety of Tories, many of them contradictory.

There are strong-leadership Tories, of the Churchill-Thatcher genre.

There are “Gladstonian liberals”, anarcho/libertarians, private sector buccaneers and get-tough statists.

The choice is further complicated by the dominant Tory of recent history, Margaret Thatcher, who displayed elements of all these.

British Toryism, nowadays synonymous with Conservatism, has never escaped its metaphor miasma.

To its mischievous philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, it “sails a bottomless sea” where there is “neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination”.

It is an attitude of mind rather than a set of values – which perhaps explains Cameron.

To Friedrich Hayek, in contrast, conservatism follows the “well-worn path”.

Indeed, if in office, its “power-adoring tendencies are often closer to socialism than to liberalism”.

As for conservatism’s modern interpreter, Roger Scruton, it is about preserving existing things “either as good in themselves … or as safe, familiar, the object of trust and affection”.

In other words, true Toryism is as clear as a black cat in a cellar at midnight.

Nor are we helped since Scruton’s “aversion to change” has been hijacked by Labour.

Any reform to the public sector is now opposed by the two Eds, who regard the central state they left in 2010 as Hayek’s well-worn path.

Such reforms as they made to health and education under Blair involved internal pricing and privatisation, Tory innovations that are now holy Labour writ.

The best search for the “real” in a party should try to disentangle its core values from its lobbies and interest groups.

Last month I sought to detach Real Labour from its trade union and public sector constituents.

I tried, as Crosland did, to marry a revived egalitarianism to a modern mixed economy.

The traditional Tory interests are those of the land, wealth and commerce, championed by a barrage of lobbies clamouring for grants, subsidies and tax reliefs.

The search for Real Toryism must detach it from these.

This is hard, because today’s Conservative sees wealth and free markets as the key to economic growth, even if chunks are taken to support the welfare state.

A pragmatic “muddling through” is the Toryism dominant through most of the 20th century.

It was defined by the party’s last Victorian leader, Lord Salisbury, as “drifting lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boathook to avoid collision”.

These were the party’s “values” from Salisbury through to Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath.

That is no longer true.

The Tory party’s default ideology has become Thatcherism, a confused portfolio sometimes identified (without evidence) with Gladstonian liberalism.

Thatcher had no boathook, only an axe. Under her aegis, Toryism redefined itself against the power of an overwhelming state.

From then on, a Real Tory would oppose that power, even if Thatcher herself was half in love with it, fervently rejecting laissez-faire (“dreadful French phrase”).

A Real Tory would look at the coalition government and ask what it says on the tin.

George Osborne may preach smaller state austerity but – despite what he and his opponents say – he has spent more, with a higher deficit and higher public borrowing.

Spending is £10bn more in real terms than in Labour’s supposedly profligate Indian summer of 2009.

Real Tories would seek a permanent shift in the nation’s resources from the state to the private sector.

They would not splurge money on vanity projects, on “free” schools, sports stadiums, high-speed railways, and flashy science and arts centres.

They would not waste money on upland farmers, Whitehall computers or wind turbine subsidies.

In the past, Toryism wavered.

It even promoted a growing welfare state under Chamberlain and postwar Butskellism, a dalliance that did not fundamentally alter under Thatcher, Blair or Cameron.

Today’s Real Tories would constitute a party of high earners, tax cutters and deregulators. They would favour road tolls, surgery fees and museum charges.

They would assist the poor with housing to reduce true homelessness, but only for that purpose. They would passionately champion the countryside.

Real Tories would be stern monetarists.

Just as they would curb demand in a boom, so they would boost it in a recession rather than starving the economy of cash, as now.

They would see taxes as a creative regulator, imposing them on spending rather than income. They would have no truck with “non-doms” and tax evaders.

They would certainly reject the EU’s Holy Roman Empire of bureaucrats.

Above all, Real Tories would oppose the advance of the modern state – nannying, interventionist, ultimately authoritarian.

They would be closer to the ideas of the American libertarian politician Ron Paul, defending personal freedom in such matters as drug use and opposing intervention in other nations’ internal affairs.

They would fight the arrogant, unrestrained power of Theresa May’s security-industrial complex and her capitulation to a snooper’s charter.

Real Tories would be less United Kingdom unionists than radical decentralists.

Just as their hero, Gladstone, would have saved the old union through Irish home rule, so a Real Tory would save Great Britain through more devolution to Scotland, Wales and, above all, to provincial England.

Such a Britain would look more like fragmented Germany than Napoleonic France.

As we saw with Real Labour, such an offer from today’s Conservative party is near inconceivable as long as the architecture of the British state so mesmerises Westminster politicians.

None dares oppose the monolithic interest group that is modern government.

It towers over the road ahead, an obstruction as much for Real Labour in its concern for equality and the poor as for Real Toryism and its concern for private freedom and personal income.

The tax collector, the regulator, the inspector and the data-gatherer go where they choose, and none dares oppose them.

Labour and Tory alike may wheedle, protest and whinge. But the advance of the state seems inexorable.

A Real Tory would do something about it, but of such Tories there are none.

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