Of all the deep ironies of the Blair years, Alastair Campbell's proclamation "we don't do God" surely must stand out. What provoked the statement was the obvious fact that Blair did 'do' God.
Antonio Weiss reminds us that, in this respect (as in others), Blair was like Thatcher. His communitarian Anglicanism/Catholicism shaped his politics as much as individualist Dissenting faith shaped Thatcherism. As Weiss points out, however, Blair and Thatcher are anything but the exception.
These giants of recent British political history are not alone in their faith. In his official biography, long after any need to pay "lip-service" to belief would seem necessary, Harold Macmillan claimed that: "I go to Communion as long as I can ... I reach for the Bible whenever I can." Wilson was brought up as a Baptist, at university joined the evangelical Oxford Group, and in 1963 declared: "I have religious beliefs and they very much affected my political views." According to Douglas-Home's biographer, his "Christianity was of the heart ... a matter of personal." Heath claimed in his autobiography that: "My Christian faith provided foundations for my political beliefs", and Callaghan was a former Sunday school teacher. Major appeared rather hesitant when discussing his faith on Radio 4, but still declared: "I do believe. I don't pretend to understand all the complex parts of Christian theology, but I simply accept it." The Calvinist/Presbyterian faith of Gordon Brown's upbringing in the Church of Scotland makes him just another in a line of believing prime ministers.
The role of faith in the public square in post-secular Britain is much more complex and nuanced than either secularist Left or Christian Right acknowledge. For over a thousand years Christianity existed as what the historian Maurice Cowling termed "public doctrine". The end of Christendom, the dismantling of the confessional state, and the slow emergence of a post-religious society have together brought about a post-secular Britain. Post-secular, however, is decidely not secular. The narrative of secularisation and modernity overlooks - quite deliberately - the ongoing cultural significance of the Christian tradition. Again in the words of Weiss:
In failing to give sufficient attention to these claims of religious faith, we miss an important historical trend, and a vital factor in understanding the motivations and convictions of our political leaders.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Monday, 8 February 2010
We won ... right?
What has been the most significant change in the period between the UK's general elections of 1945 and 2010? As Geoffrey Wheatcroft puts it today, it "has surely been the rise and fall of socialism":
Halfway through the past century socialism in one form or another seemed irresistible. Stalin was in the Kremlin and Attlee in Downing Street, with flourishing socialist parties throughout western Europe. Since then there has been a tectonic shift to the right, and those who deny this are whistling in the dark. We are sometimes told that Britain remains a fundamentally social democratic country. Maybe it's literal-minded to ask, but in that case, how come Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were prime ministers for 21 of the last 31 years? If either of those is a social democrat, I'm a Maoist.
Following the implosion of Soviet Communism, the Italian left barely exists any more, the French Socialists are in disarray, and the Social Democrats were the big losers in the German election, having fallen in 15 years from 40% to 23% of the vote. Perry Anderson remarks on this decline of centre-left parties in the last chapter of his book, The New Old World, adding grimly: "The pit of contempt into which New Labour has fallen, in the closing stages of the tawdriest regime in postwar British history, is an extreme case".
Many of us on the centre-right will enjoy reading Wheatcroft's analysis. The Left lost. Its heyday was the decades following 1945. When the Wall fell in 1989, the Left fell.
The triumphalism, however, needs to be checked. The Right is about much more than economics. It is principally an understanding of society. Wheatcroft is correct to celebrate the tolerance, respect and pluralism that has emerged in the UK in recent decades:
On the Fogey Right, they lament the good old days, whispering the last enchantments of the 1950s, when murderers were hanged and queers were locked up. There will be mercifully no return to that.
But the centre-right has also profound questions to ask of contemporary society, rather than merely celebrating it. Questions regarding a rights culture which crowds out obligations, the celebration of diversity undermining cohesion, a secularism which threatens authentic pluralism, the philosophical priority given to the sovereign individual.
Socialism is defeated. But perhaps it is not conservatism that has won ... but rather the Manchester School, the utilitarians and the latter-day whigs.
Halfway through the past century socialism in one form or another seemed irresistible. Stalin was in the Kremlin and Attlee in Downing Street, with flourishing socialist parties throughout western Europe. Since then there has been a tectonic shift to the right, and those who deny this are whistling in the dark. We are sometimes told that Britain remains a fundamentally social democratic country. Maybe it's literal-minded to ask, but in that case, how come Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were prime ministers for 21 of the last 31 years? If either of those is a social democrat, I'm a Maoist.
Following the implosion of Soviet Communism, the Italian left barely exists any more, the French Socialists are in disarray, and the Social Democrats were the big losers in the German election, having fallen in 15 years from 40% to 23% of the vote. Perry Anderson remarks on this decline of centre-left parties in the last chapter of his book, The New Old World, adding grimly: "The pit of contempt into which New Labour has fallen, in the closing stages of the tawdriest regime in postwar British history, is an extreme case".
Many of us on the centre-right will enjoy reading Wheatcroft's analysis. The Left lost. Its heyday was the decades following 1945. When the Wall fell in 1989, the Left fell.
The triumphalism, however, needs to be checked. The Right is about much more than economics. It is principally an understanding of society. Wheatcroft is correct to celebrate the tolerance, respect and pluralism that has emerged in the UK in recent decades:
On the Fogey Right, they lament the good old days, whispering the last enchantments of the 1950s, when murderers were hanged and queers were locked up. There will be mercifully no return to that.
But the centre-right has also profound questions to ask of contemporary society, rather than merely celebrating it. Questions regarding a rights culture which crowds out obligations, the celebration of diversity undermining cohesion, a secularism which threatens authentic pluralism, the philosophical priority given to the sovereign individual.
Socialism is defeated. But perhaps it is not conservatism that has won ... but rather the Manchester School, the utilitarians and the latter-day whigs.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Not the Keith Joseph of history
Fraser Nelson's call for Conservatism to return to a supposed Thatcherite orthodoxy continues to attract criticism for its profoundly ahistorical approach. Matthew Parris has highlighted how Nelson's elevation of Keith Joseph to the touchstone of Conservative orthodoxy profoundly contradicts Margaret Thatcher's approach to governing:
Better ... to give the electorate an honest sense of your essential slant on politics, while leaving the beef to be worked up, and talked through, from the more secure position of incumbency. This is not, as Nelson implied, bad advice from a bad angel. It is the same advice, from the same angel, as Margaret Thatcher heeded in 1978-79, when she was persuaded by quiet Tory voices to agree a manifesto that was gloriously unspecific. Crikey, it was years before she got the closed shop in her sights: in 1979 it was dynamite, as is the NHS today. As for guaranteeing overseas aid spending (about which Nelson complains), that’s loopy, I agree, but the sums are chickenfeed and to the caring classes it means a lot. Who, anyway, are the voters who are going to vote Labour because the Tory leader has not committed himself to enough right-wing policies?
Fraser Nelson’s column was taken from his Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture. I knew Keith Joseph. I consider him the greatest Conservative thinker of his century. But the truth is that Mrs Thatcher, who was not a great thinker but only a great Prime Minister, kept Joseph in his box.
It is the ideologue's credo - ignore the complexities, nuances and compromises of history and then create a narrative which vindicates an ideology, in this case free-market liberalism. It is, of course, a profoundly unconservative approach to history, underpinned by a profoundly unconservative philosophy. History and society are treated in the same irreverent fashion - as the raw material for ideology.
Fraser Nelson's lecture was the voice of the Manchester School, not historic conservatism.
Better ... to give the electorate an honest sense of your essential slant on politics, while leaving the beef to be worked up, and talked through, from the more secure position of incumbency. This is not, as Nelson implied, bad advice from a bad angel. It is the same advice, from the same angel, as Margaret Thatcher heeded in 1978-79, when she was persuaded by quiet Tory voices to agree a manifesto that was gloriously unspecific. Crikey, it was years before she got the closed shop in her sights: in 1979 it was dynamite, as is the NHS today. As for guaranteeing overseas aid spending (about which Nelson complains), that’s loopy, I agree, but the sums are chickenfeed and to the caring classes it means a lot. Who, anyway, are the voters who are going to vote Labour because the Tory leader has not committed himself to enough right-wing policies?
Fraser Nelson’s column was taken from his Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture. I knew Keith Joseph. I consider him the greatest Conservative thinker of his century. But the truth is that Mrs Thatcher, who was not a great thinker but only a great Prime Minister, kept Joseph in his box.
It is the ideologue's credo - ignore the complexities, nuances and compromises of history and then create a narrative which vindicates an ideology, in this case free-market liberalism. It is, of course, a profoundly unconservative approach to history, underpinned by a profoundly unconservative philosophy. History and society are treated in the same irreverent fashion - as the raw material for ideology.
Fraser Nelson's lecture was the voice of the Manchester School, not historic conservatism.
Saturday, 6 February 2010
Charles against the Enlightenment
The admiration of Burke's Corner for Prince Charles has now reached its zenith. This week the heir to the throne declared war ... on the Enlightenment:I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt proud of that ... I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it. We cannot go on like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do. But if you challenge people who hold the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything, you do really upset them.
Charles has reminded us that Enlightenment (we can dispense with the self-congratulatory 'the') is merely one historical, social and cultural narrative amongst many. Its values, its beliefs cannot be allowed to dominate the public square to the exclusion of other narratives. A robust pluralism demands that we relegate the Enlightenment from metanarrative to narrative.
And within that robust pluralism, some of us - like Charles - can declare with Burke:
We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire.
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Fraser Nelson's lecture - ideology, not history
Thanks to Fair Deal for drawing my attention to Fraser Nelson's Keith Joseph Memoiral Lecture - an intense assault on Cameron Conservatism from the perspective of purist Thatcherite ideology.Danny Finkelstein has pointed to the "vast contradiction in the central argument" at the heart of the lecture. Nelson suggests that Cameron is another Heath, because he lacks Thatcher's ideological vision and consistency. At the same time he admits that until the Falkland's victory in 1982, Thatcher's revolution was "very shaky". The contradiction does not stop there. Finkelstein notes how Fraser attempts to force a decade of Conservative government into a much shorter timeframe:
And then later, Fraser calls for Cameron to show the self-confidence demonstrated by the Tories in Joseph and Thatcher's day by slashing the top rate of tax.
He then points out that this was done, er, in the Budget of 1988.
In other words - again in direct contradiction of his central theme - this self-confidence was not demonstrated until the Tories had been in power for almost a decade.
What is perhaps most striking, however, is Nelson's reliance throughout the lecture on Keith Joseph as the touchstone of what he regards to be Conservative orthodoxy - free market liberalism and individualism.
This is the Keith Joseph of Thatcherite legend, not the Keith Joseph of history.
Not the Keith Joseph who, as Health Minister in the Conservative government of 1970-74, presided over the NHS in exactly the same manner as every other post-1945 health minister.
Not the Keith Joseph who, as Secretary of State for Industry in Margaret Thatcher's newly-elected government, bailed out British Shipbuilders, British Rail and British Leyland.
Not the Keith Joseph who, as Secretary of State for Education from 1981, insisted on personally approving the individual subject syllabuses before the GCSE system was introduced.
Not the Keith Joseph who said that if he had ever become leader of the Conservative party "it would have been a disaster for the party, country, and me".
The Mad Monk was no ideologue in government - no authentic tory or conservative can be. For conservatism, governing is about the national interest, not the pursuit of ideological purity. Fraser Nelson's lecture is ideology, not history. And that ideology is, in the words of conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, "passing fashion, well-meant, not always misguided, but by no means the ineluctable expression of the conservative point of view".
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Assisted suicide - autonomy over solidarity
The call by Terry Pratchett for the legalisation of 'assisted death', together with the Panorama poll showing a significant majority of Britons supporting such a move, has provoked a response from Guardian columnist Austen Ivereigh. Ivereigh is a practising, thoughtful Roman Catholic. His arguments against 'assisted death', however, are couched in the language of the common good rather than specifically theological terms:
Changing the law would enshrine the idea that we can and should choose the time and place and manner of our death. Death would come under our control. Inevitably, we would use that new power in such a way as to avoid the pain and suffering which dying often entails; and we would soon be persuaded that it was a generous thing to do, because it would free up NHS budgets.
And this new cultural norm would gradually dispense with the whole object of dying, which is precisely that it is out of our control. Those who accompany the dying – as I did recently, at the bedside of my father – know that it is an incredibly profound process, the crystallisation of human life and meaning. It is no accident that hospices and care homes, the places where these journeys are undergone every day, are the most vigorously outspoken against those who are urging a change in the law; they know dying – in all its agony and serenity – and they declare it to be a process so important, so vital, and so necessary that it must be preserved, not as a right for religious freaks but as the norm of a society which sets the value of humanity higher than the narrow constraints of reason.
As Ivereigh suggests, the legalisation of 'assisted suicide' would radically contradict the notion of solidarity that is fundamental to the good society. It would be the defining elevation of autonomy over solidarity, of individualism over shared obligations.
Changing the law would enshrine the idea that we can and should choose the time and place and manner of our death. Death would come under our control. Inevitably, we would use that new power in such a way as to avoid the pain and suffering which dying often entails; and we would soon be persuaded that it was a generous thing to do, because it would free up NHS budgets.
And this new cultural norm would gradually dispense with the whole object of dying, which is precisely that it is out of our control. Those who accompany the dying – as I did recently, at the bedside of my father – know that it is an incredibly profound process, the crystallisation of human life and meaning. It is no accident that hospices and care homes, the places where these journeys are undergone every day, are the most vigorously outspoken against those who are urging a change in the law; they know dying – in all its agony and serenity – and they declare it to be a process so important, so vital, and so necessary that it must be preserved, not as a right for religious freaks but as the norm of a society which sets the value of humanity higher than the narrow constraints of reason.
As Ivereigh suggests, the legalisation of 'assisted suicide' would radically contradict the notion of solidarity that is fundamental to the good society. It would be the defining elevation of autonomy over solidarity, of individualism over shared obligations.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Thatcherism and the Broken Society
Burke's Corner has been critical of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They have, however, raised an issue on the pages of the Guardian that challenges the centre-right. Agreeing that Britain is - as Cameron has famously declared - a Broken Society, Wilkinson and Pickett ask 'who broke it?'
What happened in the later 1980s may now seem merely water under the bridge. But broken Britain is Thatcher's bitter legacy. Rather than having instantaneous effects, inequality gradually corrodes the social fabric. It takes a while for greater material differences to make the social hierarchy steeper, for status competition and consumerism to increase, for people to feel a greater sense of superiority or inferiority, for prejudices towards those lower on the social ladder to harden, for prisons to fill to overflowing under the impact of more punitive sentencing, and for people to seek solace in drugs.
A number of thinkers on the right (Phillip Blond is the most striking example, Kieron O'Hara and Danny Kruger have also suggested this) would agree that Thatcherite market liberalism and radical individualism undermined the traditional bonds of allegiance and obligation in our society - thus, at the least, contributing to the Broken Society. The statism and abstract rights culture of New Labour deepened this malaise, particularly in terms of determined hostility to the little platoons.
For those of us on the centre-right, the task remains to analyse the 80s according to the virtues and values of traditional toryism and conservatism, rather than proclaiming a heroic narrative couched in the discourse of Manchester School liberalism. Wilkinson and Pickett failed in The Spirit Level to offer a convincing account of the good society. They have, however, asked a question that should provoke serious reflection on the centre-right. Did Thatcher's radical individualism contribute as much to the brokeness of our society as the statism and rights culture of New Labour?
What happened in the later 1980s may now seem merely water under the bridge. But broken Britain is Thatcher's bitter legacy. Rather than having instantaneous effects, inequality gradually corrodes the social fabric. It takes a while for greater material differences to make the social hierarchy steeper, for status competition and consumerism to increase, for people to feel a greater sense of superiority or inferiority, for prejudices towards those lower on the social ladder to harden, for prisons to fill to overflowing under the impact of more punitive sentencing, and for people to seek solace in drugs.
A number of thinkers on the right (Phillip Blond is the most striking example, Kieron O'Hara and Danny Kruger have also suggested this) would agree that Thatcherite market liberalism and radical individualism undermined the traditional bonds of allegiance and obligation in our society - thus, at the least, contributing to the Broken Society. The statism and abstract rights culture of New Labour deepened this malaise, particularly in terms of determined hostility to the little platoons.
For those of us on the centre-right, the task remains to analyse the 80s according to the virtues and values of traditional toryism and conservatism, rather than proclaiming a heroic narrative couched in the discourse of Manchester School liberalism. Wilkinson and Pickett failed in The Spirit Level to offer a convincing account of the good society. They have, however, asked a question that should provoke serious reflection on the centre-right. Did Thatcher's radical individualism contribute as much to the brokeness of our society as the statism and rights culture of New Labour?
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