A less authoritarian Tory Party would have fewer authoritarian policies. Why doesn't it?

There appears to be something of a splurge of thinking in the Conservative Party. I'm keen on this especially given we're also in government making it much harder to leading figures to burst into thoughtful song - the dour, dull business of government 'twas ever a drag on ideas. The thinking seems to revolve around three themes: being altogether jollier, escaping the legacy of Thatcherism, and making a 21st century case for capitalism.

Now this all sound like a slightly updated version of Reaganism (for the record, the USA's best post-war president and a man whose ideas still resonate in their defence of freedom, community and a sunnier life) but underneath is covers over the gaping chasm in the UK's Conservative Party. This isn't a matter of policy nuance but something much more fundamental, a sort of cavaliers and roundheads divide between those wanting a stern parental grip on society and those who think a load more freedom is a great idea.

It's true to say that Conservatives have a sort of on/off love affair with liberalism - David Cameron famously described himself as a 'liberal conservative', a tag that raised the ire of the more autocratically-inclined in the party despite Cameron repeatedly demonstrating his illiberalism. Elsewhere - in what is probably the mainstream of the party - support for illiberal ideas like ID cards, stricter licensing laws, minimum pricing for alcohol, chasing immigrants about with slightly racist posters, and wanting controls on the Internet in the vain hope they will stop teenaged boys looking at pornography.

So when Ruth Davidson, probably the most shining champion of Cameron's liberal conservatism says:

“We look a bit joyless, to be fair. A bit authoritarian, sometimes”.

I have two conflicting reactions. The first is positive, fist-pumping agreement - we really need to stop nannying and fussing over the public as if they're unable to make any decisions at all without the gentle guiding (big stick wielding) hand to the paternal state. So well said, Ruth, well said.

The second reaction is that Ruth is a raging hypocrite - after all:

“Support for alcohol minimum pricing represents a major policy shift for the Scottish Conservatives. It follows my commitment as leader to undertake a widespread review of policy.

“I am delighted that we have managed to secure two major concessions which will reassure the retail industry following productive negotiations with the Health Secretary.”

Here's a policy that is harmful and stupid in equal measure, is the epitome of joyless authoritarianism and Ruth Davidson walked her Scottish Tories into voting for it.

If the future for the Party lies in being more fun, less fussy and more libertarian (a view that seems to have its champion more in Liz Truss than Ruth Davidson) then we need to put an end to things like minimum pricing, sugar taxes, aggressive benefit sanctions, ever expanding demands for ID, and stupid immigration policies that prevent businesses getting the skilled labour they need to compete in the global race David Cameron was always banging on about. Above all we should start treating the British public as adult friends and neighbours who we want to help get along, support when they're in trouble and care for when upset or ill. What we're getting instead is rampant fussbucketry that seems to view people as slightly retarded eleven-year-olds who can only survive under the benign, authoritarian gaze of a nanny state.

Ruth Davidson is right, the Conservative Party needs to be less authoritarian. To to this we should start by not proposing authoritarian policies. It might just help!

....

Article 50 Case: Incompetence, lies and the importance of free speech

I may have been misunderstood. Not because of anything I said but because of how some people decided they knew what I'd said or because they knew what I really meant. The starting point was that, following the High Court decision about invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, I was angry. Indeed, I was as angry as I had ever been about something political.

Now if people had noted what I said, they'd have spotted how my anger wasn't directed at those three judges (however much I might think their decision egregious) but rather at the Government. After all they'd proposed and got support for (overwhelming support as it happens) a proposal to have a referendum on our membership of the European Union - something that had been in the manifesto that government stood on in May 2015:

That’s why, after the election, we will negotiate a new settlement for Britain in Europe, and then ask the British people whether they want to stay in the EU on this reformed basis or leave. David Cameron has committed that he will only lead a government that offers an in-out referendum. We will hold that in-out referendum before the end of 2017 and respect the outcome.

So my expectation was that the result of the referendum (and whether you like it or not, we voted to leave) would be implemented. The Government even wrote to us all telling us just that:



All pretty unequivocal. It seems, however, that this isn't really the case, at least as far as those three judges are concerned. Not only was the Government incompetent in proposing a referendum bill that didn't do what it said in the manifesto, they then compounded this by issuing a false statement that this was so. Put simply the Government led by David Cameron was either incompetent or it lied (maybe even both). I feel entirely justified in being as angry with this as I was with Tony Blair's government when it sent young men to die in Iraq on the basis of what turns out to have been a lie. Just as subsequent enquiry revealed Blair's duplicity, the three judges last week revealed the incompetence (or lies or both) of David Cameron's government.

Although I may not be angry with the judges, I do have a great deal of sympathy for the many people - including those writing the front page headlines in some newspapers - who were explosively cross with the decision and those who made it. And I find the reaction of too many, especially lawyers clucking round their superiors, to these headlines deeply concerning. All this stuff about the headlines "intimidating" the judges (by writing in a newspaper - how spineless are they?) and wanting some sort of unspecified action from the Government to deal with the offending editors simply represents an attack on press freedom and free speech. Do we really think a headline in the Daily Mail is going to destroy the independence of the judiciary, however unpleasant and intemperate that headline might be?

The thing with free speech is that it's loud, messy and often pretty unpleasant (trust me on this - I get that same bile directed at me as those judges got). But no part of our state's institutions should be immune from robust criticism - even when that criticism is ill-informed or ignorant. It is disturbing that the Bar Council and a parade of "Important Legal People" think judges should be privileged by newspapers being punished in some way if they dare to criticise. The law - just like other institutions - needs broad public support. If the law's leadership is too thin skinned to make good decisions because a newspaper might have a go at those decision, then perhaps we need to get better leaders?

If the law is excluded from exposure to free speech because of 'judicial independence' then we have a problem. Law in all its forms - and the decisions lawyers and judges make - is central to our lives. If we're not permitted to challenge those laws, those lawyers and those judges then our liberty is compromised. The law becomes vainglorious, privileged and its practitioners untouchable. In a nation that values freedom and the idea of democracy, this cannot be so.

....

The most significant political moment of 2015

*****

The most important thing that happened this year in Britain (aside from me getting re-elected) was the election of a majority Conservative Government. I find it odd that all the pundits are gently tiptoeing around this truth and the fact that this is probably the year's most telling and surprising political moment:

Now I didn't see this live on the BBC but instead heard it on the radio as we pulled up to park across the road from Victoria Hall in Keighley. At that moment the first flicker of a smile was on our faces as we realised that nearly all the pollsters, newspaper pundits and TV experts were wrong. What we'd heard on doorstep after doorstep was right - "we don't want that man", "a deal with the SNP would destroy the country", and most commonly, "things are just about OK we can't afford to mess it up".

We still had to stand through the seemingly endless process of an election count conducted by Bradford Council - indeed it wasn't until the next day when we arrived at Bradford Brewery for a pint with George Grant the brilliant (if unsuccessful this time) Conservative candidate in Bradford West that the truth of it all sank in - there really was a majority Conservative government that could make the necessary and right choices for Britain. As an aside this moment of reverie was interrupted by a slightly tipsy fellow who tried to pick a fight with my blue rosette. Although no fight ensued, I'm pretty confident that the rosette would have won even unattached to my suit jacket.

It now seems that this unpredicted (well, mostly unpredicted) result not only gave Britain good government but led to the Labour Party exploring the darker parts of its collective psyche and electing a man best known for appearing on platforms with terrorists as its leader. But the election of Jeremy Corbyn, for all the obsession of the left with its supposed significance (especially all the wibble about a "new, caring sharing politics" or whatever), was only possible because David Cameron won an overall majority.

Since that election success - presaged by that exit poll - it almost seems as if the punditry has decided that it was always going to happen this way, that Conservative majority government is the normal course of things (despite it being eighteen long years since the last one), and that other matters are more significant. No-one looks at what Cameron achieved and what it means for us - not just victory in the Scottish independence referendum protecting the integrity of the UK and leaving the SNP dominant in Scotland but hamstrung by its arrogant belief, just like the left's arroagance seven months later, that it had won when it hadn't - but also the prospect of a referendum allowing the country (and the Conservative Party) to lance the boil of its relationship with Europe.

Across the world there were any number of telling political events - the re-election of Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Angela Merkel's embracing of Syrian refugees, Turnbull's defenestration of Tony Abbott - even the final election of Aung Suu Kyi as prime minister of Burma sixty-eight years after the assassination of her father. But the most surprising was Cameron's election victory.

So for Britain, at least, 2015's top politician has to be David Cameron, the most important event his re-election as prime minister with an overall majority, and the killer moment the hesitant - blood drained from his face, unbelieving - announcement of that BBC exit poll at 10pm on 7 May.

.....

A Yorkshire tale or "We get the media we deserve. And it ain't pretty."

This morning I went to listen to the Prime Minister. And he had a lot to say - about prison reform, promoting digital government, the case for deficit reduction, payment by results and getting decision-making closer to ordinary people through devolution. It was interesting and important - it doesn't matter whether you agree with the Conservative agenda or not, what he said mattered.

As I left the venue for the PM's speech a BBC TV reporter poled up to me accompanied by a cameraman. The camera was pointed in my face and a microphone shoved at me.

"Did you listen to the Prime Minister's speech this morning," asks the reporter.

"Yes" I reply.

"Would you like to comment on something Mr Cameron said before the speech that we picked up and recorded. Something about Yorkshire people hating each other?"

"No" I reply.

This conversation was repeated (only more brusquely) with another BBC reporter - this time a local one.

Now I could at this point have a good old go at the priorities of the media - how a mild gaffe by the Prime Minister is more important to them, a sort of "ha ha ha, he he he, gotcha, you're an idiot" approach to the news. But the reality is that the media are just a mirror to society - this petty and irrelevent news-making reflects our sad pleasure in schadenfreude and childish slapstick. Instead of reporting the actual news, we prefer to either point and giggle or else (and worse) adopt a faux-outrage for the sake of political point-scoring and the indulgence of our prejudices.

The problem here is that people who disagree politically with Cameron will dollop their prejudice all over social media, will ring up phone ins and generally behave as if the Prime minister had suggested the rounding up and summary execution of every Yorkshireman (perhaps followed by raising towns to the ground and ploughing the earth with salt). It's not simply that these people have conveniently mislaid their vestigial sense of humour but that they see Cameron's comment as the most important element of the news.

It's fine for such an approach to feature in gossip-mongers like Private Eye or Guido Fawkes but the BBC is not there to peddle eavesdropped gossip but to report the things that matter. Ramming a microphone in my face is fine if you're going to ask me about the speech I've just heard but not if you just want to find someone to express the faux outrage that will make your pathetic piece of tittle-tattle into a better story.

In the end this sort of focus - taken up with self-important comments like "this shows the utter contempt that Cameron and the Tories have for the North and exposes the whole devolution agenda as a con" - shows the complete lack of any depth or substance in much of our political debate. And the fault lies with us, with our preference for ad hominem, our obsession with trying to catch people out, and our tendency to conduct political debate in the manner of two ten-year-old boys - 'my Dad's bigger than your Dad', 'we've got a bigger car and two tellies', 'you're stupid with a snotty nose', 'bogey boy, bogey boy, na na na'.

I'm not being partisan here - it's just as bad when the focus is on Ed Miliband eating a sandwich or Andy Burnham talking to a fake donor (isn't is odd how the media think it fine to use deception but are so judgemental about deception in others). Not only are we a staggeringly hypocritical society but we a in danger of becoming down right nasty - only a degree away from picking on someone because they've a runny nose or spectacles or ginger hair or a funny walk. For sure we can all have a laugh at what Cameron said and, if you like that sort of thing, at his discomfort. But it really has nothing to do with the Government's programme or with what are today's important news stories.

We get the media we deserve. Petty, insubstantial, snide, gossipy and, at times, just nasty. The media do this because it seems to be what we want. Laughing at others misfortune, ogling celebrities' divorces, manufacturing offence, and conducting debate on the basis of gotcha rather than a considered assessment of the issues and challenges facing political decision-makers. Not very pretty.

....

Quote of the Day...

****

Written as a founder member of the Norman Tebbit fan club:

“I joined the Conservative Party in 1946 and I’m not going to be pushed out by adventurers. It’s my party.”

Absolutely Norman - I'm a johnny-come-lately since I only joined in 1976 but David Cameron was still in Prep School. It's my Party too.

...

"I don't approve of you drinking" - Cameron's message to the English

The softening up process - the drip drip of judgemental leakage that typifies Cameronism - continues as we're warned about the new "Alcohol Strategy":

The plans, being driven by David Cameron, have raised fears that middle-class households will bear the brunt of measures supposedly aimed at troublemaking youths and other anti-social drinkers. 

Now when this all started it was driven by the recycling of old photographs in the Daily Mail. You know the ones I mean - attractive girl, drunk, draped over a bench. All accompanied by the dire description of our town centres as ridden with drunken violence. So minimum pricing was born - not to make us healthy but to get rid of the unsightly tramp, to discourage the baseball-cap wearing youth from quaffing cheap cider at the park gates and to end "pre-loading" thereby making town centres civilised places where people promenade between tea shops rather than stagger from bar to bar.

But it's not about that now. It's about you and me sitting at home, not bothering anyone and enjoying a glass of wine while watching the X-Factor:

“People shouldn’t think this is just about yobs getting drunk in parks and kids preloading before going out — this is going to affect respectable middle-class people popping into Waitrose for a couple of bottles of sauvignon blanc at the weekend.” 

So from a (misguided and misplaced) policy aimed at those buying cheap booze - by definition these folk don't shop at Waitrose let alone Booth's - we now have policies targeted at the myth of increasing alcohol consumption. It seems we will get a consultation - but it won't be about whether these proposals are a good or bad idea or even whether they will actually achieve what they claim.

Mr Cameron this year backed a 40p minimum unit price, but it is understood that the Home Office will next week seek views on a range of options for a minimum price for a unit of alcohol.

The policy is confused, won't achieve its stated aims, is illiberal, will promote rather than reduce crime and will close down a load of corner shops. And it will annoy people - not much but enough to flake a few more off the Tory branch. These people won't take to the streets in protest. They won't fill the pages of the Guardian or the BBC's bit of the airwaves with their voice.

But they will give both barrels of their opinion to the next Tory canvasser. And I don't blame them.


....

David Cameron, Conservative (and let's not forget it)

****

Yesterday evening, amongst the usual chatter and gossip, we had a few thoughts about what we mean by being a ‘conservative’. And, in some ways, with the loudness of the Tory “right” and the seeming success of UKIP this discussion is important. After all (and I know it’s not universally agreed) UKIP folk often lay claim to being “libertarian”.

The starting point was my observation that David Cameron is the most “High Tory” – the most ‘conservative’ – prime minister since Stanley Baldwin. I was asked to explain not least because, as readers here know, I get very angry at Cameron’s knee-jerk nannying fussbucketry. So how could I, as a conservative, describe Cameron as the “most Conservative leader”?

The answer to this lies in two central concepts of conservatism (or at least English conservatism) – the first is what we might call ‘noblesse oblige’ and the second is the idea of government as administration.

‘Noblesse oblige’ is the idea that a person laying claim to nobility is obliged to act nobly. We could describe it as a duty on the citizen to assist those less fortunate or even, to borrow from Hillaire Belloc:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.

Some recoil from this concept seeing in it the ossification of society, the triumph of aristocracy as an institution. But for Cameron – and we see this in his enthusiasm for “social action” – such an obligation to act nobly is essential to conservatism. We are defined by what we do rather than what we support. Passing laws to help the poor in Africa or to care for communities in England is not sufficient; we must act ourselves to help society. A central tenet of Cameron’s conservatism is the idea of “giving back” – we are fortunate so it behoves us to put some of that fortune back into society.

The second concept is the idea of administration. Some people see the purpose of securing political power as the way to effect change, to direct the forces of government so as to improve mankind. In Cameron’s conservatism this is not the case; the purpose of power is administration – the running of good government.

A Tory friend at university once described this as “soft loo paper conservatism” – the object of government is to deliver contentment, comfort, security and maybe happiness to the citizen. There is no place in conservatism for the idea that mankind can – or should – be bettered or that government, through planned action, can improve society. If society is to get better, it will do so because people act nobly not because government willed it so.

As importantly, Cameron’s “conservatism as effective administration” requires attachment to and confidence in institutions – the National Health Service, the Civil Service, Royal Colleges, Universities. Government should concern itself with ensuring these institutions are well administered rather than with the outcomes of the institutions work. Put the right leaderships in place and trust in their judgement is what government must do – and then act to implement and enforce the plans those leaders create.

This may not be my conservatism – mine is founded on the idea of place, the principle of responsibility and the imperative of freedom – but no-one can say that Cameron is not a conservative.

....

Entering an Age of Disapproval

Over the weekend my reaction to the news that David Cameron was insisting on introducing a minimum price for alcohol fluctuated between resignation, anger and cynicism. Resignation at the seeming inevitability of the nannying fussbucket’s victory. Anger that a Conservative prime minister thinks it OK to muck about with prices for the purpose of social engineering. And cynicism in that Cameron appears to be chucking some red meat to the health lobby ahead of the final stages of the Health Bill’s progress through parliament.

With the new week came the dawning realisation that Cameron is merely a mirror of a depressing age – his championing of nannying fussbucketry reflects his penchant for government by dinner party and a resulting tendency for Mumsnet-style kneejerk reactions to perceived problems in “society”.

It’s not just minimum pricing for alcohol, the PM has moaned about chocolate oranges in W H Smiths, the “premature sexualisation” of girls (but for some reason not boys) and has proposed ‘fat taxes’ on the ‘most unhealthy foods’.  Whenever Cameron wants a positive headline he turns to the judgement of other people’s lifestyles and other people’s choices. And in doing this he is simply reflecting the age in which we now live.

We have entered an “Age of Disapproval” – after several decades of growing openness, personal freedom and choice, society has looked at itself and decided it doesn’t approve. Where once liberalisation was applauded, it is now seen as license, as an encouragement to decadent hedonism. We have created a new set of sins – things of which we disapprove.

A few years ago a good night out was something good – a chance to blow away some cobwebs, let our hair down and enjoy ourselves. Now it’s binge-drinking and it's unhealthy - a terrible burden on society and especially on that most sacred of sacred cows, the National Health Service.

There was a time in all our lives when the thing that hit the spot was a full English breakfast – bacon, sausage, fried eggs, hash browns or fried bread, maybe a bit of black pudding and perhaps some beans. After that big night out this great meal set us right again. Now these meals are cancer-giving, artery-clogging and sinful – we disapprove of such indulgence with talk of rising obesity and, you’ve guessed it, the great cost to the NHS of such a terrible diet.

Not so far back in time, we saw smoking as a bad habit but tolerated the smoker – it was their choice after all. We liked the fact that places made provision for smokers while allowing non-smokers space as well. Today, smoking sits as the thing we disapprove of the most. And we don’t stop at condemning the sin – we ostracise and exclude the sinner as well, casting them out into the cold and rain, making them second-class citizens, like pariahs.

Everywhere we look, we see disapproval – complaints about the covers of so-called ‘lads mags’, frowning criticism of models for being too thin and condemnation of mothers for putting a cream egg in their child’s lunchbox. Politicians, doctors, scientists, journalists and pundits fall over each other to express disapproval of the choices other people make. And this disapproval is followed by calls for action to prevent such evil from spreading – whether we’re talking about school dinners, the ‘sexualisation’ of children or me having a very large whisky at the end of a long day.

Right now the pendulum is swinging away from personal choice and private freedom towards a controlling state and society. The “Age of Disapproval” chalks up a new victory with each passing day – with every one of these little wins making society a little less free and life for so many a little less pleasant.

But this is fine for the New Puritans, prohibitionists and healthy living fanatics – it means that people are directed towards an approved, purposeful and sober life and away from indulgent, hedonism and pleasure for the sheer joy of its experience.

It isn’t a better world. It is a dreary, depressing, controlling culture where we may live a little longer but that extra will be free from pleasure, without the chance of indulgence.

It truly is an “Age of Disapproval”.

....

Save us from the nannying fussbuckets...

The Prime Minister - tempted here to call him "nannying-fussbucket-in-chief" - has visited a hospital somewhere in the North East where he's chosen to share his wisdom with us on the matter of alcohol. We're told:

...the last decade has seen a "frightening growth" in the number of people who think it is "acceptable for people to get drunk in public in ways that wreck lives, spread fear and increase crime", many of them under the legal drinking age.

A frightening growth, Mr Cameron? Show us where it's hiding for the truth is that consumption of alcohol, alcohol-related crime or anti-social behaviour and the incidence of binge-drinking have fallen over the past ten years. Yes, folks - fallen.  And the biggest fall in consumption has been among 18-24 year-old men.

So why do the nannying fussbuckets keeping on with this "growing problem" nonsense?

The objective of course is prohibition - the "denormalisation" of drinking. This is, for the Church of Public Health, a moral crusade, the abolition of a normal pleasure for millions of people simply because these people - these nannying fussbuckets - disapprove of it.

Injury from sports and physical exercise costs the NHS more than drinking does - the hospitals are filled with people suffering from breaks and sprains, bashes and bruises. Yet no-one is calling for rugby or horse-riding to be banned or for a gym tax.

These people simply disapprove of people drinking - especially young working class men.

So I have a suggestion for Mr Cameron - next time you want to make announcements about boozing make them in a busy pub in front of real live drinkers. See how they respond!

....