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!

....

Carefully crafted bigotry - a comment on Hilary Mantel's 'Assassination of Margaret Thatcher'

****

Hilary Mantel, I'm told, writes historical fiction. I haven't read anything that she has written before today.I am unlikely to read anything she has written or will write in the future.

However, Ms Mantel has written a little short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is defending herself from the criticism that her writing inevitably precipitated. Now, I've no real issue with Ms Mantel writing such a story, just so long as she is willing to countenance counterfactual history written from a perspective that challenges her prejudices (which I somehow doubt - imagine a story where the assassination of JFK failed and he led the US into WWIII or one where Nelson Mandela was executed for terrorism).

However, her defence (or at least the part quoted in The Guardian) is something of a confused concoction:

“I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating."

The first sentence is fine. Of course we can contemplate why someone might want to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, we don't have to go far to understand that mindset because a man who actually did try to assassinate Margaret Thatcher is alive, well and living in freedom (which says a great deal about our society). However, the second sentence - from someone who has made a fortune from exploiting history - displays a profound misunderstanding of even some history within my living memory. It is Ms Mantel who is running away from history, choosing instead a slanted rewrite formed out of prejudice rather than a real analysis.

In the end all this is fine - I've read the story and it's filled with the sort of bien pensant hatred we've come to expect from the UK's literary elite. It gives us a sort of stage Scouse Irishman as a suitable mirror to Mantel's personal hatreds, a kind of justification for her carefully crafted bigotry:

''It's the fake femininity I can't stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It's the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It's her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It's her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can't cry?''

As an analysis of Margaret Thatcher this is useless but as a revealing insight into Hilary Mantel's hateful bigotry it is really valuable. Everything about the paragraph resonates with the dismissal of an inferior (Thatcher) by her superior (Mantel). Just as the working class man in Ms Mantel's little story is shallow, cardboard, a thing to be patronised, Margaret Thatcher is provincial, suburban, a little bit ordinary. In both cases unlike Hilary Mantel. But the working-class terrorist is portrayed as a victim whereas the lower middle-class shopkeeper's daughter who became prime minister is the villain.

Speaking personally, I find it hard to contemplate creating a false history purely from blind - and ignorant - hatred. Not the fictional vehicle of a conversation between a terrorist and a women whose home he'd barged into - that's a fine basis for a short story. The blind and ignorant hatred is the caricature of Margaret Thatcher, the view that this is the sort of women - indeed Ms Mantel can barely call her a women - who is so unlike me as to be a monster. Ms Mantel goes on and on about how Margaret Thatcher wouldn't like her hair, how she doesn't like the way Thatcher walks, her handbag - she casts herself as some sort of Anti-Thatcher, as a thing entirely built from the PM's disapproval.

What we see here from Ms Mantel is something that, in truth, is foreign to those of us who share Margaret Thatcher's lower middle class background. Taking the trouble to construct a fiction based entirely on your hatred of a caricature of a women you have never met is something peculiar to the bien pensant left. What this short story tells us about Hilary Mantel - bitter, bigoted, ignorant - is far more important than any flicker of insight into the motives of the Provisional IRA or the character of Margaret Thatcher.

....

Thanks Maggie (plus an old quote of mine)

****

Others will write finer prose, there will be a great deal of it too, so I will stick to two things - a one word appreciation of all that Margaret Thatcher did for Britain and a recycled quote from something I wrote in 2009.

The one word - it should be on all our lips really - is thanks.

And the quote - written following one of the periodic occasions when a Labour councillor talked of celebrating Maggie's death:

It’s nearly 20 years since the great lady left office – 12 of which years having been under a Labour Government. For most of those involved in this spat, Maggie is but a memory – even if they were born before 1990 their memories are those of a small child or those transferred across the generation from parent to child. Yes the scars of deindustrialisation, the impact on places like Barnsley of pit closure continue to inform us about the politics of such places ...but the left should look forward – to how their ideas might influence the shape of tomorrow’s world not backwards to dreams of a place that’s gone and won’t come back.

I never considered myself a “Thatcherite” – altogether too whiggish, too Gladstonian for my tastes. But those ten years transformed my country – painfully for sure but changed nonetheless – and made it possible for the small battalions to climb back out of the place they were hiding. Championing those folk is the challenge for me – and it should be something both left and right can support. We do not need big institutions, grand national organisations – we need things local, people-sized, participatory and independent of big government.

So thanks Maggie. RIP.

....