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!

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It was a good-looking march. Britain's new authoritarians take to the streets.

It was a pretty good-looking march. Lots of forty- and fifty-something middle-class men and women flourishing home made banners with witty slogans. We're not sure how many there were - estimates vary from about 20,000 up to half the population and were accompanied by the now familiar moans about how the media were reporting other news (even god-forbid the timely jumping ship of UKIP MP Douglas Carswell) rather than indulging the marchers vanity - but however many turned out they were an attractive bunch. No punks or masked anarchists just 35 year-old civil servants with their faces painted like the EU flags and well-groomed writers who've dragged their seven and eight year old children along.

These are the new authoritarians, the political children of 2016 - Remainers. Looking at the images from yesterday's march I am struck by both the homogeneity of the crowd - for all the talk of diversity it was a very samey looking gathering. And this was also a gathering of the 'haves' not the 'have nots', Harm de Blij's flatearthers rather than the common folk who are happily tied by love and faith to the place they live.

The common theme of the hand-made banners is that somehow a wrong has been done to these people. And, because of this wrong, we should change the principles of democracy to accommodate what they see as right. It's not enough that we had a referendum. It's not enough that Parliament, in accordance with constitutional principles made up yesterday by some judges, voted to allow the advice of that referendum to be taken by the government it advised. No we must have other votes, referendums and debates - a live second-guessing of a delicate negotiation.

At the end of last year I described 2016 as the Year of the Remainer:

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

What's clear to me about these few thousand remainers - let's call them Remain Ultras - is that they've invented a EU that didn't exist before 23 June 2016. Before then the EU was an unloved institution, almost no-one would dream of painting their face with it's flag without first getting a grant and we only waved that flag because the conditions of that grant required us to do so. Even those people who saw our membership as a good thing would have struggled to muster much enthusiasm for defending the EU itself.

Today all that has changed as our Remain Ultras take to the streets - where they'll be addressed by EU pension-holders like Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. Flags are waved, smiling and healthy faces nod at the sage metaphors from these men - cars driving over cliffs are a favourite. The EU is portrayed as a marvellous sugar daddy of an institution, a bastion of democracy, equality and all sorts of other good stuff (including those grants, of course). Then comes the crunch as one of the speakers, yesterday it was David Lammy MP for Tottenham, mentions the D-word:

We’re living in a dictatorship. In democracies people are always allowed to change their minds. Over the coming months and years we will fight.

Nothing out there suggests that any more than a few people have changed their minds about the vote last June. And some of them have come to like Brexit. What Lammy's words tell us, and they could have come from any of those Remain Ultra leaders, is that we cannot afford to see them as figures of fun. They are genuinely a threat to our ideas of liberty, democracy and the right of the people to have a say. As I wrote in December:

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

We must resist this authoritarian, anti-democracy message. Above all we should not indulge this bunch of extremists just because they dress well, have a decent hair cut and nice kids.

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Social Justice - a new authoritarianism

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I got to thinking about social justice. Partly this was because I'm doing a debate on Wednesday with someone who comes billed as a 'Social Justice Campaigner' and partly because it's a term I see used again and again but which seems to avoid clarity or definition. On the one hand we can point to a right wing version as typified by the Centre for Social Justice:

By combining hands-on experience, public involvement, academic rigour and effective political engagement, the CSJ has been able to work from a foundation that has sparked radical public policy change. Since 2004 we have set out over 800 ideas – published across more than 20 research themes – that would make a transformative difference in people’s lives. Many of these recommendations have influenced the political process significantly, revolutionising a tired debate about poverty and social justice. These include: radical welfare reform through Universal Credit; early years intervention programmes; political commitments to prevent family breakdown; pioneering education reforms; efforts to improve the rehabilitation of offenders and drug addicts; action on street gangs; and support for people with unmanageable debts.

I see this as having the same relationship to Conservatism as Methodism appears to have to English protestantism - at least in so far as I understand these things. Indeed, the CSJ does come across as drawing on a Christian conservative tradition that might be associated with 19th century 'muscular Christians', with G K Chesterton or, more recently, with Pope John Paul II. I'm being careful here because the mixing of religion and politics is always tricky. What is clear from the CSJ position on social justice is that it is about poverty and exclusion rather than inequality per se.

The other hand contains the left wing world of our social justice campaigner - the one I'm seeing on Wednesday is from this organisation:

JUST is a groundbreaking initiative set up by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in 2003 to promote racial justice in West Yorkshire. Since its establishment JUST has become a leading voice in the North promoting racial justice, civil liberties and human rights. The fall-out from the 2001 Northern Uprisings and the introduction of draconian legislation following the 7/7 London bombings has resulted in civil liberties and human rights increasingly becoming an integral part of our work in the region.

In an era where the Community Cohesion and Prevent agendas have become the key paradigms of government policy and the Race and Institutional Racism agendas have been rolled back by the State, the adverse impact on Black and minority ethnic people has been unprecedented.

BME people continue to be over-represented in poverty, discrimination, NEETS, criminal justice, stop and search, education, poor health and other poor quality of life outcomes. Instead of investment in resources and funding to address the generational and historic systemic and structural discrimination that BME people experience, the government’s ‘war on terror’ has ‘criminalised’ BME and particularly Muslim people and its community cohesion policy has put the burden of good race relation on visible minorities.

We're in a very different place here from the CSJ. Instead of the focus on poverty we have an emphasis on inequality - the view that government and other institutions are contributors to the lack of justice faced, in this case, by BME communities. And we can encounter the same language from others advocating for LGBT, for women's rights and even for religious minorities (this is hinted at with JUST West Yorkshire saying "...particularly Muslim people....").

The question here is whether we have two entirely different definitions of social justice or whether there is a common theme between the anti-poverty positioning of the CSJ and the minority rights approach of JUST West Yorkshire. I did trawl through the philosophical underpinnings of the idea - from John Rawls backwards (always best to work backwards with philosophy) to Locke and Hobbes via Rousseau. As usual with philosophy it's about a penetrable as six-inch thick steel plate but the themes of poverty and equality (or equity) were common as was this idea of a 'social contract'. Indeed this latter concept seems to me quite the central consideration.

The problem is that this social contract is every bit as nebulous as the idea of social justice. Not only is the contract not written down but there seems to be some confusion as to whether it applies to all of humanity or merely to parts of humanity. Is the social contract something sitting at the level of the neighbourhood (say Cullingworth), region or nation? And is the General Will that Rousseau talks about essentially a vocalisation of that social contract? Finally, who interprets or enforces the social contract and how do we know that reflects the General Will?

I'm saying all this, not because I want to answer all those questions (I'm not sure we can), but rather because we need to understand that, if social justice is the enforcement of Rousseau's social contract, it can only be done through authoritarian means and through the preference for communal rights over individual rights. To do this someone - or some organisation - has to become the arbiter of what is or isn't a breach of that social contract or, in other words, is contrary to social justice.

Sometimes all this is pretty straightforward because there is no conflict between individual and communal rights - for example in arguing that it's wrong to exclude someone from employment on the basis of skin colour, gender or sexual preference. But where personal views (and our right to express them) are concerned we can only enforce social justice by denying individual rights. Thus the 'social justice right' may wish to prevent (or actively discourage) 'non-traditional' family arrangements and the 'social justice left' may want to stop the expression of support for such a traditionalist position. Both positions deny people a right - either to live in a non-traditional family or to express opposition to that idea.

The problem is that both sides invoke (at least implicitly) the idea of the social contract in defence of their position. Yet the positions are - for essentially the same reason on each side - mutually exclusive. The left says excluding the non-traditional is unfair or unequal while the right says that the non-traditional arrangements promote poverty and therefore inequality. Social justice cannot be delivered unless one or other position is rejected.

For the right this means championing stable communities, families (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and often the fear of god. Hard work, community involvement and self-sacrifice in the interest of future generations are held as essential virtues - the social contract is an unwritten commitment to the whole community and that community is local, limited and seeks to be resilient. Social justice is served where everyone is part of secure, supportive and strong communities.

The problem is that this leads to social stasis, to paternalism and to the exclusion of people who reject (or have a different idea of) the essential community virtues. Plus, of course, someone has to define and enforce those virtues, to be the authority.

In the case of the left social justice is served by rejecting homogeneity, placing equality as the primary virtue and ensuring that no actions or speech undermines this primacy. The result is - or aims to be - a homogeneity between communities rather than within communities. Anything that questions the primacy of equality as the social contract's purpose cannot be permitted. Moreover the meaning of equality becomes fluid - it is determined by authority rather than by the reality of access to opportunity. As a result individual rights become secondary as communal rights come to dominate society. It is acceptable to 'no platform' a speaker if it is feared their words might contest the enforcement of the social contract - in ensuring social justice.

I had thought to draw the philosophical line forward down a different route to Giovanni Gentile's transition from Actualism to Fascism where the question of who interprets the General Will was answered though the idea of 'the leader'. The problem, however, is that this takes us - implicit authoritarianism aside - away from the modern position where leadership is more complex. Rather than a single identified leader, we have a sort of groupthink - a hive mind perhaps - that provides the basis on which the General Will is decided and the social contract upheld. Because this collective has market power, authorities bow to the pressure it asserts and exclude those who fail to conform with the perceived General Will.

In the end social justice is really something desired and doesn't need to be defined. The politician who proclaims he is fighting for social justice secures approval by seeming to support some sort of community betterment. The reality is that, whether from right or left, social justice is illiberal and excluding - either by enforcing an intra-communal conformity (the right) or by insisting on an inter-communal conformity (the left). The biggest loss here is, for me, individuality and the accompanying rights to speak, act and live freely.

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Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State...

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Fascism is being reborn.

The headline I've chosen would be welcomed by the Owen Jones' of this world - it describes and defines what they believe. It is the very essence of Richard Murphy's 'courageous state' - a definitively fascist concept.

And the headline is a quotation - a translated quotation - from the man who created Fascism, Benito Mussolini. There was no subtlety at all to Mussolini's hatred of the Italian elite or to his belief that the institutions of society - industrial might, the strength of labour and the passion of leadership - must be directed by the state in the interests of the state.

Fascism is being reborn - here is Lyndsey Hanley writing in the Guardian:

Yet isn't the idea of 3 million people working hard and not being required to pay tax a recipe for their disenfranchisement? The Liberal Democrat segment of the coalition is most likely to see a high tax-free allowance, which goes up to £9,440 on 6 April, as a step towards the goal of a "citizen's income" – a no-strings basic payment from state to individual over and above any earned (and therefore taxable) income. A fundamental component of citizenship, however, is paying towards the ongoing work of building and maintaining resources for everyone to use. 

Everything in the state, nothing without the state.

Every day I see the dark shadows of this authoritarian creed - in the denormalising of personal choices, in the arrays of cameras pointed at everything we do, in the selection of chosen "hatreds" to condemn and in the braying offence of calling for more regulation, more control and more taxation.

As Benito said:

The Government has been compelled to levy taxes which unavoidably hit large sections of the population. The...people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the...people, it does not so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order.

Or perhaps this fascism sums it up:

His narrative depicts the State in a current crisis of confidence, neutered by the self-doubt of elected politicians who are taught to believe that the market knows best. This results in a weak government unable to perform its duties and uncertain of the State’s ability to work for the benefit of the citizens it represents. Yet...vision the State is not just the best but the only solution to the current financial turmoil, uniquely positioned to deliver a prosperous, sustainable, and equitable future for the greatest number.

Mussolini would have cheered Richard Murphy - and his courageous state - to the rafters. Here again is that rallying call for action against the corruption of the markets and the evil of capitalism. Here - cheered on by  the likes of Ms Hanley - is a new authoritarianism of the left, a new fascism.

And it scares me.

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The eco-city - ineffective and authoritarian?

Milton Keynes - is it really so bad?

Ever since I started indulging my fascination with urban geography, I have experienced the promotion of certain selected European cities. Places help up as paragons of municipal virtue – places like Montpelier (pdf):

Planning for recent growth in Lille, Montpellier and Lyon began before explicit sustainable design agendas were common. Nevertheless, these cities exemplify a number of planning and design strategies that advance sustainability on the urban scale. Chief among these are: 1) promoting density and diverse use in the city center, 2) developing urban infrastructure and transit systems that conserve energy and preserve the quality of the urban core, 3) counteracting sprawl through the establishment of concentrated patterns of growth in the urban periphery, and 4) “urban recycling:” the adaptive re-use of existing built fabric and the reclamation of urban post-industrial sites.

And Freiberg:

For 25 years - since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster - Freiburg’s guiding principle has been the saving of natural resources. It now has car-free neighbourhoods (while we still tell ourselves that ‘would never work here’) and trams that run through green corridors. It has a football stadium where the stands double up as solar energy factories.

The Freiburg charter sets out twelve principles for ‘sustainable urbanism’, drawing together ideas of diversity, tolerance, walkability, good public transport, high quality design and more. It misses some things out - it doesn’t adequately address poverty and inequality, although its principles help to mitigate them - but it offers a very good way of thinking about cities.

Here are the wonders of ‘old world urbanism’, setting out the agenda for a carbon-neutral, eco-friendly, people-focused city. But is it quite as shiny as the pundits make out?

However, there is another face to Montpellier. Away from the modern developments lie older areas developed in the late 19th and early 20th century. A growing population led to urban sprawl, which took place outside of the city walls (e.g. The Gambetta). Here terraced, ‘2 up – 2 down’ housing is packed into narrow and cramped streets, lacking the open space of the Antigone. Even with the influx of high tech jobs, unemployment in Montpellier rose from 16.7% to 22.4% of the active population. A large majority of these are the North Africans who have made Montpellier their home, but cannot locate within the newer developments. Both lack adequate housing provision and high crime rates are now major problems in Montpellier. Social and ethnic polarisation is therefore highly evident.

Perhaps we are looking only at that which we wish to see rather than at what is actually happening:

It's a brave utopian vision - but, oddly, Rieselfeld is the last place I would want to live. Its housing blocks, built to a uniform height (usually four storeys), are reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc. Because the properties are all the same age, the place lacks character and charm. On the walk to my hotel, I pass an area of pitted waste ground reserved for the last phase in Rieselfeld's development, awaiting the excavators and cranes that accompany any such work in progress. It might be 'the gateway to the Black Forest' (as one resident put it), but the quarter lacks some of the facilities you might expect of a small provincial town.

And residents in the Freiberg tenements speak of the social control:

In Vauban, if Rieselfeld residents are to be believed, green living is compulsory. 'It jumps in your face a little,' Claudia Duppe warned me, 'and there is a lot of social control. If you walk into the quarter with an Aldi carrier bag, it's, "Sorry, I'm not talking to you; you shop at a discount supermarket and you don't buy organic." It feels claustrophobic, because everyone expects you to behave in the same way - and of course you are not allowed to have a car.'

This is the wonder of ‘old world urbanism’ – charmless boxes to live in, neighbours who shun you for buying cheap food and €18,000 a year just to park your car. Indeed to avoid this charge you have to sign a declaration that you will never own a car – something I’m pretty sure plenty of residents ignore.

If this is a better world, it is a better world I don’t want. A dysfunctional, bossy world tossed between trendy urban obsession with ‘sustainability’ and the pretence that creating swanky inner city neighbourhoods can resolve the fact that there aren’t any jobs. Ignoring the simple fact that this economic renewal requires transport links – and that mean roads, cars, trucks and airports as well as trams and bicycle lanes.

There are certainly things to learn from these places – the conformist, Stepford sort of places that the Greens would have us believe is the future of urban living. But the lesson is as much a warning about how authoritarian and controlling the ‘sustainability’ agenda has become as it is about whether these places work any better than Milton Keynes, Atlanta or Calgary.

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