Forget Orwell and boots stamping on your face, welcome to Cuddly Fascism

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. George Orwell



Such a familiar image of oppression, yet the truth about big government is that it's not a boot but a huge, suppressing comfort blanket of good intention. Welcome to 21st century cuddly fascism.

The idea of national service is a popular subject for the florid gentleman leaning on one end of the (currently closed) pub bar. These days the fellow is probably too young (the youngest men who did national service are now 81) to have done national service but you'll know the line of argument - "would do them good, toughen them up, give them discipline, get a sense of national pride". In academic terms the words look like this:

Societal ownership itself underpins resilience. Awareness of the need for security creates a more robust society, and that in itself provides a level of protection as it reduces the returns on attack. Public engagement in defence creates a level of mass participation, which itself leads to resilience. This rests on the integration of the armed forces within the community, and in particular on direct evidence of their contribution to security. A lack of mature public engagement creates a lack of national resilience.

This sounds to me a bit like a sort of schoolboy understanding of Sparta: resilient, tough, focus on nation, sacrifice, honour. These martial values are seen as central to a strong, effective and prepared society, things to be valued above those bourgeois virtues associated with an open liberal society.

Although I am a conservative and, as we all should be, respectful of the contribution, commitment and, when it matters, sacrifice of our armed services, I take the view that having a less prominent military is a good thing (would that we could do likewise with the increasingly militarised police). A sign of a peaceful country engaged positively with the world. I do not think it in our long term interest to be seen, in the manner of the USA or China, waving our military might about - we do more good internationally with foreign aid, the regular diplomatic service and endeavours to open up trade than with big ships and shiny planes.

The report those words above come from doesn't propose reintroducing national service but rather says that we have "...a near-universal and almost impermeable consensus against even discussing national service." The suggestion here is that because other places (Germany, Denmark, Estonia, France) have debates about the purpose of their existing conscription systems, we should be doing likewise despite having abolished our system 60 years ago.

Proposals like this are part of a slow drift away from an open liberal society towards what I call "cuddly fascism". This is best typified right now by those who justify the use of surveillance systems similar to that in China but we might also add enthusiasm for business licencing, public space protection orders (PSPOs), ASBOs and the revisiting of old demons through calls for bans on alcohol, tobacco and foods deemed "unhealthy".

At the heart of all this - other than military and state-directed technology like surveillance and tracking systems - is a distrust of innovation. There is no objective reason to believe that an app-based, cash-free taxi system such as Uber is less safe than traditional licence-based taxi systems yet the political power of existing taxi businesses has meant, almost everywhere, a direct attack on Uber and Lyft's innovation by local licencing authorities. This local protectionism is commonplace among people who would consider themselves centrist and moderate - the shopkeeper who argues that another competing shop shouldn't open on 'his' high street, the hairdresser who campaigns for occupational licensing knowing it will limit market entry, the doctors trade union that limits how many doctors get trained again protecting their market interest.

This dislike of innovation extends to proposals to tax it - the widespread calls for an "Amazon Tax" to save the high street is a fine example. The proposal is quite simple, lobbyists for high street retailers want a tax on Internet sellers that is then spent on traditional shops and high streets (in some unspecified manner). This tax will be paid by customers of online retailers and is a tax on their convenience, choice and embracing of innovation (just as taxi licensing strictures are de facto a tax on consumers of innovations like Uber). Of course, the initial tax - assuming the government is illiberal enough to introduce one - will not be high enough and each budget cycle will see the lobbyists out in force calling for a higher rate "to save our dying high streets".

If you go to Keighley Market (and you should because it is a good place), you'll see that Bradford Council's Markets Service has put up a permanent sign explaining (erroneously) that buying with independent traders means supporting a real family's life rather than a CEO's new boat. Now, while I'm all in favour of independent shops and businesses (remember those big businesses you are told to hate started out this way), it is simply untrue to suggest that the profits of the market trader selling you a t-shirt are different from the profits of the big chain store or on-line retailer and that the wages of the mum serving at the checkout or the dad measuring your waist are somehow not going to help their families. We are, however, bombarded almost daily with stories of the evils of big busineses - from allegedly dodging taxes though to accusations of price gouging or (often at the same time) undercutting the small shop.

This attack on business and on the people who run businesses is a persistent theme in this centrist cuddly fascism. People who own businesses are not to be trusted, the businessman or woman is presented as cynical, exploitative and immoral in popular drama and fiction - I'm sure there are sympathetic portrayals of business people but they are swamped by an mudslide of devious traders, sinister bankers, ruthless managers and exploitative owners. So, taking our lead from Which or Martin Lewis or Esther Rantzen, we call for limits, restrictions, rules, registrations, regulations and reporting requirements that will stop the bad stuff. What we don't realise, of course, is that 99.99% or more of transactions are entirely open, transparent and mutually beneficial - we get fantastic consumer value from the ideas and innovation of business people, they get profit.

And we know who is the big winner with all this innovation for profits because they gave William Nordhaus a Nobel Prize in Economics for working out the return to entrepreneurship:

We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.

Those returns in value are about 2% meaning that, while Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page are spectacularly rich, nearly all of the value from their innovations has gone to us consumers using Bill's operating system, Larry's search engine and Jeff's on-line market to improve our lives. Yet cuddly fascism tells us that somehow even that tiny part of the wealth generated accrued to the entrepreneur should be taken from them through punative taxation. Or worse, through the Supply Chain Fallacy, claiming that somehow, as Deidre McCloskey put it, "...if a scientist got a National Foundation Fellowship when she was a graduate student, then all her subsequent works can be attributed to the government."

Of course this, like giving kids purpose though national service, saving the high street and standing up for our traditional cabbies, is all cuddly and easy to justify. Just as we support draconian controls on outside drinking because we have insufficient support for the problem drinker and ridiculous clamp downs on playing music in stationery cars by young people when they've nowhere else to gather and listen. It's all tidier isn't it! We hand police the power to turn almost anything into an arrestable offence (check out the regulations on ASBOs and PSPOs if you don't believe me). Then we get surprised when, infused with the spirit of Judge Dredd, the police simply invent their own rules.

But we've nothing to hide, have we? Nothing to fear? Such is the standard response until, that is, the police turn up on your dorstep threatening arrest because you filmed a traffic warden or an error in identification brings the threat of prosecution or enforcement. Or someone overhears you expressing a robust view that eavesdropper considers 'offensive' - welcome to 'hate' crime enforcement, to people getting sacked for old Facebook posts and to police sternly telling a local councillor that, yes, 'hate' crime is as concerning as burglary or the street grooming of young people for sexual exploitation.

Britain is now one of the world's most spied on places - of the world's top ten most surveilled cities, eight are in China but sitting there at number six (one place, interestingly, ahead of Wuhan) is London. Not that this proliferation of spying seems to work, at least judging by London's rash of gang-related knife crime. The problem, however, with intrusive government not working is that the first response to failure isn't to try something different but to double down - more cameras, higher taxes, new police powers, additional enforcement officers, extra regulations and plenty of bans. We have convinced ourselves that social control works, that people want this social control and that it is what Henry Potter was on about in 'It's a Wonderful Life' when he bemoaned George Bailey offering people hope - "a discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty, working class". The cuddly fascists want a compliant, thrifty working class - resilience they call it.

Potter's outlook - that the working class should know their place and what's good for them - is commonplace now among planners and policy-makers in government (and much less so among businesspeople who, surprisingly, see ordinary people bettering themselves as a good thing). Indeed, one of the features of our cuddly fascism is the cultifying of national institutions - police, army, courts and, above all, the health system. These institutions are, we're told, noble in an ancient, pre-liberty way, filled with selfless people acting for the public good and driven by a mystical 'public service ethos'. The grubby ways of business are not for such people and the institutions they profit from are beyond reproach. And, of course, are protected from reproach by social control and regulation.

The NHS is the finest example of how we have turned a national institution into a sort of new religion - "Our NHS" is filled with saints and angels. Don't get me wrong here, what I said earlier about the armed services applies to those providing a health service, like most people I'm appreciative of their dedication, skill and knowledge. What I don't see is that these people are any more dedicated, skilled or knowledgeable than those in other health systems that aren't centralised, single-payer models of provision. Yet the need to protect our health system has been a major element in health planning - even before the need to manage NHS capacity during a pandemic that led to the recent lockdown. And a common theme in this urge to protect has been the targeting of lifestyle choices, most commonly around drinking, smoking and eating the wrong food.

Our centrist cuddly fascists have adopted modern public health - "think how much it will cost the NHS" - as a justification for stopping businesses from opening, taxes on food deemed "unhealthy", tighter licencing, for price interventions, bans and a puritanican dislike of any pleasurable activity that lacks some greater purpose. Local councils have 'play strategies' for children ("play is important to child mental health") rather than just allowing those children to just play. Even worse, on a different shelf to the play strategy is a bigger book filled with all the reasons why children shouldn't do this, or that or the other: don't kick a ball here, don't climb, don't run, don't slide, don't swing. Keep off the grass, keep out of the water, keep on the path. Above all, our cuddly fascists believe, children should be learning and developing from play - so much for just larking about.

I started with the idea that young people should be forced to carry guns and march up and down - for their own good and to benefit a thing called national resilience. It seems to me that this idea comes from the same place - I've called it cuddly fascism - as a lot of other things that governments do. From trying to use planning controls to improve health and in doing so stopping a new business starting, through regulations and taxes designed to halt innovative ways of providing consumer value, to outright attacks, bans and controls on people's personal choices. All overseen by a benign, 'Brave New World' of surveillance and self-enforced social control - some like former Cameron advisor Claire Foges even want a cuddly digital ID card ("so convenient, so safe").

I fear that we will be the worse for all this extension of government into our lives but hope that, somehow, the instinct for betterment, innovation and creative destruction isn't stopped by a government more interested in resilience, order and enforced good behaviour than in allowing freedom to do what it does best, make everyone's lives better.

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Why we need to stop government (and its agents) using facial recognition as surveillance

A big developer at King's Cross plans to introduce facial recognition systems to "ensure public safety" and, while some privacy and data protection concerns have been raised, nobody seems to see just how this represents the normalisation of intrusive surveillance of people going about their everyday lives. It follows on the appalling behaviour of the Metropolitan Police in their trials of using the technology where they assumed that anyone avoiding recognition was guilty.

This is where is ends up:

Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras that feed their pictures to facial recognition software. At the behest of the national government and regional police forces, Chinese software makers are training their algorithms to distinguish Uighurs from Han, China's ruling ethnic majority. Police officers stationed throughout Kashgar need neither probable cause nor a warrant to detain Uighurs and check their phones for the surveillance software that they're legally required to install.

It may not be as openly racist as the Chinese system but we will get to a point where the widespread use of facial recognition but public and private organisations will destroy the idea that our private activities are not a concern of the public authorities (their agents or those acting in the manner of the King's Cross developer). All of this will be "sold" to the public as being to ensure public safety, to catch criminals or with general wish-wash about 'law-and-order'.

I keep reminding us that the main reason for these intrusive technologies (other than 'they exist and we can use them') isn't public safety but a lack of trust in the public. In surveilling everyone, government and its agents remind us that they don't trust us and signal that, in general, people are not to be trusted. When we talk about the loss of community, the breakdown in social capital and the fragmentation of society, it is this collapse in trust - encouraged by the authoritarian tendencies of government - that is the main cause.

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Liberty isn't the opposite of security, it's the basis for a safe, strong and successful society

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Although the conext of Benjamin Franklin's remark is somewhat specific (it was about rich people using political power to dodge taxes), the sentiment comes down to us as an essential argument against authoritarian government. It also reminds us, or should do, that liberty is not the opposite of security. Nations with high levels of freedom are, overwhelmingly, safer than places without those liberties. Moreover, people in free countries are less fearful and more optimistic.

So it should concern us that Onward, the supposedly 'conservative' (or at least 'centre-right') think tank run by Theresa May's former policy wonk now frames the future direction of policy - the "Politics of Belonging" is their slightly cutesie term - as a choice between freedom and security:

The poll suggests that policies which increase freedom, autonomy and choice are unlikely to be major vote-winners in the way they were for much of the last fifty years. Instead, policies that restore a sense of belonging, provide security and protect citizens from the modern world are likely to be most effective.

My first thought here is that this is not really a surprise since Onward has given the people it polled a binary choice between "a society that focuses on giving people more security" and one that “focuses on giving people more freedom”. Do you want A or B ask the pollsters without it seems considering that there isn't any real contradition between freedom and security.

There are plenty of competing measures of safety but all of them show that the world's safest countries - least conflict, lower crime, safer streets - are all places we would see as liberal.

The Global Peace Index has a Top 5 of Iceland, New Zealand, Austria, Portugal and Denmark while SafeAround's similar ranking has a Top 5 of Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Singapore. If we look at immediate public concerns about crime for example we have a Top 10 including Sweden, Austria, Norway, Denmark and Japan. And when we look at the extent to which people trust other people (a central factor in the idea of belonging that Onward speak about) we find the same countries - Sweden, Denmark, Norway - crop up near the top again.

Although authoritarian places like Singapore (sadly a favourite of so many on the Tory right, something they share with China's leadership) appear in these lists, the majority of the world's safest places are associated with those individual liberal values Onward place as the opposite to security. They are also places with very free market economies, big welfare states and that invest a great deal in community (much of Denmark's huge welfare state is managed by local not national government, for example).

I like it when conservatives talk about community but this research seems to co-opt the ideas of family and community into a justification for “having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country”. And we see a sort of isolationist, protectionist streak in the claims that that "globalisation, technological change and immigration have harmed ordinary people’s lives, jobs and wages".

What we have here isn't a reflection of what a good, safe, strong society looks like (clue - it looks quite a lot like Denmark) but rather a reflected set of fears about crime, terrorism and economic insecurity. Day after day wise-looking grey heads on the TV tell the public that the economy is weak, that everyone is getting poorer and that austerity is biting. Other 'experts' appear and tell them that every business is trying to rip you off, that all sorts of scams and cons are widespread and the Internet needs controlling because it's fostering all sorts of evils (even though you and I don't see any of them). All this is accompanied by a weird ennui among the great and good; nothing is quite right, there's hate and offence (albeit mostly a sort of lazy on-line hatred and offence) everywhere, and you can't trust anyone any more.

Is it any surprise that, when asked to chose between the freedom that gave us all this bad stuff (hint - it didn't, quite the opposite) and some sort of unspecified 'security' people plump for the latter? And if that just means a few more coppers, a bit more spent on the military and some road safety cameras, then we're all cool with it. But what if it means ending the aspiration for free trade (and what else does “globalisation has not benefited most people” mean) and closing the borders to foreigners - especially brown foreigners? Will that really make us more secure?

If we want a real agenda for conservatives, one embracing freedom and democracy, then we need to start with the idea that the best government is government closest to the people. This means a radical devolution back to communities - not the technocratic and undemocratic nonsense of grand regional mayors given a campaign pulpit and a little bit of central government cash. It means putting communities not technocrats in charge of the police, the hospitals and the schools. It means central government handing over administering welfare and the collection of taxes to those communities.

At the same time we need a return to the presumption that people are mostly decent and honest. And that we should trust them. This means an end to officious demands for ID, the simplification of welfare applications and tax forms, and no longer seeing people as just a reference number on a national database.

We also need to rediscover some old ideas - a chivalry that recognises men are strong but raises them to use that strength for good, a charity that isn't a well-funded industry but rather individual, selfless acts of care for our neighbour, and that the family forms the bedrock of a safe, secure society. What we don't need is more of the security state, more cameras, more restrictions, more controls, bans and limitations - all imposed because it will make us safer, a sort of nanny state on steroids. Most of all we should reject - utterly reject - the seemingly popular idea of “a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament”.

The best security doesn't come from any sort of benign authoritarianism, from a sort of cuddly fascism, but from living in a world where we see out neighbour and see someone we can trust, where we know the government because he or she lives round the corner and where the decisions that affect us are mostly made in a place nearby filled with our neighbours not by anonymous authorities in a castle in a city.

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Silencing dissenting voices. How the left threatens freedom.

A letter signed by academics calls for Cambridge University not to give Dr Noah Carl an academic position because (they state but don't evidence) Dr Carl's work is racist. Now, since I haven't read much of Dr Carl's work, it's tricky for me to know whether or not this statement is true. I am also certain that, despite what they've said in the letter they've signed, few of the 200 hundred or so academics who've said Dr Carl is racist have read any of his work either.

This seems an isolated incident but it represents a trend in our society. Intelligent people, mostly who hold left wing views of one sort of another, collect to silence dissenting views. Dr Carl is a dissenter whose failing is that he is right wing (he challenges this assertion) and researches links between intelligence, politics, race and economic development (this is a simplification). More importantly, I suspect, is that Dr Carl is a prominent and outspoken critic of leftist bias within academia and especially in his own field of sociology and social psychology. It is this criticism that lies behind the academics' letter not the essentially spurious allegations of 'pseudoscientific racism'. Right wing voices must be either silenced or placed in a carefully quarantined box labelled "dangerously wrong ideas".

Don't misunderstand me here, I don't think there's a vast conspiracy of critical theory scholars and sociologists plotting in some university common room to silence voices arguing for conservative, classical liberal or libertarian ideas. It's rather that there's a consensus that these ideas are "wrong", that people who hold them are either sinister forces or misled by sinister forces, and that rather than engage with the ideas the motives of those promoting such dangerous thoughts must be questioned or else their character smeared (sometimes both).

We see this in the "who funds you response" directed (amongst anti-foreigner and misogynist slurs) to young female voices from organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute and Taxpayers' Alliance. We saw it in the damning mischaracterisation of Toby Young as an eugenicist, in the selective misquoting of Roger Scruton following his appointment to chair as government body looking at aesthetics in architecture. And we've seen it in the bizarre conspiracy theories of George Monbiot and Carole Cadwalladr - a world where well known libertarians giving money to a libertarian-inclined think tank is "dark money" and where someone turning down the offer of a deal is proof positive of their collusion with the makers of that offer.

The problem - and it is a real one - is that too many left wing people simply believe nobody can support free markets, capitalism, free speech and economic liberty without being 'shills for corporate lobbyists'. This viewpoint is now firmly embedded right across the left of politics and academia, from the mildest of Blairite establishment figures through to the communists who work for Jeremy Corbyn - people are right wing because they are making money from it or thick or 'gaslighted' by those funded by "dark money" into backing ideas against their interests.

Dissenting voices - whether it is old-fashioned conservatives like Scruton or left-libertarian ex-trots like the folk at Spiked - cannot be tolerated. Hence calls for the BBC to stop having people from the IEA or TPA ("who funds you") presenting their work - it's not about the funding, it's about the ideas they promote. These ideas - conservatism, classical liberalism, free markets, open societies, free speech - are what the newly intolerant left want to silence and attacks on motives, slurs, misrepresentation, whataboutery and orchestrated calls for sackings or no platforming are justified by the need to either silence or discredit right wing thinking.

I don't offer a resolution, more a question and something of a warning. The question is how, when the centre-left and progressive mindset is so pervasive across the media, do we create a sense of balance? By way of example, the IEA is routinely referred to as a 'right wing' think tank when its researchers appear on broadcast media, yet when people from think tanks like the IPPR appear they are seldom introduced as from a left wing think tank. This imbalance reinforces the idea that right wing is problematic in a manner that left wing isn't. It is a moderate version of the manner in which communists and fascists are treated with the former allowed space and time and the latter excluded.

The warning is that, without freely expressed voices in support of freedom, we will lose that freedom. You don't have to be a supporter of the capitalist model (many libertarians aren't) or a believer in free markets (lots of conservatives aren't) to recognise that the manner in which such voices are excluded, discredited and demonised by the dominant mainstream left, especially in academia, represents a dangerous trend and a threat to wider freedoms. If one set of voices - many essentially moderate (there's nothing remotely threatening about the work of the Mercatus Centre but George Monbiot sees it as park of his nexus of "dark money") - are excluded, it's only a short step to the exclusion of other voices. This is already happening in academia, through deliberately orchestrated actions like trying to get Dr Carl sacked and through the manner in which the training, recruitment and appointing of academics is conducted as well as by the raising of mobs to shout down dissenting voices when they appear. If we want to be free we will have to challenge this illiberal progressive mindset so the ideas of freedom are heard.

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Something happened - and that something was the free market

Man's natural state is grinding poverty:

Among economists and anthropologists, this is “settled science.” Economists left and right might bicker over minor details, but they agree that poverty is man’s natural environment. As economist Todd G. Buchholz puts it, “For most of man’s life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass C. North and his colleagues write in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that “over the long stretch of human history before 1800, the evidence suggests that the long-run rate of growth of per capita income was very close to zero.”

For tens or thousands of years nearly all men lived in that grinding poverty. There were little flickers of light showing what was possible - in China, in Baghdad, in Florence - and then, bang, we suddenly and sustainably got rich, dragged ourselves out of poverty, and created the wonders of our modern world from dishwashers to the internet, from recorded music to space travel.

And that bang? It was the liberal enlightenment, the idea that creativity and innovation wasn't the preserve of aristocratic patronage but was for everyone. It was what we sneeringly called the middle class - whether suited banker or white van man - that made that great noise of human improvement. It wasn't government, it wasn't posh landowners, it wasn't socialism, it wasn't a cumulative process of incremental improvement - human betterment is a consequence of freedom - free speech, free enterprise, free assembly, free worship, free trade. Improvement came because we decided people shouldn't have to have permission from their 'betters' if they wanted to try something out.

So if you want to limit freedom - stop folk exchanging freely, prevent people from saying what they wish, halt people's right to gather together, limit what they can believe in and worship - any of these things and you offer future humanity a worse world. Above all, if you think free markets are a bad idea and need limiting, regulating and controlling by our betters, then you offer future generations a less wealthy, less healthy and less happy world.

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Is democracy dying? If it is, there's blood on the left's hands

It sometimes seems that way as we move from a pluralist world where ideas are discussed and debated to one where debate is contained and constrained - a short step to that one-party state:

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

This may seem fine until (and maybe the 'ever-so-right-on' chap writing this doesn't care) you consider this excludes not just millions of Californians but, more to the point, a huge swathe of opinion about taxes, markets, intervention, housing and the classical liberal enlightenment. Worse still, our wealthy progressive doesn't just want a one-party state in California but wants to impose its ideas on other places like some ghastly authoritarian hegemon - conservatism must be destroyed:

The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards.

As I said, it seems not just that democracy is dying but that it's 'liberal progressives' - The Left as we call them in Europe - with blood on their hands.

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Free markets are better for fairness and equality than the state

Yet again we have evidence of how systems dominated by non-free, constrained or licenced systems (or else directly controlled by the state) are less fair and equal than free systems:



Business - that's the free market - is by far the best sector for social mobility. Rather than as with the law (what a surprise) where the man at the top being ten times more likely to be privately-educated, he's only four times more likely in the private sector.

This is because, unlike state-controlled systems like law, medicine, the army and the civil service, the private sector doesn't have the luxury of relying on Daddy and thereby ignoring 90% of the population. If you're good, your chances of getting to the top in private business are far higher. As a result private business is more innovative, more diverse and more creative than the public sector. This is because without that innovation and creativity businesses fail. And without diversity you miss out loads of people who'll bring to the skills, talents and originality you need to succeed.

Every time we look at the world, we see that free systems - markets, trade, speech, assembly, choice - deliver a more equal society. A society that can't be gamed so much by the wealthy, well-connected and fortunately-born. As I've observed before, it beats me why the left has such a down on freedom when it delivers the goods on fairness and equality better than their preferred state-directed utopia.

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It puzzles me why the left opposes free markets - they argue for most other forms of liberty

It's odd how many on the left, so keen on all sorts of social liberation, are adamantly opposed to the idea of people being economically liberated. It's hard to understand why, when the liberation of women, gay and lesbian people, and ethnic minorities get such prominence in left wing thinking, they seem unable to recognise that part of that liberation must be economic, must be the power to exchange, interact, co-operate and trade.

It seems, without conducting any sort of extensive survey, that the problem lies in two places - firstly, a sort of elitist belief that most people aren't bright enough to make their own economic decisions and therefore need guidance from experts, and secondly a sort of semi-comprehended Marxist reject of the market in preference for a wholly planned economy. In truth though, a lot of the opposition to free markets is pretty woolly - here's an example in a tweet to cabinet minister Liz Truss from Labour MP, Stella Creasey:

Except in a free market you aren’t free @trussliz because you will always end up picking up the tab for its failures - try reading the other half of adam smith about value of collaboration to securing freedom for us all …all money is after all a matter of belief

Now I'm not going to try and deconstruct Ms Creasey's Tweet (it is after all only a Tweet) except in so far as it contains several of those presumptions about free markets - they're not 'free', they 'fail', and they are exploitative. Ms Creasey also references (I assume) Adam Smith's 'other book', the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here's a chunk from a commentary by Eamonn Butler:

As individuals, we have a natural tendency to look after ourselves. That is merely prudence. And yet as social creatures, explains Smith, we are also endowed with a natural sympathy – today we would say empathy – towards others. When we see others distressed or happy, we feel for them – albeit less strongly. Likewise, others seek our empathy and feel for us. When their feelings are particularly strong, empathy prompts them to restrain their emotions so as to bring them into line with our, less intense reactions. Gradually, as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we each learn what is and is not acceptable to other people. Morality stems from our social nature.

Smith wasn't limiting free markets but rather making the observation - at considerable length - that human beings are not just motivated by prudence, by an overriding utilitarian urge. Rather our motivations are grounded in a set of ethics of which prudence is just one - justice, temperance, faith and courage are just as important. And since our motives in a marketplace are not just self-interest, the idea that free markets exploit is wrong. As Smith put it himself:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

I'm sure we can have an extensive discussion about whether or not we are ever truly free but, in more pragmatic terms, Ms Creasey's typically Fabian position is essentially that we don't have sufficient knowledge in the marketplace so are liable to manipulation and exploitation. We see such an argument put repeatedly in respect of advertising drawing on a variety of slightly sneering observers - Veblen, Packard, Klein - who argue that advertising is uniquely and corruptly persuasive especially for children and what might be called the lower orders of society. As a result, the first target of the prohibitionist is to limit, then ban, the advertising of the product they wish to ban - smoking, drinking, sugary food, gambling.

The problem with this argument is that it is, as with so many left wing critiques of classical liberalism, essentially a straw man. Nobody claims that free markets require perfect knowledge for all parties merely that there is no coercion and that the buyer and seller both secure benefit from the process of exchange. I do not need to know the price of every second hand Land Rover to be able to judge whether the price I pay to buy one provides me with a value in excess of that sum. If I'm wise, and most buyers, regardless of age or social class, are wise, then I will do more than simply buy the first of a product I encounter but even if I do this it doesn't stop the market being free.

To return to Ms Creasey, she argues that Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is about collaboration and I assume that, in making this assertion, Ms Creasey believes that collaboration is not a feature of a free market. Now, leaving aside Smith's position that human nature is not simply about self-interest, maximising utility, it does seem odd to consider that interactions in a free market do not feature collaboration or cooperation. Is the achievement of mutual benefit through exchange not the very essence of collaboration - two humans freely interacting to the advantage of both? Yet the Fabian socialist position seems blind to all this, preferring to fall back on the idea that exchange in a marketplace is exploitative and therefore not free.

It makes absolutely no sense at all for people on the left to be so dismissive of free markets, enterprise and trade - they ought to have the same enthusiasm for such things as they do for women's rights to control their bodies, for society to see gay and lesbian people as normal, and for ethnic minorities to be treated fairly. Instead the left seeks out things - often falsely - to suggest that free markets are wrong. Most often they point to failures in highly regulated markets - financial services, energy production, transport, housing - where powerful businesses work with government to limit innovation, create rents and prevent new entrants to that market. But even when they don't, the criticism of free markets is based on an entirely vague notion of an alternative (and I'm guessing that most on the left don't want a Soviet-style planned economy).

In the end, however, the alternative to a free market is a market that isn't free. And this means either that you do not have access to that market or else that your access to directed by another party. As I wrote a while ago:

Please explain which part of the word 'free' is a bad thing? If you don't like free markets, what you want is markets that aren't free. Markets where only some privileged people can trade. Markets where someone else (usually the government) sets the price. Markets where their effectiveness is determined not by the actions of those in the market but by who is most effective at lobbying - for which read bribing, corrupting - government. If you fetter free markets (which given you always go on about the free market being "unfettered" is what you want) what you create are winners and losers, privileged and unprivileged, rather than having a system where people seek co-operation and mutual benefit. Freedom is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. So stop lying about this and undermining the liberty of your neighbour.

And it makes no sense, given its enthusiasm for other liberties, for the left to oppose this liberty.

....

Of course....

Your want more creativity and innovation? Here's how you do it...

"...the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent."

I'd have thought this was pretty obvious - not funding, not institutions, not 'cultural strategies', just giving people the chance to do, say and think the things they want to do, say and think.

....

Quote of the day - faith and trade

Via Cafe Hayek comes this quote from Richard Cobden:

They who propose to influence by force the traffic of the world, forget that affairs of trade, like matters of conscience, change their very nature if touched by the hand of violence; for as faith, if forced, would no longer be religion, but hypocrisy, so commerce becomes robbery if coerced by warlike armaments.

It's a condemnation of trade warriors like Trump and those more gentle of sabre rattlers like David Cameron with his 'global race'. Trade isn't about wins, losses, victories or defeats. Trade is about mutual advantage, cooperation, collaboration and getting richer together. And the more free that trade the better.

....

In all this trade talk let's not forget that we're rich because we're free

It starts like this:

At the end of last year, a news story was published with huge implications for ‘international development’: a drop-off in commodity prices through 2016 dashed hopes that the world’s poorest countries could escape extreme poverty by the end of the decade.

The story raises a critical question directly linked to what Brexit will mean for countries of the global South and the reality of what ‘free trade’ and protectionism mean in the context of economic development – a reality brought into sharper relief in recent weeks by a long-running spat over trade at the G20 and Liam Fox’s focus on signing tariff-free trade agreements around the world.

And then goes rapidly down hill. The thing that beats me is why people who tell me that they 'care' about the world's poorest are so trapped in the belief that more open trade is making the 'world's poorest countries' less well off. Let's start with the facts:

The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original MDGs—such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early.

The main reason for this wonderful decline in world poverty is the recognition that open markets, more free trade, property rights and good economic governance are the necessary prerequisites for reducing poverty. Bear in mind that the natural state of humankind is grinding poverty. Up to around 1700 - a little earlier in Holland - nearly everyone lived and had always lived in what we'd describe today as absolute, abject poverty. Since that time, courtesy of us recognising that if you allow people to prosper by innovation the whole of society benefits, average incomes in the UK and other developed nations have risen - in cash terms - by a factor of at least sixteen. If we take account of what that innovation means - the thousands of things that make our everyday lives better ("dentistry" as P J O'Rourke put it) - then that factor of sixteen is truly much higher.

Now free trade isn't the reason for that growth in our living standards (nor, for that matter, is the shocking colonial exploitation of the 100 years from roughly 1850 to1950) but it is one of the things that contributes to the, sadly belated, opportunity for those countries that missed out on the first economic revolution to secure the sort of living standards even the poorest in Britain enjoy. And much of it will be about those institutional reforms, the list of things governments shouldn't do, enabling people to do business (again - property rights, good economic governance, free markets). But trade matters and the more free that trade the better.

So we don't want this sort of nonsense:

But the UK must go further. Brexit trade policies will do little for longer term economic change in the South unless poor countries can export processed or manufactured goods with similar preferential schemes, or, conversely, use tariffs to shield emerging industries from international competition. On top of this, the Northern-led agenda of using trade deals to privatise public services and grant corporations legal powers to sue states outside national jurisdictions offers little in the fight against poverty.

I agree the UK must go further and absolutely agree that the sort of protectionism that forces developing countries into exporting raw produce rather than processed goods (as I once asked, 'why aren't we eating Ghanaian chocolate bars?') is a bad idea all round. But the next part - tariffs and import substitution - is a return to the days before 1980, before the dramatic drop in the world's poverty, before the triumph of what's now called neoliberalism. And being able to go to an independent court for arbitration is a protection not an affront to liberty - without giving people and businesses the power to challenge government there is no check on arbitrary decisions by that government.

I also agree that 'trade deals' and especially bilateral trade deals are not free trade. Indeed the fact of the 'trade deal' between two governments (or groups of governments) is a reminder of the degree to which trade is not free. For sure a lot of so-called trade deals are really about regulatory harmonisation (sweetened by public procurement bungs in both directions) but they do not represent the ideal of allowing, in a well-governed economy, people to trade freely. This means, since trade is about consumption rather than production - imports not exports, allowing people to purchase the things they want with their own resources from whoever, wherever they wish.

Over the past 40 or so we've not talked much about trade. There has been occasional bits of political posturing about the 'balance of trade' and a great deal of macho talk about 'the global race' and 'competition' between nations but not much about actual trade. Or indeed the fact that it is nonsense to, for example, argue for a ban on live animal exports without realising that there's no difference between taking a truck load of sheep from Canterbury to Cannes or from Basingstoke to Aberdeen (at least not for the sheep). And a thousand other examples of how doing business - buying and selling, securing mutual benefit, adding value - shouldn't be different if the supplier is in Ulan Bator or Uttoxeter.

The result of us not talking about trade is that people begin to believe this sort of nonsense (completely unsupported by economic history):

...this obscures the fact that rich countries only pursued free trade after they ascended to the peak of the global economy; they used protectionism to ensure that domestic industries grew ahead of being exposed to competition, before “kicking away the ladder” they used to get to their dominant positions.

Not only does this line not make sense (if protectionism worked then there was no ladder to kick away) but it really isn't true. In the UK you only have to look at the 30 year long row over fixing grain prices with Corn Laws or the rows about 'Empire Preference' to see that there's nothing new at all about political arguments between mercantilists and free traders. And most of the time - witness steel, food, cars, even second-hand washing machines and old clothes - the protectionists, the mercantilists, win the argument.

Brexit really does mean a chance to do it differently. I appreciate that the absolutist position (remove all the tariffs on stuff we buy) may be correct in theory but we should remember it also removes the opportunity for reciprocity by governments - takes away a little of their power. Meaning it won't happen. But, since most of the barriers to trade are regulatory (or outright bans as is the case with much of European trade policy), the presence or otherwise of tariffs is pretty marginal - we lose a little by scrapping them but it allows us to get focused on improving economic governance in developing countries by helping them improve their standards of regulatory enforcement and compliance.

Free trade is a very good idea but the regime we have in world trade today is not free trade. We're a lot better than we used to be - the GATT Agreements and their child, the World Trade Organisation, helped make this the case as did the growth in international regulatory co-operation spawned by GATT - but the focus remains on the inter-governmental fix, on grand folk meeting in summits to decide whether or not some women somewhere will be allowed to sell you cocoa powder, knitted comfort blankets or large amounts of steel. If we can change this then we'll have a more free, more happy and above all richer world - all of it.

....

A note on Slovakian planning...

I've written about Slovakian planning before (a niche subject I know) but this is a reminder that when you've few land use planning controls stuff gets built pretty quickly:

Recently, I returned to Slovakia. One day, while driving through the capital of Bratislava, I noticed a brand new suburb that covered a hill that was barren a mere two years before. The sprawling development of modern and beautiful houses came with excellent roads and a large supermarket. It provided a home, privacy, and safety for hundreds of families.

How was it possible for a private company to plan, build, and sell an entire suburb in less than two years, but impossible for a communist central planner to build one small building in almost a decade?

The article's actually a cautionary tale for young people explaining the evils of communism. But for me this paragraph stood out because there's no way that you'd get a new suburb built in the UK within two years from scratch including roads, buses, supermarkets and schools. Perhaps we need to learn some lessons in liberty from the now free Slovaks?

The clue, after all, lies in that word 'planning'. And it's the main reason housing markets don't work properly.

....

So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

I like and respect many Leavers, but I’ve never shared their enthusiasm for democracy – I want liberty and prosperity, and I don’t want to trade that in just to give my stupid next-door neighbours more power over my life.

What follows isn't about the recent EU referendum although, like much discussion and debate right now, it is inevitably framed by the issues surrounding our vote to leave the EU. The quotation above is from Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and it cuts to the heart of what I think will prove the dominant division in politics for the coming generations - the debate about democracy and its purposes. We will have a bickering coalition of collectivists and populists arguing that democracy is pretty much everything opposed by an equally troubled combination of technocrats and libertarians to tell us democracy is an anachronism.

In some respects, the argument for more democracy is akin to the argument for more railways - a nineteenth century solution to twenty-first century problems. yet, at the same time, we are vocal in our support for "having a say", "being consulted" - for votes, elections and polling. Public opinion, far more than evidence, ideology or reason is the driver of political decision-making - Sam Bowman's "stupid next-door neighbours" really are as important to what government's do as are the wise minds in Sam's think tank.

The advocate of democracy pipes up here - we're all equal in the eyes of the law and we all should have an equal say. This is the 'end of politics' envisioned by UKIP's Douglas Carswell:

Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

For Carswell, political systems of representative democracy are legacy systems, clunky, unresponsive, corrupt and not well-liked. We need, Carswell would argue, to embrace technology to create an iDemocracy filled with referendums, instant consultations and dispersed decision-making. It isn't democracy that is failing and out-of-date but the institutions of representative democracy - parliaments, parties, election days and preening politicians. Release democracy from these constraints and it will flourish, will once again capture Rousseau's 'general will' as the flow of information from and between people allows a fluid, data-driven iGovernment.

But is it so simple? Here's John Naughton reviewing historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:

...modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. And each of these foundations is being eaten away by 21st-century science and technology. The life sciences are undermining the individualism so celebrated by the humanist tradition with research suggesting that “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”.

We don't have to accept Harari's argument to recognise that, as every science fiction reader will tell you, for every optimistic technological future there's a frightening dystopia. Carswell's web-enabled democracy sits at odds to Harari's world - one more like H G Wells 'Time Machine' than a happy world of progress. Using that metaphor of nineteenth century technology beloved of so many tech writers, Harari depresses us with:

“the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.”

So which is it to be, Harari's world of Morlocks and Eloi or Carswell's liberated world filled with empowered citizens actively engaged in the new democracy through a new politics? Cynics, the wise ones at least, will recognise in Harari's world the realisation of that part of post-democracy we'd call technocracy. This is government by experts informed by ever more sophisticated 'Big Data' analyses. A world where there is no ideology merely data-driven answers to questions posed by the experts. A world where, if Harari and many others are right, the expert won't even be human. Public opinion plays no role in this decision-making other than as one imput to the expert system.

What we have is Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the idea that everything can be boiled down to a set of equations - algorhithms as we'd call them today:

“It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.”

Although part of me suspects Gordon Dickson's Final Encyclopaedia is a better analogy, the lesson here is that there's just too much to know, that every model is a simplification and every trawl through 'Big Data' only touches a tiny part of the potential evidence. For all its wonders, technocracy does not provide the answers - the more we know, the more we're aware of what we don't know (unless, of course, you're a macroeconomist). And technocracy without democracy gets uncomfortably close to fascism even though its advocates do not see this problem and persist with ideas like basic income, depoliticised public services, industrial strategies and the belief that the economy can be directed from a room in the central bank.

There are two distinct responses to the EU referendum result. One is to reject the idea of referendums - to put Carswell's iDemocracy firmly back in its tin and screw the lid down really tightly. The other is to observe that the experts - the technocracy - were out-of-touch, unable to express their understanding other than through a patronising appeal to authority: "I'm an expert and you should therefore agree with me". The experts were not 'of the people' and, if the direction of technogical advance Harari describes is rights, future experts may not be people at all.

All this takes us back to Sam Bowman's quote where he rejects democracy in favour of "liberty and prosperity" and expresses the liberal view that his next-door neighbour (stupid or otherwise) should not have any power over his life. In some ways this libertarian viewpoint isn't set out often enough. Anyone who took an introductory course in political science will have pondered the essential conflict between freedom and democracy. Most usually this is dealt with by adopting the constitionalist view that liberties enshrined in law act as a check on the essential tyranny of democracy - the 55-45 or 52-48 problem.

By accepting liberties, whether we call them constitutional or human rights, our liberal democracy qualifies democracy and, as S E Finer put it, recognises that government is limited, society is pluralistic and that there is no "objective science of society or of morals". I take this as meaning that, when the chips are down, liberty trumps democracy. Just because you've 50% plus one behind you doesn't mean you can run me out of town on a rail. Nor, as Bowman hints, can you take decisions that damage my interests especially if they cause me harm.

The problem is that, while we nod in the direction of liberty, when faced with its realities we favour democracy. We see this in the debate around what is called "hate speech", in the French government banning the burka, and in a host of interventions designed to promote order at the expense of pleasure (because the majority disapprove of that particular pleasure). Perhaps because of its essential nature, our politics shouts more loudly about democracy than about freedom meaning that, too often, we lose the core idea of a government limited by the exercise of that freedom.

This, in a roundabout way, gets us to the problem with Sam Bowman's decision to vote to stay in the EU. As I noted at the start, we're not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of that vote but the real issue is whether the EU is liberal or technocratic. Bowman suggests the former because the institution insists on free movement of people and prevents the use of tax receipts to subsidise private business (there may be other examples but these are the two Bowman cites).

The problem is that these examples may not be the consequence of a commitment to freedom but rather a happy correlation between technocracy and liberalism. Such correlations are - as this note from Noah Smith tells us - pretty rare. Smith sets out a series of things he calls "free-market ideology" that, on reading, are all central elements of the currently dominant technocratic view - the weight of regulation's touch, the faux-privatisation of public services, public-private health systems and controlling monopolies. What matters isn't whether Smith is right but rather that he identifies the flaw in the technocratic ideal that 'Big Data' and the prophets of evidence-based policy have promised.

Bowman proposes supporting an undemocratic technocracy because, currently, it protects some freedoms he values. In the context of the recent referendum this makes sense - UK government is not significantly less technocratic except that, unlike the EU, it is more susceptible to democracy. And right now that democratic pressure is populist, it is Bowman's 'stupid next-door neighbour' demanding that something is done about the demons (and their witches) that infect our society. The result being the moral of Thurber's ' Very Proper Gander':

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Right now the main reason for having democracy is the scale of government and that this government does not respond to free choices made in a free market. In the UK government spends about £4 in every £10, it is a behemoth that dominates our society and economy simply because of its size. In other liberal democracies the governmental whale is even larger. We can, and rightly do, celebrate Tax Freedom Day when we start earning for ourselves not the government but this doesn't change the fact that the only brake on the desire of government to grow larger is the existence of democracy.

Until we are able to realise that those things we assume can only be provided by government - schools, roads, hospitals, drains, welfare - don't have to be provided by government, we need to keep that democracy and accept that sometimes Sam Bowman's neighbours get too much say over Sam's life. This is probably wrong but, until the case for libertarianism and a voluntary society is accepted, we really have no other way of keeping the Mr Creosote that is government from overeating.

....

It's not for the left to decide what is freedom

Freedom... we're talking bout your freedom
Freedom to choose what you do with your body
Freedom to believe what you like
Freedom for brothers to love one another
Freedom for black and white
Freedom from harassment, intimidation
Freedom for the mother and wife
Freedom from Big Brother's interrogation
Freedom to live your own life...

A chunk of lyrics from Tom Robinson's 'Power in the Darkness', a song that became a sort of anthem for Rock Against Racism and the birth - or was it a rebirth - for Britain's cultural left. And, you know, I can't disagree with a word in that mantra, that statement of freedoms. As a child of '70s South London the events and culture of Rock Against Racism couldn't be avoided - at school badges sprouted, the radio echoed to a different set of musical sounds, there was a strut about Brixton, West Norwood and Crystal Palace that hadn't been there before.

Yesterday I went to the opening at Bradford's Impressions Gallery of an exhibition of Syd Shelton's photographs of the Rock Against Racism days along with my friend and former colleague, Huw Jones, who sort of famously features in the exhibition as (in his words) the 'token white' in the world's only Asian punk band - Alien Kulture. Now bear in mind that I'm a Tory, indeed I joined the Conservative Party as a teenager in 1976 almost in the teeth of this anti-establishment rock and roll sentiment. Even now, in an audience of now older Rock Against Racism aficionados I'm pretty much an exception. So Sid Shelton can - albeit a little hesitantly - include the Conservative Party in the parade of today's wrongness and racism.

All of which takes me to those lyrics and why they matter to me. Too often we forget that freedom - free speech and free choice - is central to our idea of civilisation. Indeed we trap ourselves in mealy-mouthed justifications of restrictions of speech or choice, always for good reasons never simply to oppress. It's not just concepts like 'hate speech', safe spaces or no platform but also the idea of preventing imports, the demonising of free enterprise and the banning of others' pleasures because we deem them unpleasant, unhealthy or unsightly.

Speech is central to this and we live in a society where the desire to prevent other voices is at risk of being institutionalised. Just as back in the 1970s the voices of black and Asian minorities weren't heard (and still fight for space), today there's a voicelessness about what some call the 'traditional working class'. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of racism out there (and that 'traditional working class' is no averse to a bit of it) but there's also a sense of a new excluded group - that 'traditional working class'.

In its slightly clunky sociologist way, The Guardian has spotted this problem. Here's Lisa McKenzie (whose from the same Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire mining communities where my grandfather started life) talking about the issues:

Over the past 30 years there has been a sustained attack on working-class people, their identities, their work and their culture by Westminster politics and the media bubble around it. Consequently they have stopped listening to politicians and to Westminster and they are doing what every politician fears: they are using their own experiences in judging what is working for and against them.

In the last few weeks of the campaign the rhetoric has ramped up and the blame game started. If we leave the EU it will be the fault of the “stupid”, “ignorant”, and “racist” working class. Whenever working-class people have tried to talk about the effects of immigration on their lives, shouting “backward” and “racist” has become a middle-class pastime.

This analysis - reflecting the patronising, dismissive, even uncomfortable response of us middle-class professionals (regardless of our politics) to that traditional working class - cuts close to the bone of the issue. We don't talk about why boys from a white working class background do worst at school and are least likely to go to university, we don't look at how angry many of these pretty ordinary Britons feel left behind and we don't ask the impact of ignoring their culture in favour of a mish-mash of the elite's Britishness with assorted imported cultures. The idea of Englishness is seen as a problem - we are perhaps the only place where many observers see flying the national flag as an act of racist provocation or, in some ways worse, being ignorant and common.

As many readers will know, I have pretty liberal views on immigration but even I can see why many ordinary people are agitated by it. Yes some of the ways in which it's discussed can sound racist but get underneath that and you'll find a real set of concerns that have little to do with a fear of foreigners - frets about homes and schools, worries over jobs, the loss of community facilities like the pub and the post office, isolation, bad policing and a sort of feeling that lots is being done for some other people and nothing for you and yours.

Although Rock Against Racism started with the thoughts of mostly white middle class musicians, anger at the racism of the music establishment, it opened the door to a bunch of working class performers and, in the Ska revival, the first black-white musical fusion (as opposed to appropriation) since the height of the jazz era. It's right that we recall what happened back then but we also need to heed the words from Power in the Darkness and raise the banners of freedom again. Not just in the continuing opposition to racism but in liberating ordinary people from the oppression of the modern state with its nannying, its obsession with supposed anti-social behaviour, its demonising of pleasure and its desire to police your speech, your movement and your choices.

What I object to in all this is that Tom Robinson's presentation of freedom deliberately excludes the right in politics. Millions of ordinary people who will all put their marker down as supporters of freedom and choice are told by the left that their idea of freedom has no place because that freedom includes expropriation of assets, the belittling of wealth and success, and the sustaining of the state as an agent of oppression through advocating punitive taxation.

I'll stand side-by-side with anyone opposing racism, supporting gay rights or making the case for free speech. But when people want to deny the freedom to succeed, to limit the availability of pleasure and to attack the choice that's central to our consumer society then I'll be on the other side of the barricade defending liberty from attack. And when - as we see from the middle-class left time and again - you're dismissive, rude or condemning of the words some ordinary Briton expresses, when you seek to close down what they say because it offends you, then you have become the enemy of freedom. An enemy of the ideals Tom Robinson set out in those lyrics I quoted.

...

A Conservative social justice caucus - can we strangle this at birth please.

****

The great philosopher of "it's not fair", John Rawls can, I suspect, be blamed for planting the seeds of what is now called 'social justice':

“Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty."

We haven't got a 'just society' because the stuff isn't distributed fairly. And, in the ultimate philosophical cop out, Rawls made 'fair' and 'more equal' mean the same thing. So society - which Rawls conflates with government throughout his work - must act to make things more fair in order that all can enjoy liberty.

Our problem, however, isn't with Rawls but rather with this idea of 'equality' and the way in which it plays out in our society. Indeed Rawls stressed that 'the principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance' - justice is quite literally blind to race, gender, class, ability or any other characteristic. In the real world, of course, such a practice is essentially impossible. Most obviously this is true where society has an ingrained or institutional racial, gender or other bias (think apartheid South Africa or the antebellum US south not the campus of a liberal arts college). The problem is that the advocates of social justice have set out to create, instead of that 'veil of ignorance', a sort of checklist of 'fairness' that must be completed before any rule is passed, statement made or comment spoken.

You can, I hope, see the problem here and indeed the point at which the idea of social justice runs full tilt into other important ideas like liberty, democracy and choice. If the somewhat warped interpretation of Rawls that's popular in some circles is used, the result is a sort of soft (and sometimes not so soft) authoritarianism. On top of Rawls' concern about the distribution of wealth and income is piled a host of other inequities - of race, sex, gender, ability, history and place. So even when they are among the wealthiest and highest income, in Rawls' terms the most privileged, some individuals by dint of being black or female or gay or ill remain the victims of social injustice (that must be challenged and righted).

It's in the context of this understanding that I was fascinated by this announcement:

...a private group of Tory MPs has formed to try to help develop a stronger social justice agenda in their party which might help the Prime Minister – and whoever succeeds him – develop a proper Tory plan for tackling poverty. Its members describe the group as a ‘compassionate Conservative caucus’, and it includes an interesting bunch of members, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Alistair Burt, David Burrowes, Stephen Crabb, Ruth Davidson, and Nadhim Zahawi. Number 10 officials also attended the group’s first meeting, which took place yesterday afternoon in Parliament, and included a talk from Bill Gates on tackling global health inequalities.

Now this, in terms of the Conservative Party, is a pretty powerful group seemingly committed to tackling 'injustices in society' and, interestingly, an ‘all-out assault on poverty’. This is, in many respects, the language of social democracy rather than conservatism. Indeed, if it is joined by the sort of agonies of language explored recently by Maria Miller, we see a significant element within the Party shifting towards a progressive 'liberal' (in the American meaning) agenda and away from what we'd more usually see as a conservative platform.

Unless that is, the agenda is to redefine the idea of 'social justice' - to escape from the straightjacket of campus identity politics, diversity top trumps and the closing down of speech for reasons of faux-offence. Perhaps this helps:

For many decades, under successive Governments, UK poverty has been defined narrowly by a measure of national income inequality. That is to say, households have been classified as living in poverty if they fall below a set income level, typically taken at 60 per cent national median income. Although this technique can be helpful in mapping low income areas, it is an arbitrary measurement of poverty, which reveals little about the reality of life in low income communities, and it offers no explanation or understanding about the root causes of poverty.

This - from the Centre for Social Justice - is a very different take on social justice. For sure, it's still about the injustice of persistent poverty but rather than seeing the problem as one of prejudice or exclusion because people belong to a group that suffers injustice, the CSJ sees the problem much more in terms of lifestyle - family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency, addiction and debt. It's the old line rewritten - 'finish school, get a job and keep a job, get married and stay married'.

Now, while I'm not wholly convinced by the 'muscular christianity' of the CSJ's approach, it does have the merit of being a recognisably conservative agenda. The failure of some within society results from failure of institutions rather than the structure of society. Although some of the CSJ rhetoric seems quite judgemental, its core message is that the state should pay attention to stable families, better schools, job creation and the promotion of a 'good' lifestyle. This is the very antithesis of both the social justice idea derived from Rawls and also the concept of a liberal, open society. It also rejects that Thatcherite virtue - a small state serving a strong society. For the only way for politics to right the failings of those institutions (families, schools, employers, lenders) is for government to intervene.

These Tory social justice warriors with their 'compassionate conservativism' and love for state intervention represent a step back to paternalism and perhaps a worrying indulgence of the authoritarianism that has become the hallmark of left wing politics. I'm all for an all out war on poverty but we rather know how to beat it (clue - look at 200 plus years of free markets) but if this comes wrapped with the so-called 'social justice' that's crushing free speech in our universities, creating division from diversity in our cities and privileging group rights and group think above individual liberty then I really think it needs strangling at birth.

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We're healthier, wealthier, safer and happier because of liberty. Let's not spoil it.

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Baron Evans of Weardale used to be the head of MI5 which means that, when he expresses a view on security matters, journalists and broadcasters go into sombre, stern nodding-dog mode. So Evans gets away with saying this stuff unchallenged:

“Inadequate security will breed vulnerability and fear and that in turn will tend to limit people’s ability to contribute to civil society, will tend to provoke vigilantism and will tend to diminish people’s ability to exercise the very civil liberties and human rights that we wish to sustain.” 

My problem with this is that there is precisely zero evidence of 'vigilantism' in the UK. Nor is there any indication that - other than oddly in a little Pennine village - people are organising themselves in gangs to provide security or exact vengance.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not suggesting that we don't need the security services or security for that matter. Merely that the sort of language used by Evans is designed merely to frighten, to operationalise the H L Mencken definition of politics:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

I will however give Evans the benefit of some doubt - having spent a lifetime looking almost exclusively at the relatively small number of bad guys in the world, it's understandable that his mind is set to see those bad guys as the central problem facing democratic societies. Thus we get this observation from our retired spook:

...the world faced a build-up of trained terrorists not seen since al-Qaeda ran training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11. 

 

We are, of course, expected to take this at face value. But it really is rather meaningless. So al-Qaeda ran training camps in Afghanistan but Evans gives no indication of numbers or the operational capability of those terrorists being trained. The reality is, I suspect, that we're talking about at most a few thousand (most of whom are safely losing a war in Syria against other Muslims) and Evans' former colleagues know who nearly all of them are. But by referring to 9/11, Evans takes us to a dark moment in our history - the worst terrorist atrocity in recent times.

The events in Paris remind us that there are people who would tear down our freedom and destroy the peace in which we (most of the time) live our lives. But we should not allow such doomsayers as Evans with their jaundiced view of humanity to set the security agenda. The truth is that, if we get vigilantism, it will be because people like Evans scared the pants off us not because of anything al-Qaeda, ISIS or Anjem Choudhary do or say.

What Evans should be doing is trumpeting the success of peace and freedom - that the world is now a safer place than it has ever been:

...while there's still plenty of war, hunger, sickness, and poverty in the world, things are much better than what they were only a few decades ago—not to talk about centuries ago. We are still far from utopia, but the data is stubborn: We are getting there. Fast.

 

However you assess the evidence and wherever you look people are safer, healthier, wealthier and happier (at least on average). The cynic would suggest that the likes of Lord Evans are conjuring up those hobgoblins so as to keep the security business going whereas others point to more powers for such folk as part of the reason. They are wrong, the main reason for the world being better is that more people have more freedom. It shouldn't be a surprise that the least safe, healthy, wealthy and happy places are places where security is absolute and government dominates everything.

And when we look at the Muslim world, we need to stop looking at it merely as the breeding ground for murderers like those in Paris but as a place where millions of people discovered they have a voice and are beginning to demand it's heard - by the military and traditionalist leaders as well as by the upholders of religious orthodoxy. The Arab spring may have turned into a pretty lousy summer but the new leaders of these places (as well as those in other places not touched by that spring) cannot put the voices back into a box.

Indeed that hope is there still. Here's Abdelbaseer A. Mohamed talking about his home city of Cairo:

So what to do? Integrate different kinds of people with each other by removing barriers and improving connectivity. By reintegrating street networks we can create valuable urban space. Arguably, allowing people to meet and interact in public urban spaces won’t threaten the security of the country and won’t corrupt morals as old players may fear it will. Rather, it might bring tolerance and promote reconciliation and reduce crime rates. Additionally, it will help in building trust between the regime and people.

My article is a call for a new strategy in which ‘anti-territorial’ programmes that are designed to break down boundaries between communities by encouraging social mix through increasing people’s freedom to construct bridges to other communities and overcome their isolation. In this respect, a new borderless Cairo might foster economic integration and urban competitiveness. I think that is the first step in security sector reform, otherwise this open plan jail will collapse and the prisoners of Cairo will be released.

The last open question that I will leave for the future to answer is: how long will the division between rulers and ruled remain?

This is the antithesis of the position that Evans and the security experts adopt. They want to manage - limit even - interaction, to ban certain activities, to control speech and to determine the sorts of fun that are permissable. Such people are brothers to both the fussbuckets and to the religious absolutists, to people who believe absolutely how people should behave in public and who use arguments about health, wealth, safety and happiness to promote their authoritarian agenda.

Forgetting of course that the thing making us healthier, wealthier, happier and safer isn't government but liberty. It's free trade, free enterprise, free assembly and above all free speech not armed policemen and snooping spies that makes for a healthier, wealthier, happier and, yes Lord Evans, safer world.

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The progressive left don't believe in free speech - and will redefine speech to pretend otherwise...

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Free speech is important. It's not just me saying that most people think free speech is one of our core values:

When asked what British values are, the most-chosen answers from all respondents were: respect for the law (69%); respect for free speech (66%); democracy (64%); respect for private property (62%); and equality between men and women (61%).

Now I know we can argue over what we mean by values but there's no doubt that most people have been raised with an essential belief in free speech. The problem comes when we begin to discuss what we mean by this free speech. Do we actually mean that people have the right to say whatever they like free from consequence? Take this comment from Norman Tebbit:

‘I’m not a particular friend of Leon Brittan, but this gentleman could equally well get up and accuse me of things like this – and I wouldn’t care for that. In fact I’d probably go round and smack him on the nose.’ 

This comment was in the context of parliamentary privilege - a peculiar form of free speech where there are, quite literally, no consequences. But in the context of free speech the words that upset Norman Tebbit enough for him to 'go round and smack him on the nose' are protected whereas the consequential physical violence isn't. However, in most circumstances, if we can demonstrate that the words spoken are untruthful, offensive and damaging then we have recourse to the law to get them withdrawn and to secure compensation.

None of this restricts free speech. You are quite at liberty to libel someone but you do so at the risk of having to withdraw the words and pay the offended person. However, we have added some other constraints on free speech within the criminal law through, for example, the Racism and Religious Hatred Act 2006. These constraints take the form of acting in response to words seen as incitement (in the case of the Act above, incitement to hatred). We have also seen constraints placed on 'offensive' or 'threatening' speech where it is broadcast or published including via social media like Twitter or Facebook. And finally we have direct and specific restrictions on free speech in the form of bans and controls on certain forms of commercial speech. The best example here is the ban on advertising tobacco products.

So while we say free speech is important we have allowed limits to be placed on speech that mean it is not always free and unlike the USA we have no First Amendment merely the goodwill of parliament in protecting our freedom. And this allows people to play a game of redefining what we mean by speech in order to justify censorship. Here's Anshuman A. Mondal setting out the premise for his justification of such censorship:

However, in his seminal book How to Do Things with Words, the Oxford philosopher J L Austin developed something known as 'speech act theory'. He argued that there were two broad categories of speech: the first, which he called 'constatives', are simply descriptive and informational; the second he called 'performatives', and they don’t simply say something, they do something. These forms of speech are therefore a kind of action.

In my book Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, I argue that the giving and taking of offence are performative speech acts in Austin’s sense. They act upon the world and the work they do is political insofar as they aim to establish a power relation between offender and offendee. Put simply, to offend someone is to subordinate them, to put them down. Conversely, to take offence is to draw attention to that subordination.

So we have two sorts of speech - one (facts and figures or stuff like that) Mondal would allow to be free while the other (opinions, observations and exhortations) should be constrained because to use such language is an act of oppression. Mondal argues (from his premise based on one philosopher's work) that the second type of speech isn't speech but action and thereby no different from Norman Tebbit's smack on the nose. Thus:

If some forms of speech are actions, then it follows that restricting or regulating them does not necessarily diminish freedom in speech in general, just as restrictions on some acts – say, robbery or murder – do not jeopardise freedom as such. Otherwise, the only true freedom would be anarchy.

Now this may be an entirely circular argument since you have to accept Austin's philosophical position that certain types of speech are actions, but it also raises a definitional problem because you have to set the boundary between speech that is protected and speech that isn't. And it is clear that Mondal intends this definition to be in the hands of the offended person - if they are offended then the speech should not be protected. Not only has Mondal redefined speech but, in doing so, he also redefines freedom (or rather suggests there is more than one sort of freedom):

If giving and taking offence is the idiom through which struggles over freedom and equality are being articulated in contemporary society then a society that desires a balance between freedom and equality is perfectly entitled to restrict and regulate offensive speech acts, either by legal means or through moral pressure. This is not the threat to freedom of speech that some might take it to be, but rather a shaping of the kind of freedom we, as a political community, believe to be desirable.

In essence we have the progressive dilemma - a vocal assertion of civil liberties combining with the desire to control the words people use through fiat. To square this particular circle it is essential to redefine both parts of the term 'free speech'. Thus some speech is redefined as action (not objectively different from a smack on the nose) and freedom is framed in the context of equality rather than individual autonomy. Neither of these new definitions make sense to the ordinary person, we are in a world where it isn't possible for a black person to be racist or a woman sexist.

Lastly such a redefinition hands to others an absolute power over what is said - I cannot predict whether what I say will 'offend' because the choice to be offended is not in my control. Moreover, Mondal want certain protected groups to have a monopoly in the use of law to police that offence. It is commonplace to see someone who isn't actually 'offended' by some speech arguing that the speech is 'offensive'. In effect no speech is protected and what we understand as free speech ceases to exist.

The result of this is that things that needed to be said don't get said for fear of someone badging what is said offensive. And this has enormous and damaging consequences for our society. Free speech is important, too important to be defined by whether or not someone is offended by that speech.

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