Some questions to get conservatives thinking

 I've repeatedly warned conservatives that, if defining who is or isn't a conservative and what is or isn't conservatism is left to socialists, liberals and reactionaries, we will become irrelevant to politics and policy-making. Historian Robert Saunders, in criticising Roger Scruton's call for defunding of university departments lacking in intellectual diversity, set this out in a Twitter thread:

In its early years, Thatcherism teemed with ideas. The party became a magnet for historians, philosophers and economists - some converts from the radical Left - who hammered out their ideas in think tanks, discussion groups and Scruton's own journal, The Salisbury Review

Saunders asks whether the current reaction from conservatives to left-wing dominance of academia - ban it, stop it, take its money away - simply covers over the paucity of conservative thinking, especially in or near to the Conservative Party itself. Saunders isn't a conservative so my warning is relevant but his (admitted a tad jaundiced) analysis of David Cameron is very telling:

From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it.

This is, without question, the defining characteristic of many modern politicians - Cameron is not unique in being spectacularly bright but incredibly shallow, just look at Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar and, of course, the godfather of 'image is everything' political positioning, Tony Blair.

A while ago - when slightly angry voices on the right of politics were saying that Cameron was a 'conservative in name only' or similar, I wrote that this was far from the truth, he is absolutely a conservative:

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

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

The problem is that this outlook - action and managerialism - doesn't leave a great deal of space for thought and rather focuses our preference on doers rather than thinkers - Rory Stewart rather than Jesse Norman. As Blair once put it "what matters is what works" and, in most cases, "what works" is defined as what wins us elections rather than a genuinely technocratic evidence-based polity. Our modern government looks technocratic but is far more concerned with what might be called "feels" than with substantive thinking about policy.

An illustration of this came from Will Tanner (who runs the brand new Tory think tank, Onward) in response to Liz Truss MP's suggestion that we need to reform planning and build a million new homes on what is now 'green belt' around London:

You've got to admire @trussliz' chutzpah, but our 10,000 sample megapoll last month suggested allowing development on the Green Belt would be the most unpopular housing pledge the Conservatives could take into an election, even with young people

Truss responds with a very telling comment:

We've got to move away from focus-group paralysis and deliver what will improve people's opportunities and life chances. We have to start making arguments again and not just follow.

Tanner's comment is in line with the Conservative Party of Cameron - no thinking ("how do we craft a planning system that protects, enhances even, the beauty, heritage and environment of England while allowing the housing development we need") just 'we can't do that, it isn't popular'. You don't have to agree with Truss's argument about housing development to see that setting policy by opinion poll denies the requirement to think seriously about the sort of places we want in our society. It is also a little ironic to see a politician slapping down a think-tank chief for not doing any actual thinking.

As to that conservative thinking, it is out there but not quite where you'd expect to find it. Firstly, the sort of issues that really bother people are now far less about economics than they are about sociology:

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

So if you want to get some substance about family, community, identity and the loss of institutions, you're better off reading US sociologist Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" or Dutch geographer Harm de Blij's "The Power of Place" than dabbing your eyes at reactionary paeans to a lost bucolic England or thudding your way through "The Road to Serfdom". And taking a look at non-conservative voices at the fringes of what's usually called 'populism' like Ben Cobley, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin.

The questions - challenges we could call them - that emerge include:

1. How do we restore trust to society - in things like marriage, education, justice, business and finance as well as government?

2. How, in an age of individualism, LGBT rights, gay marriage and identity wars, do we rebuild families as the central building block of society?

3. How do we balance the undoubted power of free markets and new technology in promoting betterment with the human desire to sustain community?

4. How do we promote local autonomy in a world filled with outcries about 'postcode lotteries'?

5. How does personal responsibility square with the popular idea that our agency is compromised by modern marketing methods?

6. Is there still a concept of duty - to family, friends, neighbourhood and nation?

7. Can we meet the aspiration for security without compromising civil liberties, and where is the boundary beyond which acceptable social control become autocracy?

8. What are the institutions we need to meet the aspirations for secure families and strong communities?

Too much of our thinking is, as Lizz Truss noted, dominated by opinion polling and focus groups resulting in policy-making that, to use an ad man's term, "just films the brief" - we get lists of initiatives each crafted so as to ping a positive in polling or research but these lists are, taken as a whole, unsatisfying. From tweaks, up or down, to taxes through grants or incentives to tinkering bits of regulatory change, what we have doesn't present any sort of picture of what we want tomorrow's families, communities and neighbourhoods to look like - they are bereft of a vision and wholly without the sort of mission Disraeli set us, 'improve the condition of the working man'.

You don't need university departments, think tanks or learned societies to consider what a 21st century conservatism might look like and there's no point in (given the left wing bias of academia) trying to push water uphill - so feel free to take those eight questions above, add to them if you like, and start thinking about what kind of place you want to live in and how we get there.


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Conservatives - what sort of society do you want? Some thoughts.

If the Conservative Party in the UK wants to thrive in the future it needs - as I've said before - to start thinking about sociology:

Because social issues now matter more than economic ones, for more people, there is a realignment coming at some point. The offer that the two parties give to the electorate will shift from being rival answers to how to cut (and bake) the pie. It will shift to a contest over which conception of society – diverse versus ordered – wins out. The precise mechanics of how this will happen are uncertain, but that it will happen just reflects the fact that one’s position on the social cleavage now matters to people.

The British political system makes this "realignment" difficult - or at least unlikely to happen in the convenient, media-friendly manner of a new political party or parties. The by-election result in Newport West, even if we apply the usual caveats about such things, show that the chances of another party - left, right or centre - superseding the two main political parties is small.

This doesn't mean, however, that the shift from economy to society as the main focus of public concern won't have a profound effect on our politics. And it does mean that conservatives need to begin to think about the sort of society they want to build while recognising that economic truths remain economic truths and can't be wished away.

When people accuse some conservatives of wanting "to go back to the 1950s", they fail to realise the significance of what this might mean in an actual policy platform. Nobody wants to go back to the real 1950s and lose the central heating, the cars, the mobile phones and the computers (or for that matter to get back the racism, sexism and homophobia) but people would like some things we have less of now that were normal in the 1950s.

What isn't to be liked about a crime rate that's less than a fifth of the rates today? Don't we like the idea of a job for life? And stable communities where people trust each other? When people hark back to better days long ago, these are sorts of things they think about. All of them are about the social environment, about the kind of people we are and the sorts of communities we live in. None of these things are incompatible with free markets, with social mobility or with economic growth. But they are less achievable in the centralised, one-size-fits-all, government by spreadsheet that we have right now.

When the spreadsheet wranglers talk about localism, they think of grand regional mayors wielding (quite vague) "powers" not district councils. And the focus of these mayors isn't community, family or neighbourhood but economic growth, regional competitiveness and the levering of central government decisions into local benefit. It is an entirely utilitarian focus on what Deirdre McCloskey called "Max U" - prudence only - and doesn't respond to those societal concerns about what people can see around their homes and in their lives.

Conservatives (with or without the big 'C') need to start framing their ideas about community and this means getting to grip with housing, with the manner in which the welfare system fails the poorest, with crime and justice. Conservatives need to start talking about buses rather than trains, about care workers rather than tech grandees, and about the environment we live in rather than the abstract finger-wagging of climate change. Above all we need to challenge the idea that everywhere is the same and can be treated the same - the managerialist ideology that has dominated our public administration for three decades. If it is our school, our hospital, our police service then this needs to be reflected in the way people relate to it.

I observed once that, at least in Bradford, the police appear to have retreated to huge, anonymous barracks that look more like something escaped from a Kafka-esque state than a local police service in a democracy. The convenience for operations management of such arrangements has outweighed the idea that the police are citizens in uniform protecting the place where they live.

The same assessment can be done for the NHS, where huge institutions with nameless, faceless appointed boards have replaced community hospitals, where (even in a comfortable place like Cullingworth) the doctors travel in from altogether grander, posher places to do their doctoring, and where the diktats of a distant bureaucracy determine what happens even if it is a really stupid thing to do in some places.

I might be wrong in thinking that the answer lies in a real localism, in actual, practical devolution of control over much of government to local communities. But I do think that, as the pathetic debacle of trying to leave the EU has shown, the current system we have has become so detached from normal society that its prescriptions - prepared by those men and women with spreadsheets - are at best annoying to and at worst actively damaging the neighbourhoods and communities that make up our nation.

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Is the problem technocracy not postmodernism?

The idea of a university as a circle of professorial peers, each with apprentices and each practicing a craft, tends to be replaced by the idea of a university as a set of research bureaucracies, each containing an elaborate division of labor, and hence of intellectual technicians. For the efficient use of these technicians, if for no other reason, the need increases to codify procedures in order that they may be readily learned.

I was struck by this observation - from C. Wright Mills, "The Sociological Imagination". It feels an essential truth, a description of the university's journey from a collegiate environment where knowledge is explored to a complex bureaucracy dedicated to the production of research. There are a lot of people culpable in this journey - Mills points to what others called the 'military-industrial complex' (with a side swipe at research-driven advertising agencies) and to 'human engineers' in bureaucracy:

To say that ‘the real and final aim of human engineering’ or of ‘social science’ is ‘to predict’ is to substitute a technocratic slogan for what ought to be a reasoned moral choice. That too is to assume the bureaucratic perspective within which—once it is fully adopted—there is much less moral choice available.

We hear from Jordan Peterson and others that the problem is postmodernism and relativism. I've a little inkling that empiricism, an obsession with uncontextualised data, is perhaps more of a problem. Technocracy is far more the core ideology of the 'liberal elite' than is postmodernism - it is the idea that bureaucracy can discover a solution through the collection and analysis of data without reference to any moral foundation that sits at the heart of our disconnection with government.

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Racism - why the progressive left's definiton is damaging

It was some time in the early 1990s when a friend, steeped in the occult law of progressive politics, explained to me that most on the "left" didn't mean what I thought they meant when they talked about racism.

You see, along with most of the populace, I'd laboured under the misunderstanding that racism was prejudice based on a persons race. So a decision, for example, to exclude someone, not employ someone or stereotype someone based on their race is pretty much all there is to racism. It seems I was wrong - or rather that there's a different meaning of racism that derives from society's structure, history and other stuff that Marxist sociologists speak about.

Under this different meaning of the word 'racism', I (as a white person) do not have to say or do anything at all that regular folk consider racist for the progressive left to consider that I am a racist. My very existence is a monument to racism - white people are racists because they are white people. And, of course, the victims of that racism - people of colour - cannot be racist even if they use language or act in a way that most folk would consider racist. Understand that you don't have to agree with this definition of racism (and I don't) for it to be significant in the way a discourse about racism is conducted.

There is, for some white people, an escape clause. You become an 'ally' of people of colour. This doesn't actually stop you being a racist because you are white but it does provide some protection as your heart is in the right place - especially if you've acknowledges the deep structural causes of racism within society (having learnt about this from listening to those Marxist sociologists).

Which brings me to Emma Dent-Coad MP and Nasreen Khan (or Naz Kahn as she was until recently).

Taking Naz Kahn first. It is clear that Naz is a person of colour (being, in this case, a Muslim of South Asian heritage) which means that, in progressive mythology, she cannot be a racist even if she says something that is racist. Moreover, Naz's crime was to be anti-Jew and there's a problem with the Jews in that progressive myth . Everyone recognises that Jews are a minority and that they were (and are) persecuted but they are mostly outside that people of colour definition because that would put them in the same category as the Palestinians who are, of course, oppressed (by Zionists who are mostly Jewish).

Ms Kahn may have overstepped the boundaries of what the progressive left will accept in terms of antisemitism - mostly by suggesting Hitler wasn't all that bad, which means the Labour Party will eventually get round to sacking her - but her opinions are simply slightly more extreme versions of those held by a significant proportion of Labour members. Anti-Zionism is acceptable (because the Palestinians are oppressed) even though opposing Zionism means opposing the existence of Israel, something central to the identity of most Jews.

Meanwhile, Emma Dent-Coad, the MP for Kensington is reported to have called a black Tory activist, Shaun Bailey, a "token ghetto boy". Normal progressive left reaction to this (and indeed that of most regular folk) would be to say "racism" because referencing the ghetto and calling a black man 'boy' definitely fits everyone's idea of racism and Ms Dent-Coad is white so, in that progressive mythology, presumed guilty of racism. Yet a black progressive left MP, Clive Lewis, chose to defend her:

I see some brothers getting upset at @emmadentcoad recent comments. Where were your howls of outrage at the Tory ‘nigger in a woodpile’ comments? Pathetic.She’s done more for black people in her constituency with #grenfell in 6months than most tories will do in their entire lives.

What you see here is that Ms Dent-Coad is being defined as an 'ally' to people of colour thereby provided cover for a deeply racist (in regular folks' understanding of what that word means) remark. You see, Ms Dent-Coad is on our (people of colour) side so therefore we can excuse her offensiveness to a black person. And this get out clause is reinforced by the victim is this case being a Conservative activist and politician. Here's Mr Lewis again:

If you think you can fight racism and be in the Tory party then I guess this conversation isn’t going to go very far I’m afraid. If anyone has any understanding of the structural reality of modern racism, you’d not come within a country mile of a Tory membership card.

In Mr Lewis's mind, Tory equates to white. What he's saying is that any black person (and the comment was in response to someone who is a person of colour) who joins the Conservative Party has given up on racism, is a sort of traitor to the cause - an Uncle Tom or a 'coconut'. And, within Mr Lewis's mindset, adhering as it does to those progressive myths about racism, this must be the case - the Tories are the party of the establishment and the establishment is white and racist.

If one thing comes of this sorry situation - with a senior Labour MP insinuating that thousands of black and minority Tory activists, including hundreds of councillors and MPs are somehow unconcerned about racism - I hope it is to confine the stupid progressive definition of racism to the dustbin of silly ideas where it belongs. We've made huge progress over the past few decades in dealing with the endemic racism within our society and, as the words of Naz Kahn and Emma Dent-Coad show, we've still a long way to go. But to say that "structural reality of modern racism" (whatever that actually means) says that Conservatives don't care about racism is to wear a set of ideological blinkers. Racism is, in the end, always about people prejudging others, often harmfully, on the basis of their race. Yes it's ingrained and embedded in society but can we not try and turn it into some sort of 'groupthink' where only those subscribing to a narrowly-defined ideological position can be called anti-racist?

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Restoring community - an imperative for conservatives

Each day I see more and more that us conservatives, by allowing assorted Marxists to capture sociology, have done the world a disservice. This is because Marx was an economist meaning that he had little or nothing to say about sociology - as a result left-wing sociologists became activists not academics. Much - not all, a long way from not all - of the subject is arrant nonsense.

But it matters. The questions it asks are not answered by economics - for sure there's a bunch of economists splashing about pretending they can inject morality into their subject's dry modelling but this isn't asking the questions a sociologist would ask. Here's Aaron Renn:

There are a number of people in the national media who make the argument that things aren’t so bad, that if you look at the numbers this idea that things are horrible in much of America just isn’t true. It’s easy for me to believe this is actually the case in a quantitative sense. But man does not live by bread alone. When you have an iPhone but your community is disintegrating socially, it’s not hard to see why people think things have taken a turn for the worse.

There are social goods (if you want to use that dreary economics language) that are as necessary as the material benefits brought us by liberal capitalism. And most of these goods are about community rather than anything definable in the typical national politics. As I wrote a little while ago:

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

It may seem trite, as Renn does, to hark back to a past age when we didn't have to lock our doors and left the keys in the car on the drive. The local concerns about burglary here in Cullingworth are real yet we have so much more than a past generation who lived lives less plagued by the fear of crime. But we can't blame the good life, the betterment of our lives as consumers - running water for folks in Aaron Renn's home county and the central heating for families here in cold, damp Cullingworth.

The willingness to be a community is still there but it is suppressed by the manner of public service management, by the transformation of voluntary organisations into agents of the state, and by the permissions and regulations laid down by the state between ordinary folk and helping their neighbour:

That's right - permission to care. That professionals in the employ of the Council, the NHS or their satellite agencies needed to allow people to look out for their neighbour. In this I saw a dead culture - one murdered by the good intentions of public agencies. That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

We need to look again at the risks of individual social action and start to err in favour of community and its capacity to self-police rather than respond to every bad case with more rules, controls and regulations. It is the suppression of social innovation, suggesting it is only possible through endorsement by the sate or its agents, that damages community. Anyone who has been involved in local communities (and I've been a local councillor for two decades) will know they are buzzing with ideas, filled with people who want to be involved. We have a generation of wealthy and healthy older people who aren't just looking to have extended holidays, yet so much of public rhetoric seems to be about how those folk are uncaring and selfish.

For me the biggest lesson from things like the Brexit vote isn't about divisions but rather about distance. Government - nearly all of it - is distant, complicated, unapproachable, opaque and thoughtless (and this is a large part of why we dislike the EU so much). We look at what happens and wonder why decisions are made the way they are, why no thought is given to neighbourhood, why the word community is used without, it seems, even the vaguest understanding of what it means, and why the narrow interests of a small economically-successful class seems to dominate the thinking of every political party, every academic and every pundit whose number the BBC producer has in her mobile phone.

When we talk about social capital, we tend to do so in a sort of abstract way - as if it it something that can be bottled by middle-class academics and civil servants and poured onto struggling communities. But social capital is all about people standing on their doorstep, seeing something that could be better and saying "we can fix that, we can do that". It's not about local councils having 'community strategies' or lottery agencies funding middle-class experts to administer to places needing help. Nor is it about trying to turn that willingness to help into the new vanguard of the proletarian revolution let alone the need to resist neoliberal hegemony.

The starting point is simply giving places - local communities, neighbourhoods - the capacity to do what they think will make where they live a little better. From fixing some fences, clearing paths and picking up litter to helping mind neighbour children or doing what Mr Sparks did for me, my brothers and dozens of local children in the South London suburb of my youth - took us to play cricket in the summer and swimming in the winter. So long as people think they have to wait for permission to do these things, they won't do them. The imperative in building that social capital we say we've lost is to get government out of the way of people who want to help.

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Thoughts on a 21st century conservatism

Chris Dillow in that slightly laid back manner of his asks why us Tories seem to be uncomfortable with the 21st century:

It’s become a cliché that the Tories want to return to the 1950s, before the age of mass migration and our entanglement with the EU. These, however, are not the only examples of Tories discomfort with the modern world. Tom Welsh says the Tory party is threatened by the large number of university graduates, and Amber Rudd seems befuddled by the internet.

Now partly this is simply a reflection of Tory demographics but we should also spot that, especially with the Internet stuff, getting all flustered over new things isn't the preserve of us Conservatives. Check out the angst about disruptive digital transport technology, the constant fretting about robots and jobs, or the renewed enthusiasm for fixing prices and managing markets. Hardly embracing the modern world.

And, let's be honest about the 1950s - who wouldn't want to return to a full employment, low crime world with strong communities and social capital? So perhaps us Tories need to start explaining how, without casting aside all the myriad ways in which today's world is better, we can help build a 21st century version of those happy days.

Chris suggests that the reason for conservative angst is that the world hasn't quite turned out quite like we expected it to in November 1989 when the communist wall came down. Mostly, of course, this is because, despite the dark days being over, this damnable ideology persists - not least because of the refusal of those who dream of man's perfection and true communism (like Chris) to accept that their faith - the secular religion of socialism - is wholly misplaced.

In the 1980s British Conservatives managed to connect traditional Tory values - family, community, personal responsibility - with the core of liberalism deserted by those who claimed to be liberals. It was less about Popper, Hayek and Friedman and more that the thing to be conserved was the neoliberal consensus about to deliver the most sustained period of economic betterment in human history.

This being said, Chris Dillow is right, conservatives have to reconnect with the middle class bedrock of their support and this can only happen when the process of leaving the EU is concluded. And the starting point is for us to rediscover sociology as a means of understanding our world and to set aside the dry, metric-dominated economics that dominates elite political discourse. It is possible to want strong, cohesive communities and to support an open, buccaneering, free-trading world.

Chris is right that there's no canon of economists on which to build a modern conservatism but this might not be such a deal (even for an economist like Dillow) - as I wrote a week or so ago:

As a starting point in understanding conservatism let me say that emotional meaning is more significant than philosophy, at least in its role as an ideological source. Place, people and values matter more to conservatives than the words in some book written in the 19th century. Where there are central texts to liberalism and socialism, there is no source book for conservatism - we can't get ideological reassurance from Marx or Smith or Mill.

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

It seems to me that this is a starting point for a conservative future, one that values personal liberty and supports community, encourages enterprise and respects service, and sees the building blocks of a good society in the actions of good people who love the place they live not in a vain search for perfection, for a 21st century Utopia.

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"It starts with what you can see from your doorstep" - thoughts on conservatism

Conservatives don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a conservative. After all politics is boring, political philosophy doubly boring. So we don't spend hours discussing the nuance of our ideology, preferring instead to talk about the garden, the football or the state of the gulleys on Bingley Road.

The problem with us conservatives not thinking much about conservatism is that others decide to do it for us. And they really don't get it at all. A thoughtful consideration of conservatism get replaced by a set of negative stereotypes depending on who is doing the defining.

To our right we get faux-conservatives who pretend that they're the only real conservatives. Everyone but them are 'cucks', 'conservatives in name only' or, worst of all 'liberals'. The true conservatism for these people is a sort of warmed over nationalism peppered (or even pepe-ed) with sub-literate on-line memes and old-fashioned racist tropes.

To our left are a bunch of folk who range from considering us sad thickos to really, genuinely hating us. No chance of a positive press here, we're greedy, uncaring, elitist and even murderous. Conservatism is a bloated, red-faced man in a pin-stripe suit.

As conservatives we've allowed these oppositional stereotypes to dominate people's understanding of the ideology (insofar as it is an ideology - but more of that later) because we spend almost no time considering what we do believe and, more importantly, what conservatism means to the millions of people who simply toddle along to the church hall and vote for us.

Conservatism is ill-defined - it's felt rather than analysed, emotional rather than intellectual. Unlike the left there is no ur-text, no 'Capital' that provides a bedrock of religious certainty to ideological discussion. We have a set of populist aphorisms - 'hand up not a hand out', 'people who do the right things', 'choice and opportunity' - but these don't help except as a set of clues to what we believe.

The advantage, of course, with all this is we can, like the Red Queen, believe almost anything if we try hard enough. This is the problem that some absolutist free marketers (and those Pepe-loving nationalists) have with conservatism - it doesn't preclude a role for the state or assume that there is some perfect model of government that, if introduced, will lead us to the Fields of Elysium.

The disadvantage with the lack of that ur-text or even a recognised corpus of accessible conservative thinking is that there's no obvious ideological filter through which to assess policy. Conservatives literally wing-it much of the time at least in ideological terms. When people speak of some sort of conservative ideological mission they largely miss the point - it's mostly this is what we do not a case of this is what we believe.

As a starting point in understanding conservatism let me say that emotional meaning is more significant than philosophy, at least in its role as an ideological source. Place, people and values matter more to conservatives than the words in some book written in the 19th century. Where there are central texts to liberalism and socialism, there is no source book for conservatism - we can't get ideological reassurance from Marx or Smith or Mill.

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkein and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

If you spend time with conservative people - and as a Conservative Party member and activist of forty years, I can say that I have done just that - you soon realise that the stuff of national debate and headlines is not the stuff of conservatism (not, as I've noted, that conservative folk spend that much time talking political philosophy). Boil it down and the core of our belief is about community, family, neighbourhood, friends - social capital, sociology. Yet we bang on as if economics is everything, dry and dusty emotionless numbers.

Because of this and because we don't think enough about what we're about, conservatives become pragmatic, technocratic and seem uncaring. If we don't ground our policy in community, family, neighbourhood and home, we end up sounding like the young man with the spreadsheet trying to tell the old publican why his business is dying. Or worse that it would be an improvement to close that business and turn the property into a convenience store or some flats. Apply this thinking to how we see the poor. Not benefits scroungers. Not immigrants. Not undeserving. But somebody's family. Someone's neighbour. Someone's friend.

The reverse used to be true about conservatives. The folk bothering about their neighbourhood, the town, the country were mostly conservatives. The sense of social duty and that 'we can't let things like that happen here' was what drove my grandmother and two friends to start delivering meals on wheels in the years after WWII - ferried round by the local curate who had a motor-cycle and sidecar.

In Britain, conservatism doesn't need a relaunch, we just need to literally go back to our roots as conservatives. To understand why we are what we are and to start talking about those conservative things - few of which, once we've got past thrift, have much to do with economics, at least in that Hayekian or Marxist "we've a prescription for the perfect society here in this book" sense of economics.

Firstly, everything is local. This is what matters most to people. Their family. Their friends. Their neighbours. Their community. Their place. As Kipling said:

GOD gave all men all earth to love
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all

Admitting our hearts are small is just the start - we must then be able to answer the questions people have about their school, their hospital, their road, their house, their family. It's not that people in Sevenoaks don't care about school and hospitals in Wilsden, of course they do. It's rather that those small hearts make them care much, much more about the things of their neighbourhood than they ever will about things in distant (even five milesaway) places.

Today this means giving people control of the answers to these questions, at the very least a say, a chance to hold the people running the services to account. So when we say we don't like the EU, it's not because it's evil or stupid but because it's simply too far away to understand what our neighbourhood, our community and our family needs except as numbers on a spreadsheet or a footnote in a think-tank report.

Even the local council is too far away to really understand what matters in our communities, to our families and for our neighbourhood. Yet the flattening of everything - creating Harm de Blij's 'flat earth' in the pursuit of Max U - makes that council just an outpost of the distant regime. And people know this and feel excluded. For some there's enough money to escape (or even to be an 'Anywhere' person, a 'Flat Earther') but for most people that's not an option.

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

For me this is the starting point for a conservative mission. We're not about grand schemes for the perfect society but rather for places that people love. I quoted Kipling's 'Sussex' above but I could equally have used Casey Bailey's 'Dear Birmingham' because it's exactly the same sentiment - I love this place for all it's flaws, mistakes and problems. It's my place.

This is where we start - with home, friends, family and the places we love. You want a conservative manifesto then it starts with how we give folk the power and the tools to turn the places they love into great places. For sure there are lots of other things about keeping people safe, about nation and stuff like that - even macroeconomics if you insist, but if we don't start with what we can see out of our front door we've missed the point.

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Political scientists discover a previously unknown political view - conservatism

Political Scientists announcing the shocking discovery that most ordinary folk are conservative

Picture the scene. A modest chain hotel somewhere in the south is hosting an academic conference - "Politics and Social Class in the 21st Century" or something along those lines. And it's filled with the sort of people who go to these sorts of events - sociologists, political scientists, social policy researchers. At the end of a long day listening to bias-affirming presentations and virtue-signalling slide shows from fellow left-wing academics, a few settle down for a nice glass of wine and a chat in one of the hotel's comfortable bars. On the table - flotsam from the previous week's 'Winning Sales and Marketing Strategies' event - is a copy of The Daily Mail. In the interests of science our brave academics plunge into the newspaper.

"If we're to research political attitudes, we have to see what right-wing people are thinking even if it means holding our noses" giggles one of our professors.

A chorus of affirmative chortles from the assembled lecturers leads to a rambling discussion about right-wing views.

"They don't like immigrants, do they?"

"What was that Thatcher thing - 'roll back the state'"

"Lots of stuff about soldiers - our brave heroes and all that nonsense"

"Human rights - they don't like human rights."

"They're always on about free markets."

"And the EU - they're opposed to the EU too."

"Bunch of neanderthals reading the Daily Mail - research has shown that right-wing people are more stupid".

From this confused analysis fuelled by cheap wine and prejudice, our academics hatch a plan - they'll write down a list of 'authoritarian views' (by which they mean 'things that right-wing people think that we don't'), get hold of some opinion polling data and look at how many there are of the sort of people who read the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph.

So it is done:

As much as half the adult population may share a political world view researchers describe as "authoritarian populist".

They favour rolling back the state and are negative about immigration, human rights and the EU, a study claims.

It concludes these views are set to have a "huge effect" on decisions voters make at the EU referendum.

Many more people share this outlook than the four million voters who backed UKIP at the election, the work says.

Academics at the Universities of Essex and Exeter say theirs is the first attempt to analyse what they call "authoritarian populist" views in the Britain.

Shocking! Half the population think free markets are a good idea, that we might be better off with a smaller state and that perhaps cuts to our military capacity have gone too far. What's even more shocking is that these academics - supposed experts in politics - had never noticed. And the real corker is that they consider free markets and smaller government to be "authoritarian".

I've been a politician for twenty years, elected by people a long way from the 'metropolitan elite' these professors say they represent, and these views - often confused and contradictory - are commonplace. They're the views of people who quite like things as they are right now (or sometimes as they were a few years ago when 'things were better'), people who really don't want trendy folk from somewhere else telling them what they should or shouldn't think or say.

And these people are 'authoritarian' is as much as they think criminals should be punished, that the people who volunteer to serve in the forces deserve our admiration and that the idea of human rights is exploited by lawyers to stop us deporting rapists and murderers back to where they came from. When they say they want smaller government, it's because they look at their wage slip every month to see nearly half of it disappearing in taxes. It's because they see endless parades of clipboard wielding public officials getting in the way of ordinary people living their lives in peace. And it's because they see enormous waste in government - everything from politicians feathering their own nests through to thousands of pointless non-jobs created to satisfy either the EU or the politically correct (or both).

What these people don't want is sneering academics peering down their noses at them while suggesting that they're semi-intelligent numpties who are waiting on their chance to elect an English Donald Trump to supreme power. These views aren't "authoritarian populist" or any other sort of lefty made-up description, there's a well-known and commonly used word that describes this political position, one that's hundreds of years old - conservative. And in that description there's a multitude of different views - from 'Blue Labour' working-class patriots with sons in the army to the vast array of ordinary middle-class folk who do a job, have a mortgage, take an annual holiday and want the government to leave off nannying, fussing and, to pay for that nannying and fussing, taking all their money.

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We shouldn't be surprised when right-wing politicians stop funding left-wing academics

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The Japanese government isn't all that keen on social science and humanities - preferring what it calls socially useful subjects:

A recent survey of Japanese university presidents found that 26 of 60 national universities with social science and humanities programmes intend to close those departments during the 2016 academic year or after. The closures are a direct response to an extraordinary request from the Japanese government that the universities take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities departments] or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs.”

Now I'm not here to defend what the Japanese government has done but rather to ask why, given the nature of these courses, we have got to the place where a national government can deem them less able to meet society's needs. All that sociology, social psychology, political science, literature and history is to be sidelined - I'm guessing for science and engineering, business and languages.

This comes on the back of the decision by the US Congress to pull funding for social sciences from the National Science Foundation:

First, in April the House passed a reauthorization of the National Science Foundation — the America Competes Act (H.R. 1806) — that cuts funding to the social sciences by 45 percent, even as it increases funding to the NSF overall.

The question here is again - why? It's easy for the establishment of social science academia to cry political foul - after all these are political decisions made on partisan grounds - but what they fail to appreciate is just how utterly loathed and detested much of their output is outside their narrow milieu. Frankly you can't expect the political right to support a set of academic disciplines that make it their business to argue that all conservatives are thick or that neoliberalism, capitalism or free markets are at the heart of all society's problems. The reason for this problem is simple - and I would support 'defunding' UK universities on this basis: the academic disciplines concerned are completely dominated by a left-wing, anti-conservative agenda.

While the authors’ political motivations for publishing the paper were obvious, it was the lax attitude on behalf of peer reviewers – Jussim suggested – that was at the heart of the problems within social psychology. The field had become a community in which political values and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately represented in the literature.

This example isn't a one off - the literature in sociology, political science, regional studies, and psychology is entirely dominated by a set of left-wing ideological certainties. And researchers cannot - if they want to get published, secure funding or advance an academic career - step beyond this narrowly defined world. It's easier to be a Stalinist communist in most social sciences than a moderate conservative. Until this imbalance - this sustained bias - is addressed, I see absolutely no reason why a conservative would want to support funding social science 'research'. What is remarkable is that Conservatives and conservative-led governments have continued to fund academics who both despise those conservatives and have the means to promote an anti-conservative ideology through their academic discipline.

If social science faculties want to protect themselves better, they should look to their own central failing - an almost complete capture by the ideological left. Until this happens the value of the disciplines within those faculties will continue to decline in the eyes of everyone but those immersed in that part of academia or else entirely wedded to illiberal, anti-democratic and oppressive left-wing ideologies.

UPDATE: Another article setting out the egregious bias and misrepresentation in social psychology concluded:

I think reform is urgently needed because I think there’s a significant risk that the field will be defunded within the next few years. I urge social psychologists to take this risk seriously. In the US, we have a funding monoculture that is largely dependent on a couple of US government agencies. If most of our findings are false, I think policymakers will question why taxpayers should fund our work. There is also strong evidence (PDF) that the field discriminates against non-leftists and conservatives — this alone may prove disastrous for us, especially since the field has taken no action to prevent such discrimination.

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How left wing academics are killing the business school

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For many years business schools and management faculties were the bastions of sanity in academia. Places where such concerns as robust research methods, consistency and applied knowledge were more important that ideology or the revolution. Business schools were, so to speak, the engineers or social science - sensible places producing graduates who could actually contribute something to the world once they left the groves of academe.

Sadly this is now under threat. A thing called 'critical management studies' has grown like a sort of parasitical maggot within the body of the business school:

As an umbrella research orientation CMS embraces various theoretical traditions including anarchism, critical theory, feminism, Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, representing a pluralistic, multidisciplinary movement. Having been associated mainly with business/management schools in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia earlier, CMS as a research approach has presence all over the world and is not confined to management/business schools. This suggests that CMS is an approach to doing research rather than a school or tradition, and there is no particular 'right' way of doing CMS.

I am reluctant to do anything more than just peek at this hideous growth upon an otherwise sensible part of our higher education system. But that peek reveals the usual - and more-or-less incomprehensible - left wing wibble. We encounter a world focused on 'alternatives to growth driven neo-liberal capitalism', on 'critical performativity' (whatever that might be), and on 'challenging the...power structures in the university workspace'.

And in doing this work, such ordinary stuff as scientific method and detached, dispassionate research are to be dismissed:

We do not believe that good social science is always detached, objective and quantitative in its approach. Nor do we think it should routinely borrow from the natural sciences in its investigations. Instead we favour the use of a wide range of methods in attempting to understand and unpick management and organisations. This is why the School of Management at the University of Leicester houses the largest body of heterodox researchers across the core disciplines of accounting and finance, marketing and organisation studies in the world.

We are now beginning to churn out from university management schools the same deluded, evidence-light, ideological research (I call it research because I'm kind) has we've seen for generations from sociology and social studies departments. This isn't to say that left wing views have no place in the study of business and management but rather to observe that the application of that ideology seems to trump any reasoned or rational consideration of the things being taught and studied.

What we see here is the continued debasement of academia as the unchallenged hegemony of 'progressive' delusions gradually infects the whole body of research. To be fair there's a way to go before the UK's business schools are so corrupted by the sort of ideological non-research those unfortunate students at Leicester are suffering. But, just as there is no space for any challenge to this progressive hegemony across much of the social sciences, it seems that it will be only a matter of time before the BSc in management becomes just as uselessly impractical as the typical BA in Sociology or Social Policy is today.

The most frightening thing about the progressive left isn't just that it is out of touch with reality but that its academics reject structured, quantitative research methods (mostly because - as I was told by my research methods lecturer - 'maths is hard') in favour of the recycling of shared opinions and the gradual translation, without any real evidence, of those opinions into a 'research' corpus. Worse, if organisations are recruiting new managers infected by this 'business is bad' ideology, then instead of new and improving techniques in business adminsitration we will see the corruption of our businesses from within.
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I've discovered why there aren't any right-wing sociologists. Lefty academics are biased.

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Well pretty close to that - these are social psychologists:

Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?" Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, "not at all." In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint ("somewhat") or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point ("not at all").

And the same went for assessing grants and reviewing papers. What really saddens me in all this is that these biased lefties - 'liberals' in American-speak - are completely destroying the relevance of their discipline. When reviewing anything written by most social scientists (economics being the possible exception), you have to assume that the the research is skewed by a prejudged left-of-centre ideology.

I've said before that the sociology department that sets out to recruit a group of centrist or right-of-centre thinkers is going to clean up on breaking new ground in the subject.

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Confirmation bias - or shall we just call it sociology?

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The research was done some while ago and has been variously reported across the more left-inclined ("liberal") media. It typically has a headline something like this:

Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Essentially the premise of the research is that only stupid people are 'conservative'. This is all wrapped up in the self-important language of the sociology academic but in the end it all boils down to statements like this:

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

The problem here lies in the headline above, the presumption that prejudiced views are ipso facto right-wing. Thus the researchers definition of 'social conservatism' runs something like this:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

These outlooks are then connected to a series of statements about racial prejudice and unsurprisingly the results show that the researchers' definition of 'social conservatism' links with those prejudicial statements. In the report, another psychologist makes a parallel observation:

...a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like "every kid is a genius in his or her own way," might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

Or rather people who say 'absolutely' to Tweet-length sweeping statements are less likely to be the brightest in the box. My concern is that the archetypal liberal perception of conservatism is, in fact, a stereotyped list of prejudices - for liberals (and I'm using this term in its American usage here) things that they dislike or disagree with are automatically 'right-wing'. As a result the researchers here have simply confirmed their own prejudice - right-wingers are nasty prejudiced folk and probably stupid.

Since 99% of sociologists and social psychologists are left of centre in their views, much of the research base in these subject is informed by the assumptions underlying that left wing position. I've wondered before why there are very few right-wing sociologists with responses varying from 'you can't be a right wing sociologist' to 'you're just dismissing the subject because you don't agree with what it finds'.

What this research sets out to show - and it will be used again and again by the left - isn't that conservatives are stupid but that because prejudice is emotionally-founded the less intelligent are more likely to use it to base their political opinions. And if you define all the prejudiced positions as 'right wing' then you confirm that those folk are prejudiced. All the researchers have done is confirm their bias, they haven't added to the body of knowledge about why some people are prejudiced.

Sadly, this left wing confirmation bias corrupts almost all of modern sociology making it almost wholly useless as a guide to understanding society.

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Social capital and the problem with immigration - some thoughts

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Immigration is a problem. OK, you can call it a challenge, a significant policy issue or some other 'slightly-dodging-the-issue' form of words but the truth is that people – voters – are bothered about immigration. We know this because they tell us so in polling and because, if any of us have any ears, we hear it every day. Whether it’s a casual racist remark in a queue to go through security at Leeds Bradford Airport or the comments that trail behind crime reports, stories about ‘multiculturalism’ and descriptions of events at mosques.

The problem is that, whatever people say, immigration really isn’t an economic problem. There really isn’t much – or indeed any – substantial research evidence showing that immigration has a negative impact on levels of employment, economic growth or other measures of economic performance. So when Jonathan Portes reports this he is right:

“The research found evidence of a positive and significant association between increases in employment of migrant workers and labour productivity. It found that recruiting from outside the UK had allowed employers to fill skilled and specialist roles and enabled some organisations to expand. Employers reported that migrants' skills are often complementary to, rather than substituting for, those of UK born employees.”

However, this really isn’t the problem (or challenge or significant policy issue) at all nor is this simply a case of people being fed misleading information by politicians and the media. A positive economic impact simply isn’t sufficient for people to accept the social changes that immigration implies. Yet much of what we might call ‘immigration-positive’ research and comment is dominated by economic considerations, arguments over statistics and accusations that opposition to immigration is essentially racist.

If we are to understand immigration and, more importantly, develop policies that respond to the genuine concerns of very many people, then we need to get a much better grip on the sociology of immigration. We need to get a better idea of how immigration affects existing communities, how those communities react to immigration and how we manage migration so as to give a greater chance of that community reaction being positive rather than negative. By focusing on the economics of migration we have missed completely the real driver behind those community concerns that some politicians exploit.

Indeed it is the need to reduce negative social impact that should drive immigration policies and controls rather than the prevailing preference for points-based systems based on a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether the ‘skills’ of the immigrant are ‘needed’. The evidence, both from polling and from qualitative studies, shows consistently that worries about immigration relate inversely to people’s exposure to immigrants. I would add that my personal view is that Britain’s current anti-immigrant feeling is substantially driven by the migration from EU accession countries being to parts of the UK that have had limited prior experience of immigration.

None of this gets us any closer to a basis for setting policy - assuming we’re going to plonk for somewhere on the continuum from totally closed borders to totally open borders. Regardless of the economic case for immigration, the potential social negatives (the cost of which may not be wholly contained in an economic model of migration) require some degree of control. And that will mean that some people will not be allowed to migrate into the UK.

And there is a good argument for striking a balance in terms of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity. I know we like to talk about how many different languages are spoken in our communities (this isn’t new – I remember the Principle of Bedford FE College saying just this in 1983) but the breakdown in social capital implicit in that heterogeneity damages both the immigrant andreceiving communities:

“People in ethnically fragmented communities have lower levels of interpersonal trust; lower levels of civic, social, and charitable engagement; less efficient provision of public goods; more sluggish economic growth; and lower levels of happiness and general satisfaction. It seems that the more diversity we experience, the lower our quality of life is.”

The risk we run with open borders is that they meet a short-term economic need but in doing so provide the seeds for more sluggish development in the communities where those ‘needed’ immigrants settle. Indeed, we should recognise that some degree of homogeneity is essential if a community is to develop the institutions, connections and structures essential to building social capital. Put more bluntly, the people within a neighbourhood have to share more than the fact of living in that neighbourhood if it is to become community rather than merely a place.

The unanswered question here is how we determine the point at which we set our migration policy. This has to be where the economic benefits of immigration exceed any negative impact on educational attainment, health or crime. Not just because those negatives carry a cost that isn’t necessarily picked up by the employers of immigrant labour (the prime beneficiaries of the economic benefit) but because poorer schools, health and community safety are reflections of a dysfunctional neighbourhood, of the breakdown in the social capital needed for the long-term.

Finally, there has to be some connection between the expectations of the current demos and the actions of government. In a democracy this should be a statement of the obvious but I fear it is not so – too often the response from public officialdom to concerns about immigration is to say ‘there, there - don’t worry’ or else to suggest that the person expressing concerns is simply a bigot. A further type of response is to flood the individual with (essentially meaningless) statistics accompanied with the implication that they are some kind of idiot.

We need to have immigration controls for the very simple reason that the public – the demos – demands that we control the arrival of culturally-distinct people into the neighbourhoods where they live. This can’t be dismissed as racism, bigotry or prejudice (although all those things may be present on occasion) but rather should be seen as articulating the collapse of social capital in many neighbours that large scale immigration brings about. People are not idiots but are reflecting concerns about the loss of community in their words and choices. And government too often fails to pick up those concerns in defining policies (locally and nationally).

I believe that immigration enhances our nations bringing new ideas, attitudes, food, drink, music and dance to pour into the English cultural melting-pot. We are a vastly better society for having welcomed generations of migrants to our shores. And I don’t want to live in a place where we push people away, where we don’t offer sanctuary and where there’s a preference for a sort of sclerotic monocultural numbness. But if we want migration to work for everyone, we’ve got to manage it, to try and mitigate how it can damage social capital and to direct our attentions to integrating all the wonderful, hard-working people who have come to make their lives in our great country.

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Does sociology need to be rubbish?

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I'm not a sociologist. Indeed I have on many occasions criticised the discipline of sociology for its lack of rigour, its preference for anecdote (OK "qualitative research") over robust experiment and quantitative analysis. But, given that 'society' (whatever we may mean by that cursed term) is central to us human animals, we should perhaps give its study a little more credit and attention.

This thought was prompted by yet another of those trite poster slogans that people recycle and share as if they are some sort of great insight into the human condition. It went:

'How about we live in a society rather than an economy?'

A moment's thought reveals the inanity of this gloriously sweeping observation - we live (and have no choice in this) in both a human society and an economy. But beneath this specious statement there might be a little glimmer of real insight from whoever penned the aphorism. We spend a great deal talking about economics and the economy. Economists are the particle physicists of social science, feted and celebrated simply for the fact of their being such masters of an impenetrable subject that brings such knowledge to our world.

Even those who seek to popularise economics fall into a trap - they'll smugly post something prefaced with a parenthesised observation: "wonkish". This usually means filled with either some chunky maths or, more usually, a dense forest of entwined jargon. And for all that we read the author's other stuff and imbibe of their wisdom, we have a sneaking suspicion that behind that innocent word "wonkish" lies the real truth. If we could only get to see through the pea-souper of indulgent jargon then the scales would fall from our eyes and we would ascend to a higher plane of understanding.

Sociologists are different. They are the botanists of social science, a bunch of folk who flit about the world saying, "ooh, that's interesting. look at that!" Except that sociologists, rather than just looking and describing have taken the idea of participant observation to the point of the ludicrous - they want to reform society in some way that would end sin and perfect mankind.

I spent a happy few years reading the output of marketing academics. And especially those writing in the field of consumer behaviour. In this field you'll find loads of quantitative research, experiment, ideas hypothesised and tested - everything you expect from a robust social science. These researchers help us understand how we respond to advertising (it's not as simple as you think), the manner in which we make in-store choices and how colours or images affect behaviour. And this is - in a manner not grasped by the actual discipline - sociology.

So here's a challenge to sociologists. Put aside the Alinsky-light social activism, step back from relating the sorrows of interviewed sufferers and embrace something more interesting and exciting. Something you can learn from those studying the behaviour of consumers. Stop with the political posturing and campaigning. And actually study society. Explore how we respond to the multiple stimuli of modern communications, poke away at why social capital declined rather than just saying it has, and explore the world as it is rather than as it would be in your perfect sub-Marxist utopia. In simple terms do the -ology bit of the sociology.

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Is this why equality is important?

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I've just re-read Gordon Dickson's 'Necromancer', a novella providing some context for the author's Childe Cycle series of novels. In the book a future world is described where man's material needs are met, where technology has solved the problems of weather, food production and much else besides. Dickson doesn't go into details - the novella's purpose is to make a point not to create a future world - but his world isn't utopia.

At one point the hero read the newspapers and sees that, despite the meeting of needs, mankind is unhappy, thrashing about looking for purpose in a world of material satisfaction:

"The publications were full of the statistics of distress. Testing of grade-school children revealed that seven per cent of those under the age of eight were headed for major mental illnesses. The world crime rate had been climbing steadily for fifty years and this last year had jumped twenty-three per cent again. And this in a world in which nobody needed to lack for the necessities, and even most of the luxuries, of life. The world suicide rate was climbing sharply. Cultism was commonplace. Hysteria such as the marching societies exemplified was growing steadily. The birth rate was down."

Dickson wrote his novella in 1962 and described a world that, for us today, is surprisingly familiar. Even down to the ennui that pervades society, the sense of dissatisfaction and sometimes anger at some percieved injustice. And at the heart of all this is the sense that, in some manner, inequality is unfair. For some this has been turned into a pseudo-science, the picking away at statisitcs to prove that the ennui of modern society is a consequence of inequality - the mental ill-health, the suicide, the overindulgence would all fade were we but equal. Yet, despite our wish for equality, we know this cannot be so.

However, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't give people the chance to be equal. More importantly there is a real need for society to seek lower levels of inequality - not because of some perception of fairness but because high levels of inequality cause society to break down. And once people break from the bounds of law and democracy they are wont to find violent, oppressive resolutions to their envy.

I don't really want to comment on the economics of Thomas Piketty here but rather to say something about the sociological implications of his argument. If Piketty is right and the accumulation of wealth exceeds the rate of economic growth with the consequence that society's stock of wealth becomes concentrated in a small elite, then at some point society ceases to function. We either become an oikos state as Finer defined ancient civilisations - where the entire endeavour of society is to meet the needs of the god-king - or else order breaks down entirely with its associated economic collapse.

In the former case we would need a reason for people to remain in de facto slavery. Bread and circuses won't do over the long term, we would need the 21st century equivalent of that god-king ensuring the Nile floods every year. We must believe we would all die if that wealthy elite failed. I do not feel that such circumstances exist, which makes social breakdown inevitable - envy will triumph before Piketty's wealth gatherers achieve dominance.

We can call the envy of others' wealth different things - injustice maybe, inequality certainly, unfair often - but this doesn't detract from the central fear that the envy will lead to violent revolution. At the end of Necromancer, Dickson leaves us with a collapsing society - he has made his point that courage, faith and creativity are essential traits in man and that technology crushes these traits preferring a drab homogeneity.

But I just see that collapse. And wonder if the obsession of some with inequality reflects a fear that human envy - I want what he has - will create such a collapse?

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