"The things we share" - a message for Conservatives

Last night I spoke to about 30 Conservatives in the upstairs room at Bingley's Brown Cow where we'd enjoyed a curry (a proper home-cooked one courtesy of my colleague Naveed). This is the gist of what I said.

I promised myself I wouldn't use the 'B' word and although some people thought I meant Bradford, I intend to stick with not using the 'B' word. Instead I want to talk about the values, ideas and principles we have as Conservatives regardless of which side we took in the 2016 referendum. There will come a time when we look back to the debate out there now and recall with shock the manner in which it was conducted.

So what do we share? This isn't in any order or structure, just the things that came into my head when thinking about what to say tonight.

Modern isn't always good or better. As Conservatives we want to preserve the things we have now, maintain institutions that have served us well. Just because something is shiny and new it doesn't mean it is automatically better. Conservation, preservation and tradition matter to us as Conservatives

Conservatives have a strong sense of duty, of personal responsibility. We do not believe you can sub-contract caring to the state, we don't believe that the first answer to every question is more government. And we feel that we are responsible for our own lives and for doing what we can to live those lives well.

Conservatives have a real sense of belonging, of place and of identity. This is what we mean by patriotism - not a sort of jingoist, unquestioning worship of flags or monarchs but rather that this is our place and we will stand together to protect it and work together to make it better.

As Conservatives we believe in the idea of business, of hard work and enterprise. Too often business men and women are portrayed as the bad guys - wouldn't it be brilliant to see a peak time drama where the hero is a businessman or businesswoman rather than a lawyer or doctor or policeman. It's not that we've anything against doctors and policemen - not sure about the lawyers - but rather that the contribution of business people is every bit as important as the contribution of doctors, nurses, policemen and social workers.

And Conservatives believe in community, in the idea that we should look out for eachother. In the principle I've spoken of before - that we start with fixing the things we can see from our front doorstep. If everyone did this - even seemingly small things like Tony here fixing stone walls - if everyone made where we live just a little bit better, the whole world benefits.

Finally - although there may be many other things - as Conservatives we don't think the man in Whitehall knows best. One of the things about government - especially the EU (but I promised not to speak about that) - is that for many people it is, physically and psychologically, a very long way off. What does the man in Whitehall know about the mum in a terraced house in Denholme? All he can see is what somebody puts in a briefing or some numbers in a spreadsheet. And that young Mum - or the old gent in the supported housing over the road from her - has no means of influencing or effecting the decisions being made that affect her, or his, life.

Regardless of what we get as an outcome from the 'B' word, we will still be Conservatives and we will still share these values and principles - community, duty, responsibility, care - as well as the objective of making where we all live a little better than it was before us. Let's not spoil this with fallings out, arguments and rudeness, and let's not lose sight of the truth that our values - Conservative values - are not shared by our opponents.

Those opponents do think the man in Whitehall knows best. They do think it's OK to sub-contract personal responsibility to the state. They hate business and business people. And they believe personal, voluntary initiative - acts of caring - are a failure not part of what makes society work.

So let's keep these things we share as Conservatives in mind and do what we've always done, make where we live a little bit better, looked after the good things already here, maintain traditions and look after friends, family and neighbours.

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The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is his values not just his policies

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So what is my problem with Jeremy Corbyn asks the wise man? Why, when I normally eschew personal criticism, do I focus so much on Corbyn's image and rhetoric rather than the substance of his policies?

I thought I'd try and explain that it's a matter of values. Rather than posting this picture and article, I'll explain that Corbyn's personal values embrace violence, reject personal freedom, oppose choice and reject individual responsibility.

Vicariously enjoying violence is not an unusual trait in politicians (from right and left) and especially male politicians. Whether it's the image of "a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other", Mussolini's fetishing of uniforms or John McDonnell's 'colourful use of language', politicians like violence. We're forever "attacking", "fighting for", and proposing "wars against".

What is especially galling about Corbyn is that, while embracing Sinn Fein/PIRA and assorted violent men from the middle east, he claims that this revelling in violent politics is done for the cause of 'peace', to 'stop war'. Such posturing is excusable in a 20 year-old student activist but demonstrates a sad lack of maturity in a 65 year-old professional politician aspiring to national leadership. Yet Corbyn has shown - right up to today - that his values embrace political violence and make no distinction between this and legitimate acts of self-defence by recognised nation states.

But then Corbyn also fails to recognise the idea of individual freedom:

Corbyn says that he supports the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced in the 1980s (“Yes, I do”) , which prohibited flying pickets and solidarity strike action.

This includes the reintroduction of the closed shop - the acme of collectivist systems - and (back to his relationship with violence) the sort of intimidation we saw all too often prior to the protections granted by those union laws.

Increasingly, those branded “scabs” by the strikers were targeted both at work and at home: windows were smashed, paint thrown at doors, some were even assaulted in the street. One who defied the pickets to go into Hawthorn coke works told The Northern Echo: “The more intimidation I get, the more determined I will be to stand up to them.”.

The message - one Corbyn still endorses - is that if you reject the 'collective will', you will be intimidated, pressured and attacked for that decision. If, and it seems they are, these are Jeremy Corbyn's values and the values of his sort of Labour Party I feel entirely justified in criticising.

And Corbyn's collectivism leads to him also rejecting choice and responsibility:

... Corbyn was one of first MPs to call for a smoking ban (in 1989). He has demanded ‘education and regulation’ — including bans on adverts — to try to wean British kids off junk food. He sees mankind as a pox on the planet (humans are ‘obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised’, said a parliamentary motion he signed).

This viewpoint - that we are blowing around in the hurricane of international capitalism incapable of making real choices or controlling our lives - is a common one on the left (and not so left) but when it is wedded to collectivist groupthink and the celebrating of political violence it forms a value system verging on the evil. And I know that is a strong word but if you think violence in the prosecution of political ends is fine, reject the idea of humans as individuals with free will and promote the idea that we are all victims of a shadowy entity called 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' then I struggle to think of a better word.

It doesn't matter how soft spoken you are, how nice your allotment is or which football team you can exchange banter about, if your values reject freedom and rejoice in violence I will have a problem with you. I hope - for the sake of the Labour Party and British democracy - that Corbyn's values, expressed again and again through his four decades as an activist and MP, turn out to be just words. But until this is demonstrated, I shall condemn those values and the man who espouses them.

But to return to the Brighton bomb. I have friends who were there that day. And while I understand the need to find peace and sustain that peace, I cannot find it in my heart to excuse murdering people in a political cause or people who acted as useful idiots and cheerleaders for those undertaking that political violence.

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Values? The one that really matters is freedom...

Queueing for bread - socialist values in action

This is a pretty typical framing of a left wing values statement - from Julian Dobson:

And that brings us back to values. Do we want a society that turns competitiveness into a totem, blames individuals for social problems and judges success on earnings and rates of return? Or are we looking for something more inclusive and creative, places that recognise the value generated by people’s imagination and relationships and passion for the common good? 

And the typical slightly green, middle-class leftie will feel a little shudder of affirmation through the bones at this statement. Absolutely, our lefty might say, this statement clearly separates the uncaring, individualist from the caring, sharing collectivist. They might add little mutterings about 'trickle down' or 'profits' before smiling again as the high plateau of collaborative, cooperative glory comes into view.

The problem with all this is that it is a delusion, a deliberate self-deception. All this enthusiasts for ending the dark and evil neo-liberal world and ignorant of its central truth - that far more than the state-directed, protectionist systems our caring lefties aspire to create, free market systems are absolutely about inclusion, creativity, passion value generation, imagination and mutual benefit. The secret lies in that magic word 'free' and it is all that freedom that gave us the wealth to ponder such matters as 'values'.

Once the matter of values was something for priests and philosophers. Most ordinary people - and this still stands for a great deal of today's world - were way too busy keeping body and soul together to bother about what it all meant. Then something happened. It wasn't a planned economy, it was a spark of liberty that set us free. And we became free because the trap of subsistence was removed, we could lift our head up from the daily drudge and think about those values, about what we thought the world should be like.

And the match that ignited those flames of freedom wasn't a law, it was capitalism, the liberal enlightenment that opened up trade and allowed business to innovate, to create and to transform - in just a few decades - the entire world.When the likes of Julian Dobson paint free markets in negative terms, when they demonise the idea of choice by talking about competition as a negative, and when they dismiss individual material success as somehow distasteful or exploitative, what these people do is build a mighty man of straw, a grand lie.

This lie is essential to socialism - without that mighty straw man representing capitalism's sins the logic of the left collapses into the terrible reality of a place where people queue for seven hours to buy some flour and some milk. This, rather than sunlit uplands, is the consequence of that focus on the "common good" - for there is no common good other than that determined by the interactions, transactions and exchanges of the people. And the best way to get those mutual benefits isn't through committees, co-operatives and regulations but through free exchanges in a free market. That is why the left must make a demon of liberty because they can't admit that free choice, free exchange and free speech is the best road to a good society, to a place where those values they prattle on about are met for everyone.

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Racism and the integration of immigrants

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In matters of race, Sweden is one of the most tolerant nations on earth. Yet, for that country's significant immigrant population, the fact that the neighbours don't mind you being a foreigner probably doesn't make up for the poor economic outcomes. In a striking study, Nima Sanadaji looks at how good different places are at integrating immigrants with the concern that:

In particular, low-skilled immigrants from poor countries experience high unemployment and a range of related social problems. Much has been written about the extent of the problem. In many Western European cities, entire communities of migrants are living in social and economic exclusion. The state of poverty is often persists among their children.

We're not here considering whether those immigrants should be here in the first place - that's a very different debate - but how, when they get here (wherever 'here' might be) they get on in economic and social terms. What Sanadaji does is use the World Values Surveys to look at whether the barrier to integration is attitudes (essentially racism) or outcomes. And he concludes that:

...it is difficult to conclusively say what factors that favor integration and what obstacles that stand in the way of integration. It could, for example, be argued that the people in countries such as Sweden are giving politically correct responses. These responses do not necessarily have to translate to the discrimination actually faced by immigrants on a daily basis. At the same time, it is clear that the Anglo-Saxon countries are succeeding in integration. This could be attributed to having English as their main language. It could also be attributed to market-based systems with strong incentives for work and relatively free labor markets. In short, attitudes, at least as reported by the World Value Survey, do not seem to explain the differences in integration. Although all enlightened countries should strive for the tolerant views expressed in countries such as Sweden, this does not guarantee well‑functioning integration.

The lesson here is that, if we focus merely on reducing discrimination, we may still find that those immigrant communities sit outside the mainstream and struggle to integrate, at least economically. Sanadaji's observations about disincentives to work in European welfare systems and the significance of open, flexible labour markets are perhaps as important - put simply incentives and opportunities are critical to the successful integration of new communities. Without these factors, anti-discrimination alone does not work to integrate immigrants.

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Quote of the day - on residential property values

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This is so true - it should be beaten into us all as we clamber up and down the so-called property ladder. It starts with the subsidising of housing provision under the New deal and, as Howard Ahmanson observes....

...instead of their forty acres and a mule, people got their ¼ acre and an automobile, the only practical way to travel from their ¼ acre to wherever they wanted to go. Eventually people came to see their ¼ acre with a house on it as an “investment,” and further, a “source of wealth.” But this was not a truly agrarian source of wealth. Farms depend for their value on the quality of their soil and their productivity as farms. They are truly commercial real estate. But residences depend for their value only to a minor degree on what is on the property itself, but rather on what is around it; and suburbanites demanded that covenants, or the Government in the form of City Hall or County Hall, control their neighbors and what is around them.

As they say, the rest is history. And, at times a pretty sorry history. Indeed a history that has trapped many of us into believing that owning a house isn't about getting a secure place to live but a shoot from the magic money tree. With the ironic conclusion that:

The suburban model, in the end, demanded that to preserve suburban values, that the building of suburbs be stopped!

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Conservative Values

"...I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs, have souls."
Giovanni Guareschi

When my left wing friends aren't describing Conservatives as 'scum', 'vile' or 'vermin', they like to opine about a thing they call values. It's common currency among such folk that there was a time in the bucolic past when us Conservatives held to a set of 'values' that meant we were, while wrong, at least in some unspecified way 'decent'.

Now I'm not entirely sure what those values were - I could have a stab but I'd end up with a list that is essentially a definition of either 'Butskellism' or, worse, social democracy. The truth is that my left-wing friends believe their 'values' are the only righteous and moral values meaning that anyone holding to a different set of values must be wrong (if not actually evil then pretty close to the abyss).

I'm guessing that this (rather overused) word 'values' refers to a set of guiding principles, universal ideas about how we should act and about what is important. And what makes we smile is that, far more than socialism or liberalism, being a conservative is absolutely grounded in a set of values. Wherever you go in the world you'll find people who hold as important such things as family, neighbourliness, independence, duty and effort. That you should work hard, contribute, look out for the neighbours, bring up your family as honest, self-reliant and care for those less fortunate.

And these are conservative values, the building blocks of community. None of them are about government, large or small. None of them see society as greater than the sum of its individual parts. And none of them are predicated on knowing better what is good for your neighbour. I know that, compared to changing the economic system or destroying the capitalist state, this is all pretty boring but it's what most folk want.

At the heart of these values (and here I'm going to use the language of the left so they can understand) is the idea of coproduction, that value is created by individual exchange. Indeed the essence of conservative values is a belief that, left to their own devices, people will cooperate, collaborate and create community. That the consequence of freedom - in speech, in enterprise, in trade - is exchange, is cooperation. Free markets aren't about 'dog eat dog' but the very opposite of this: mutual benefit.

When conservatives go wrong it is to try an enforce these values and there is a fine line between enforcement, incentive and reward. But those left wing experts on conservatism, who have decided we have dumped our values by believing in free exchange, are so very wrong. But then such people never really understood in the first place.

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The BBC's new class system - a vanity project of no value or purpose

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When you’ve been involved with direct marketing, marketing planning and profiling for as long as I have, you will know that every so often another ‘radical’. ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’ new scheme of social classification is launched. Usually this is from an advertising agency, a data management business or something called a “strategy consultancy” and is essentially a jolly good wheeze to get lots of press coverage and thereby to promote the business launching the classification.

To make this work we have to have funky names for the classes – none of that ABCDE malarkey, that’s far too boring. Instead we get value-loaded words that play on our stereotypes of certain ‘class’ groups – terms like ‘proletariat’ or ‘elite’ pop up thereby summoning up either gap-toothed ‘Shameless’ wannabes or waistcoated Bullingdon Boys. Such designations do not help in our understanding of social class and such studies do not guide our knowledge of how society changes over time.

Indeed, the BBC – who seem to think spending money on such work is what we pay a licence fee for – have fully understood the point. This creates some jolly headlines, a load of people on Twitter trill about which class they’re in and it fills in some gaps in an otherwise quiet week.

So folks, a great deal of fun has been had by everyone with the BBC’s new class system:

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups

This, says the BBC, replaces the three group system - the three group system that was replaced in the 1950s by a five group system of social class (ABCDE) and then, in the 1960s, with a six group system (ABC1C2DE). Apparently this is some sort of great advance in our understanding of social class in Britain, we are blinded by fancy on-line tools and the involvement of professorial types and told that this is so much better because it involves surveying 161,000 people!

The problem is that it’s nonsense. The size of the sample doesn’t make it better than, for example, a social classification system based on census data or one using transactional and behavioural data from millions of people. More to the point, the system encompassed information (cultural choices, for example, that more reflect affordability than class per se). Indeed, this wonderful new seven class system really doesn’t improve on the established and widely used six class system – a six class system that is used all over the world not just in the UK.

Compared to the well-known geodemographic systems – ACORN, MOSAIC, etc. – this new classification is useless. It is inflexible – fine for targeting mass market television advertising – but worse than useless if you want more precise analysis, say for retail location choices or direct marketing. For academics that system is interesting, there’s a lot of data to play with and it may contain some genuine insights. But it won’t replace the established social class classification (for all its flaws) because it largely fails to improve on that classification.

Let’s make that appraisal by matching the seven BBC classes to those traditional six socio-economic classes:

• Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth – this is wholly indistinguishable from Socio-economic Class A
• Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals – ah, yes, this would be Socio-economic Class B
• The next three groups Technical Middle Class; Emergent Service Workers and Newly Affluent Workers fit less well but are essentially the old Socio-Demographic Classes C1 and C2
• Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived Here we have Socio-economic Class D
• Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class. That would be Socio-economic Class E

It’s not a precise comparison but it’s plain to see that this expensive piece of taxonomic research is essentially an indulgence that sheds almost no light at all on the issue of social class and how it affects the economic, social and cultural development of the nation.

Of course, it goes without saying, that the system ranks me as part of the "elite". I suspect this reinforces the system's daftness!

It really is a vanity project of no purpose and with the validity of a horoscope.

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To the wood government is the man with the axe...

OK, grump over. It's true that the forthcoming General Election seems set to see an even lower turnout than in 2005. And yes, there's a great deal of distrust directed at politics, politicians and the political system. And boy do we deserve it. But there's still reasons to do it...

1. If liberal minded folk like me aren't there the controllers, collectors and directors will win for sure

2. Somebody has to beat against the wall of bureaucratic unhelpfulness that surrounds government

3. The plague somehow never strikes all their houses - despite the protest those houses still carry on

But above all someone has to see the wood....

...and that wood - the "big picture" - isn't some visiting of your values on me (I know your values are better you keep on telling me) because there's 51 of you and only 49 of me. The wood is thousands - millions - of different people all striving for sunlight, making their own patch as good as they can, growing, developing and reproducing. All happily and cheerfully.

To that wood government is the man with the axe. Sometimes helpful, useful, organising. But mostly destructive, unheeded and uncaring.

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