Melanie Phillips's Articles

The Tories' nervous breakdown

Daily Mail, 6 October 2003

The Tories have started their party conference in the manner of actors striking a set of stirring poses while behind the scenes the props are disintegrating, the script is being constantly rewritten and the whole company is trying to throw the director out of the stage door.

The persistent failure by Iain Duncan Smith to lay a glove on the government, even when its own reputation has nose-dived, has promoted a climate of seething mutiny.

While the party in the country is quietly getting on with the business of making itself more relevant – as with the selection of a black candidate in hitherto exclusive Windsor -- Tory backbenchers are falling over themselves to be disloyal to the leader who has promoted just such a shift.

Now, his enemies have tried smear tactics to engineer a palace coup. An unscreened BBC TV item has reportedly made claims of impropriety about Mr Duncan Smith’s employment of his wife as his secretary. No evidence has emerged that this was in any way irregular. Indeed, many politicians of all parties do exactly the same. The significance of the charge lies rather in the fact that there are people in the party prepared to use such a smear to lever their leader out.

The party’s problem, however, is far more severe than impatience over its leader’s failure to go for the jugular. It has been laid bare by the split over tax. Mr Duncan Smith says the Tories will cut taxes. But his Treasury spokesman, Michael Howard, is reportedly furious since he says this can only be an aspiration, no doubt aware of the damage if the Tories are thought to be preparing to take an axe to the public services.

If the Tories can’t even agree on whether they are a tax-cutting party or not, how can they expect to be taken seriously? Their programme simply isn’t coherent.

This week, they promise to unveil a series of specific policy proposals. Some have huge potential merit and popular appeal, such as the expected announcement of a move towards a voucher system for schools, or the increase in state pensions by restoring the earnings link.

Such policies could be vote-winners – if they were presented with conviction and consistency. Mr Duncan Smith is pilloried for his deficiencies in this department. But the Tories are very mistaken if they think that his departure would solve their problems. For a start, who would replace him? Every alternative candidate would divide the party.

And the party’s plight goes far deeper than personalities. The Tories are suffering from two basic problems: their intellectual incoherence, and the fact that voters think they are out of touch.

People are simply bewildered by what the party is saying, because it no longer know what it stands for. This problem developed after the Soviet Union imploded, since the fight against socialism had given the Tories purpose for almost a century and masked the party’s permanent internal divisions.

Tony Blair responded to the collapse of socialism by inventing New Labour. This paralysed the Tories from the start, since they mistook Mr Blair’s conservative rhetoric for the real thing and concluded they had been left without a cause.

Still mesmerised by the Prime Minister, they were further traumatised last week when he saw off the threat from Gordon Brown by adopting Mrs Thatcher’s ‘not for turning’ tactic. As a result, the poor boobies think he really is Mrs Thatcher. No wonder they’re in such a state.

Attacking him as a liar rebounds badly, since it merely reminds people that they think all politicians are liars. In desperation, the Tories are now falling back on tax cuts. But this will also rebound, since it reinforces the impression that the Tories are the party of the better-off – deepening the widespread perception that they are out of touch with ordinary concerns.

Yes, of course people need to be freed from increasing state control. But independent-minded Britain also has a deep belief that we all have some responsibility for each other – a sense of the common good.

So rather than individual freedom, the message should surely be social solidarity – the need for the nation to pull together and look after the interests of all its citizens.

That would mean attacking Labour for ruining social cohesion by promoting family breakdown (yes, the Tories have got to tackle this head on), giving disastrous signals to young people on drugs, and destroying education standards.

It means standing up for nation and culture, through a principled critique of illegal immigration on behalf of Britons of all colours and creeds, along with an onslaught against the government’s supine surrender over the EU constitution.

It means promoting a welfare society instead of a welfare state, with the encouragement of mutual assistance in health and social services. It means explaining the significance of vouchers as a means of using taxpayers’ money to empower the poor and disenfranchised by giving them control over the way it is spent.

Only by emphasising such collective elements in their proposals will the Tories begin to break down the view that they are disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people.

But even that is not enough. The other reason they are seen as out of touch is not -- as the party’s libertines absurdly suggest -- because their front bench isn’t heaving with cohabiting, cocaine-snorting, gay feminist transsexuals.

It is rather because they are seen as representing upper-class professionals or well-off business people – the employer class --whereas most of the population are employees, and increasingly public sector workers to boot.

Tony Blair – the public school and Oxford-educated barrister – had exactly the same problem. People may squirm at his patronising glottal stops. But by carefully allowing himself to be seen in the uniform of the ordinary person (jeans, open necked shirt), carrying the defining symbol of the ordinary person (mug of tea), and talking about the things that matter most to the ordinary person (his children) he managed to persuade people that he was an ordinary person.

Now the ex-army officer running the Tories has to do the same. He has to get personal. He has to stop being a stuffed suit on a podium and connect, visibly and tangibly, to ordinary concerns. He has to talk sympathetically about people’s worries and aspirations, showing from his experience how he personally shares them. And he has to present his policies in terms of real people – not just the poor, but crucially the middle classes whose votes he has actually lost -- and the impact these policies will have on their lives.

The Tories are the party that has always defined itself by defending the country against a threat. They’ve seen off their opponents on economics. But the big threat now is from social, moral and cultural breakdown, promoted so assiduously by New Labour.

If Mr Duncan Smith transforms his approach so that he articulates this with passion and conviction, and in a personal and accessible way, he will inject coherence for the first time into his party’s policies and provide the ammunition for the powerful challenge to the government which our democracy so badly needs.

Simple, really.

Posted by melanie at October 6, 2003

Comments

While an interesting article, the real problem with the Conservative Party is that people no longer have an agreed set of values (basically the Victorian ethos of honesty, self reliance with family support and belief in the virtues of hard work and self sacrifice to make this country better for the next generation). The rot set in as politicians ceased to be disinterested men doing what was best for Britain as a whole and became instead self interested and concerned about doing what they think is best for the sections of society they represent and became antagonistic towards certain sections of society they didn't represent. This began before the War with Lloyd George, but was worst in the Attlee and Wilson Governments when the Welfare State began to destroy the reliance of people upon themselves and family and enabled them to depend instead on the State. Personal accountability is lost when individuals no longer have to rely on others for support, and can escape to be hedonistic and unaccountable. The destruction of the family as a unit means that people can do what they like without restraint or facing consequences of actions which are unacceptable to others.

Conservatism, like Christianity, gets a bad press from those who don't like rules of any sort and don't like being faced with the consequences of their actions. The State should be limited in its provision of services and it is very hard to take away benefits from people who are used to having them and expecting them to pay for services that others pay for in their taxes. The present Blair Government proposed policies that no Conservative Govt would have dared introduce (ID cards, harsher asylum laws, harsher prison sentences, privatising air traffic control, etc) and which would have roused the liberal chattering classes to howls of anguish.

What the Conservatives need to learn is that in for a penny in for a pound is a better proposition than being all things to all men. It is impossible to be principled and to put the public good above sectional interests if one is afraid of those sectional interests whose power in almost every case is over estimated. Thus Conservatism must seek to reduce the State's interference in people's lives and reduce the provision of services (because it does it badly) and revert to the Victorian model where local people paid for their local hospital and local police and local schools, and you knew who was in charge and could speak to them if you had a problem. The dumping of ever more duties on local authorities over the past 50 years with central funding to pay for this has meant that locally elected conncillors no longer raise money for local services for which they are accountable. What we have is representation without taxation for large numbers of people, and basically if you don't contribute, for whatever reason, you shouldn't have a say in how what you don't contribute is spent. This will give rise to howls of protest as being anti democratic and back to only ratepayers having a vote. The up side of it, once established, is that money will be better spent. The legacy of the years when the system of local Govt was dependent on local rates and ratepayers only having the vote is well built council houses and hospitals and libraries and police stations, whereas the post War legacy is of poorly built everything which now needs replacement. Conservatives need to make people understand that with financial responsibility for their own affairs comes lower taxation and that the having one's cake and eating it days are over. The provision of local authority care for old people for example costs a huge amount of money with the middle classes fiddling the system to keep their parents' house and making the State pay the bills instead of looking after their parents themselves. Old people are dumped on the State and are no longer viewed as their children's responsibility in the same way that parents who embark on new relationships try to avoid responsibility for the children of previous relationships. This has to stop.

The EU is the corporate state writ large with its regulation and interference in every area of business in the interests not of competition, but of control. The EU's leaders still believe that the State can control economies and influence investment and the way people behave. To a limited extent this is true, but it always has the opposite effect of that which is intended and unforeseen consequences (fisheries wiped out, self sufficiency in food altered to huge surpluses being produced with no where to get rid them other than dumping outside the EU, extra taxation (VAT) to pay for useless bureaucracies hindering business). Conservatives have to say that they were misguided in believing the European ideal which is a fantasy just like socialism or communism was a fantasy based on the notion that if only we did all this, people would be better and behave like we want them to, when instead the exact opposite occurred with one oligarchy being replaced by another. Less Govt is the winning formula and the best start is to abolish most of the thousands of laws, EU Directives etc passed in the 20th century which were all unnecessary and which do nothing to help any one. That would be an honest role for Parliament and Conservatives - go back and keep only those laws which are good and get rid of the rest.

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Posted by: Peter Hollander at October 8, 2003 03:07 PM

Anyone who thinks 1921 was better than 1947 is mad as a hatter: Attlee was determined to prevent the misery and poverty of the interwar period and did so magnificently. The aftermath of war is a bigger mess than fighting it, and the Conservatives pulled down Lloyd George in 1922 and generated a decade of decline leaving Britain ill-prepared for the challenge of Adolf Hitler.

Until 1980 Britain had no devastating recession postwar; and the problems inherited from a loopy monetarist experiment bedevill us today. The Conservatives have failed to focus on a centrist position...though Duncan Smith was getting there after the extremism of Hague.

Portillo is a Vicar of Bray who has swung from extreme right to left like John Bercow, reeking of opportunism. Why choosing a black candidate for Windsor makes people vote Tory beats me, Affriyeh sounds to be an articulate and interesting candidate, obviously Blair thinks so - he appointed him to the board of the Museum of London.......but commenting on his pigmentation should not be 'relevant' in arties not given to tokenism: he is either suitable or he is not.

Perhaps, if Conservatives dropped this free market mantra and focused on citizens of this country rather than what is vogue in think-tanks or US academics, we might live our lives as a nation rather than guinea-pigs in foreigners economic experiments.

If the Tories believed in the 'minimal state' they would have internal and external security writ large; but the removal of police from our streets, the centralisation of power, and the regionalisation of metropolitan police forces were all Conservative policies under Howard, Clarke etc.

It was Kenneth Clarke who imposed a 1990 contract in the NHS which caused today's shortage of GPS and NHS dentists; and messed up the police force before Patrick Sheehy found a role for him at BAT.

The Conservatives have a record revealed in every derelict industrial site and the growth of the supermarket aided by the nationalisation of the Business Rate, and the centralisation of planning consent in Whitehall and Bristol.....so the city centres were destroyed and the four supermarket giants emerged.

Without an effective Opposition the Tories imposed 18 years of their untrammelled wishes on a reluctant nation; until they got too tired and let New Labour in to continue their work.

William Hague was the oddball, politician since 16 and not very good at it ! He alienated the general public by being in hock to the loony right, just like Portillo; and now the media want the Tories as an analogue Liberal Party so it becomes a Three-Party-Single-Policy State.

Posted by: Peter Williamson at October 17, 2003 08:01 AM

Just referring to Peter Hollander's contempt for the middle class....they pay the taxes ! Take a look at the Income Tax yield by decile...it is getting tiresome to listen to self-loathing from well-paid middle-class professionals who despise those lower in the salary stakes than themselves. It is a contempt the aristocratic landowner reserved for the tradesman and it is heard so often in this country as to make one wonder just how the transfer payments are actually paid for in this country; and to have a taxation system and user-charges as this regime seems to like is going to make a flat-rate poll-tax for of income-tax the next big issue.

The Middle Class built the welfare state, they staff it, and they make it run....the alternative is the Poor Law abolished by Neville Chamberlain, where the middle class dispense minimalist provision to the poor.

Posted by: Peter Williamson at October 17, 2003 08:08 AM

I see history in a different light. The Attlee Govt and all Labour Govts were disastrous experiments in socialist stupidity. Wasn't it Attlee whose stupid rush to Indian independence resulted in millions of Indians dying in sectarian conflict and millions loosing their homes and livelihoods? Wasn't it Attlee whose stupid pride wouldn't allow him to accept Marshall Aid when it was offered thereby denying British industry the capital to modernise? Wasn't it Attlee who kept rationing for years when every other country in Europe got rid of it in late 1945 or in 1946?

Attlee had a lot to be modest about and there is nothing magnficent about his legacy. The Welfare State is not a magnificent legacy but a cobbled together system where the costs of the services provided have never been paid out of the contributions levied to finance it, and hence it has never been properly funded. The pension system is funded out of current contributions and depends on future generations to pay this generation's pensions - the same fiscally imprudent system begun by Lloyd George where those who pay have no guarantee they will get what they put in (except civil servants, MPs and ministers). Attlee and his fellow ministers were all stupid enough to believe in socialism. Though they may have had some clever company in being taken in by the drivel Marx and Engels and Lenin propagated, that doesn't alter the fact that the socialists' and communists' belief in their barmy paradise has led to more misery in the 20th century than anything else. Thank God that Labour was never in power long enough and always too preoccupied with balance of payments crises and economic mismanagement to implement all its potty nationalisation and taxation (98% on investment income under dear old Dennis Healey) of any one with a few bob.

Tory mistakes are always seen as deliberate and mean spirited, whereas Labour mistakes are simply either bad luck or well meaning. Labour Govts have always been spiteful towards those they assume don't vote for them, and it is because of their desire to take from those who have, to give to those who haven't (with a 10-30% Govt take to pay for handling such wealth redistribution) that this country is not as well off as it should have been without these imposts. Theft whether legalised or not is always stealing, and no amount of moralising will justify it.

An example of Gordon Brown's stupidity is that I am loosing £520 p.a in my pay via child tax relief this year and my wife got an extra £520 child benefit BUT only after I filled in the 16 page form 3 times, spent ages on the phone not getting anywhere to find out why they didn't have the forms (they "lost two of the forms"), got 5 letters (2 saying they didn't have the forms and 3 asking questions already answered on the forms like what is my National Insurance number), my wife got 3 letters (1 the money's coming soon, 2 what are your bank details which was already on the form and 3 what is your national insurance number (already on the form as well) and finally a chit saying here it'll be paid into your bank!

The paperwork generated for this circular exercise is a complete waste of my time, my having to pay a civil servant to deal with the matter and my wife's time and the bank's time to pay the money monthly into her account. As a family we are no better off which anyone with any common sense would see. The only beneficiaries are BT, the Royal Mail, computer and paper manufacturers, software providers and junior Inland Revenue staff who have the boring job of churning out this paper chase.

This kind of nonsense occurs throughout the NHS, Local Govt, Education system, DEFRA, National Statistics and is just a complete waste of time and effort. That's why we need to abolish the multitude of laws, statutory instruments and Orders in Council that allow Govt to ask all these stupid questions, demand answers which will merely be filed, interfere with matters none of their business and do things which are really pointless if anyone sat down and thought about them for 5 minutes rather than listen to some mandarin justifying the need for this or that done in his dept. Common sense has gone out the window because those who pass laws don't personally have to do what they say others have to do. All MP's should be forced to fill in their own self assessment tax returns and correspond with the Inland Revenue without any professional help and that might focus their minds on why they pass such complicated tax laws that they expect other people to know all about and be able to fill in the forms correctly. They all should have to fill in pointless National Statistics forms personally on pain of penalties and fill in loads of forms about meeting the targets set them along with time sheets accounting for the work they do. They should be made to fill these forms in weekly and get their pay docked if they don't and deal with a hotline where no one answers despite pressing *something other and listening to all the options and Vivaldi drives them nuts.

Posted by: Peter Hollander at October 20, 2003 05:23 PM

My you do seem agitated Peter Hollander. Actually Britain received more Marshall Aid than Germany; it was Poland which refused Marshall Aid....STalin helped them decide on this ! British Marshall Aid was used to reduce the National Debt with the City; and of course you know about the huge Sterling balances with India as a result of the war no doubt. German Marshall Aid was used in the Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau.

India was to have its Independence in 1935 but someone called Winston Churchill sabotaged the Bill and caused Baldwin much pain. Britain could not afford to retain India; and the loan negotiated by Keynes on fairly ungenerous terms - the US having ended Lend-Lease in May 1945....was spent mainly policing Palestine.

Dealing with a civil war in Greece, trouble in Palestinec and in India, and a country in which 50% GDP in 1947 was Marshall Aid cannot have been easy. Fortunately, it was not a disaster like the post WW1 era.

As for stupidity and incompetence in government, that seems pretty evenly distributed, and the rather low quality people who run this country in their strange ways have made a mess. It was ever thus. Few people seem impressed with the goernments 1922-1940, and they were far from effective.

Lloyd George's system was such a relief to ratepayers, until then the old had been a charge on the rates through Poor Law. Just read te Minutes of the Workhouses in 1909 and see how relieved the Councils were to have an income from central government allowing pensioners to pay their own way.

You are right in that government has squandered the 'pay-as-you=-go' money and not built a fund; so police pensions come out of todays salaries budget which is financed by the 11% pension contributions from the current policemen.

Abolishing Orders in Council would be funny, we could not run the country; but secondary legislation should be restricted.

I am afraid the BofP crises usually resulted from the outgoing administration having overheated consumption; and we know that if Britain grows above 2.5-3% the trade deficit explodes.

The logical system is for all benefits to be universal and recouped through income tax; and for ritish Income Tax forms to be simple as in Germany or the US, not mis-shapen or arcane.

BTW - do you think Jinnah should be blamed for anything in India, or just Attlee ?

Posted by: Peter Williamson at October 21, 2003 02:45 PM

Any certainty is a delusion.

Posted by: Williamson Zach at January 20, 2004 08:35 AM