Daily Mail, March 25 2002

Two swallows don’t make a summer, and one opinion poll certainly doesn’t win a general election. A poll showing a drop in Labour’s lead buoyed the Tories at their weekend spring conference.

There is no doubt that Iain Duncan Smith is winning respect. His speech yesterday which placed the Conservatives on the side of the poor and vulnerable was shrewdly judged. He has well understood that his party is loathed because it is seen as harsh and unfeeling.

This was the unattractive side of Thatcherism. It was a poignant irony that Lady Thatcher was bowing out through ill health from the public arena at the very moment that Duncan Smith was repudiating the most destructive element of her legacy.

For Thatcherism did convey the message that the poor were expendable and that everyone was out for himself. Duncan Smith has grasped that the Tories must show they would govern for the whole nation.

But sure-footed as his performance has been so far in steering towards social conscience and away from politically correct gesture politics, a crucial element is still missing. We still don’t know what modern Conservatism is for. What is the point of the party? We know what it is against – the Labour government. But we still don’t know quite why.

The Tories rightly point to our broken-backed public services. They will put these at the very top of their priority list – even above tax cuts. Hallelujah. But on the health service – apart from pointing out that European systems put the NHS to shame -- they are resolutely opaque about what they would do.

The reason goes to the core of their deeper problem. They fear, with good cause, that they cannot yet persuade voters that any radical proposals for health care would be in the best interests of all.

And that is because they have not articulated to the country that what they stand for is [ital] in the interests of all. Freedom from the state, their perennial cry, simply will not do. For freedom can so easily translate into a libertarianism that turns a blind eye to harm – precisely the situation from which the poor and the vulnerable are suffering now.

Senior Tories bridle at this. They say their values are perfectly clear, and point to motherhood and apple pie. They miss the point. They have to show a very good reason why it is so important to vote them in and the other lot out.

Both Lady Thatcher and Tony Blair understood this with their gut instinct. They each came to power because they told people what was wrong with the country at the most fundamental level, and did so with a passion that made people believe they could be trusted to put it right.

Lady Thatcher identified that the country had simply become ungovernable because it had lost all belief in itself. Her genius – and it was genius – was above all to embody an absolutely credible guarantee that she would sort it, period.

She had such credibility principally because she was a woman; more particularly, she was instantly recognisable as the kind of woman who is utterly single-minded in her pursuit of what is right, and refuses to play the silly, opportunistic games that are all about preening and posturing and nothing to do with getting things done.

When she was pursuing that agenda, she was a great Prime Minister. Where she went badly off the rails was in refusing to acknowledge the human dimension to society. In her hostility to the state, she assumed that the sole antidote was the market. She forgot that collective and co-operative endeavour through the institutions of civil society – schools, hospitals, churches, police, independent professions and above all the beleaguered family -- is essential to produce civilised social values.

Tony Blair’s great and equivalent insight was to grasp that the public had become terrified by the breakdown in these values and the resulting fracturing of society. His skill was to project himself as a healer who would bind up the wounds to the social fabric, a fantasy which has now been exposed.

Lady Thatcher was a slayer of dragons; Tony Blair was a healer of the broken. What is Iain Duncan Smith? We don’t know. He is not a symbol because he hasn’t yet spelled out the cause to which the country would readily rally.

That cause is obvious. The country is undergoing a relentless assault on those values that make up a civilised society, spearheaded by the Labour government. Duncan Smith’s unequivocal message should be that what he stands for is drawing a line in the sand.

Many Tories still haven’t grasped the scale of what is happening. They still think that Blair’s socially conservative tanks are parked on their lawn, and he’s just too vacuous or phoney to get anything right. They haven’t understood that the man is instead a muddle-headed, wannabee radical who wants to transform society into Utopia.

So much was illustrated by his remarks on education last week, when in justifying the ‘all must have prizes’ philosophy that is driving down both academic and vocational standards as an attack upon ‘elitism’, he showed that he is actually leading the charge against educational achievement.

What we are facing is not just failing public services, appalling though they are. We are up against an inversion of an entire value system.

This week, the government is expected to scale the heights of Mount Rhetoric once again against the scourge of juvenile yobbery, this time targeting parental aggression for good measure. But this is a government which has been a major sponsor of the culture of victimhood, which has enabled people to justify their bad behaviour by blaming someone else.

This is a government which rewards the unmarried for having children, abandoning those infants to lives of emotional chaos and despair. This is a government which is signalling that the law on drugs is an ass, undermining parental attempts to stop their children from taking them.

In all these areas and more, this is a government which, by turning values on their head, has achieved what Duncan Smith correctly identified as the abandonment of the vulnerable.

Drawing a line in the sand against this moral free-for-all emphatically does not mean leaving people to do their own thing. A moral society is all about the needs of other people. That is why personal responsibility and accountability matter.

And that is why, if the Tories eventually propose more private insurance as a remedy for the NHS, they will have missed the point. They should be looking instead at mutualisation and locally based social insurance schemes as a way of combining personal and social responsibility.

Promoting a ‘tough-love’ moral agenda of personal accountability and social responsibility is the only way to rescue our society, and the only way that the Conservative party will deserve to be trusted again to run it.

Posted by admin at March 25, 2002