Talk to Patrons' Club, Witney Conservative Association, 16 June 2005

I’d like to share with you my thoughts about the current political situation arising from the general election, the referendums in France and the Netherlands, and the Tory leadership contest. And I’d like to start with that relaxed, calm, laid-back and focused conversation that the Conservatives are presently conducting with themselves.

They are asking each other why they lost the election and how best to reposition the party. Many say that radical change is necessary. But what kind of change? No-one seems to know.

Rival versions are being offered of what the electorate was actually saying. The party was too nasty; the party was not nasty enough. It should have talked even more about immigration; it should have talked much more about schools and hospitals. It should have clearly stated it would cut taxes; it should have done much more to reassure people that it could be trusted not to destroy the public services. Above all, it still doesn’t reflect the way society has changed — the party is not black enough, not gay enough, not serially-partnered enough.

To me, this is a bit like trying to devise the perfect menu without first working out whether it’s for a barbecue, brunch or formal banquet.

In other words, the Tories don’t know what they are for. They appear to be suffering from a profound identity crisis — one that is based on their inability or refusal to understand what is happening to our society. Without properly understanding what is going on around them, they cannot hope to correctly decide how to react to it, let alone sell it to the public.

They have to go back to first principles and decide what conservatism actually is. Now, there are many interpretations of conservatism, but it seems that a conventional understanding is that it stands for a small state, the defence of liberty and low taxation. But I think this misses a very important factor. To me, conservatism is not so much a discrete ideology or philosophy as a state of mind.

Edmund Burke is said to be the founding father of conservatism. Actually, he was not a conservative as such. He was in fact a liberal. He was only called a conservative because he saw need to defend — to ‘conserve’ — the values and traditions of liberty from the totalitarian impulses of the French Revolution which threatened to destroy the foundations of this liberal society.

Since then, much of the raison d’ètre of conservatism has been the defence of what is valued in our society against attack. For much of the 20th century, this comprised a defence against communism, or socialism. This defence was a constant understanding, although it certainly waxed and waned as the encroachments of socialism became so widely accepted that even the Tories no longer perceived them as a threat. The Butskellite Tories, for example, went along with the encroachments of the welfare state, a tradition sharply broken by Mrs Thatcher who freed the country from the power of the trade unions and started to privatise the public services.

The problem was that even under Mrs Thatcher the Tories viewed everything through an almost exclusively economic prism. They were very slow to acknowledge the erosion of the very fabric of society that was inexorably taking place through the ideologies that consumed education and kicked away the props from beneath the traditional family. They were therefore totally unprepared to grasp what still needed to be done once their economic platform stopped being a distinctive Tory cause.

Mrs Thatcher demonstrably galvanised the party and gave it a sense of purpose by having a very clear vision of what she was against and what she was for. She was the slayer of the dragon of state control of the economy. And crucially, she offered voters hope — hope of restoring Britain to greatness, hope of a better future for individuals and their families; and she spelled out the way in which she was going to deliver on that promise of hope. For without hope, why should people support a politician? Why should they vote for a party unless they believe that it offers hope of mending what needs to be broken and changing things for the better?

The problem was that once that particular dragon was slain, the Tories no longer knew what they were for. Communism went down the tubes, and with the final vanquishing of this great historic enemy the Tories’ raison d’ètre seemed to vanish. Tony Blair abolished Clause Four and embraced the market; and the great cry went up from the Tories that ‘he’s parked his tanks on our lawn’. And they’ve remained paralysed by that perception ever since. Blair’s stolen all our best tunes, they wail. He talks like a Tory. He looks like a Tory. And so their only room for manoeuvre has been to claim — with justification — that he’s a bogus Tory: he puts taxes up by stealth, he’s all talk and no delivery, he’s a liar, and so forth. Much of this may be true; but such a position means the Tories remain fixated by Blair and allow him to set the agenda which they can only lamely follow. They allow themselves to be defined by what he is doing rather than setting out their own vision. They don’t have a vision to set out any more because they think he’s stolen it.

This is the great error that the Tories are making. They have failed to grasp that the battleground has changed. The great divisions of our time are no longer economic. Everyone now buys the market. The economic battle has been won. But there is another, even more lethal war being fought below the Tories’ radar. This is what has been called the culture war, an all-out assault which has been going on for at least half a century upon the norms and traditions of western society and the very concept of the nation state.

On the great battleground issues of family, education and social order, the networks of formal and informal legal and social sanctions that restrain behaviour in the interests of others have been progressively dismantled. They have been supplanted by a culture of ‘rights’, in which groups designating themselves as marginalised or oppressed by the majority demand equal status and the end of moral ‘judgmentalism’. The family has been attacked by the doctrine that alternative lifestyles are of equal value to heterosexual marriage. Anti-social, harmful or illegal behaviour such as drug-taking or under-age sex is either tolerated or even promoted. The education system has been emptied of knowledge, with an explicit animosity towards teaching British political history and transmitting the values of the nation. The very idea of a majoritarian culture, intrinsic to the identity of the nation, is now deemed to be racist. The only legitimate society is considered to be multicultural. And political correctness means that this repudiation of majority values cannot be questioned.

It is no accident that this culture war, which has been under way for several decades, accelerated as communism started to enter its death throes. The political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was an icon of the sixties generation that now controls our establishment and defines our culture, wrote that the workers would never rise up and overthrow western capitalism. Economics would never be the weapon that would destroy the west. Instead, he proposed a steady infiltration and takeover of all the institutions of society — the universities, media, schools, civil service, legal profession — so that the values of that society could be replaced by the transgressive values of those who lived on its margins. So it has proved. Gramsci’s blueprint has been followed to the letter.

At the root of this cultural onslaught is the desire to control people by knocking away the props that make people free. The family is one of the principal props, and the nation state itself is another. Both of these are linked: the particular form of the western family, the monogamous married couple, is the bedrock of the democratic nation state. One of the deepest divisions now in our world is between the defenders of the nation — the idea that a people is entitled to express shared cultural, religious and legal traditions based on a nation’s history — and those who think by contrast that the nation state is the principal cause of war and prejudice in the world and so should be replaced by supra-national institutions such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights doctrine enforced by supra-national courts, all of which embody values which represent a universally applicable concept of the good and therefore can never be challenged by opposing national values.

Which brings me back to Tony Blair. For the doctrines that I’ve just been talking about are all espoused by Mr Blair. He believes passionately in universal values imposed by supra-national institutions. He believes in the corrupted idea of tolerance under which ‘judgmentalism’ is a form of prejudice. He believes in a global utopia where the mere application of reason (embodied by himself) eradicates all prejudice and ends all human conflict— and which brooks no opposition. For how can there be any opposition to moral perfection? That’s why, as he has often said, his aim is not just to defeat the Conservative party but to destroy conservatism for all time. In other words, Mr Blair is not a conservative at all. He is the modern equivalent of the French revolutionary Jacobins. His tanks are not parked on the Tory lawn. On the contrary, his guns are pointing straight at the Tories and all other dissidents. And yet the Tories are forever trying to clamber up alongside Mr Blair on his own gun-turrets and start firing in the same direction themselves.

Meanwhile, others can see at least part of this picture very clearly. While the Tories pussyfoot about on Europe, too terrified to speak up in case the Today programme is nasty to them or their own superannuated big Eurobeasts start growling, the peoples of Europe have left them behind. The revolt against the EU constitution is of the greatest significance, particularly in the Netherlands where people have realised that their way of life is under attack from the opening up of borders and the denial of national destiny.

This is a tremendous opportunity for the Tories to come out of the EU closet and say very clearly that the EU should now become no more than an economic association of independent trading nations — or else Britain should come out of the EU altogether. Because this is not just a fight against Chirac, Shroeder and Juncker, not just an argument about feather-bedded French farmers, but a struggle to defend democracy against an oppressive, anti-democratic bureaucracy that was created specifically in order to destroy the power of the nation state.

Moreover, the Tories should say, this should not be seen in isolation. The democratic nation state is under attack from both without and within. That means standing four-square with the US in the great fight to save the free world from the jihad declared against it (the party’s wholly opportunistic squirming over Iraq was not only disreputable but revealed the palpable vacuum in its thinking). It means taking back power for democracy from the EU and from unaccountable human rights lawyers; it means opposing multiculturalism, the proper context for ending Labour’s undeclared policy of mass immigration; and it means taking emergency remedial action to shore up the family, principally by ending incentives to cohabitation.

This last suggestion tends to be resisted by most of the current Tory leadership, on the basis that it is either too divisive or that what the party needs to do before it can gain power is to make itself appear ‘reasonable’ rather than extremist. To which I would make two points. First, unless the Tories say what they think is right, because they think it is right, they will get nowhere. Voters can sniff out politicians who are not being true to their own principles from a long way off. And that matters. People will only support politicians they trust, and politicians who stick by a set of consistent principles, if necessary against the scorn and insults of salon society, win plaudits even from those who disagree. The secret of George W Bush’s success, after all, is that voters know exactly where he is coming from because everything he says hangs together.

The second point is that the Tories need to reclaim the language of morality from the left which has hijacked it and corrupted it beyond recognition. The Tories have allowed the left to redefine the intolerable as tolerance, to destroy authority by confusing it with authoritarianism and to redefine compassion according to the inverted and amoral logic of victim culture which has destroyed the concepts of duty and responsibility by excusing damaging behaviour on the grounds that all lifestyles are morally equal. Such nihilism is the polar opposite of the reasonable status to which it is ascribed by the left. It is not reasonable for children to be abandoned to the emotional chaos of serial parenting. It is not reasonable to connive at the unlawful sexual abuse and exploitation of children by providing contraception or abortions to children below the age of consent. It is not reasonable to promote brain damage and addiction among young people by reclassifying cannabis as a less dangerous drug. It is not reasonable, in short, for a political party to promote or condone lifestyles which damage the vulnerable and leave a trail of personal damage and social chaos. It is the very opposite of the progressive instinct to build a better society — without which ‘modernisation’ becomes something out of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

In conclusion, we know that people are dangerously disaffected by all politics. They believe that it is irrelevant to their lives, that politicians don’t speak their language and that in any event they are powerless to make any difference. They are right. Politicians are powerless because so much power has drained away from Parliament – to the EU, to human rights lawyers, to supra-national institutions. And all parties now say very similar things, all chasing the same agendas thrown up by the focus groups — made up of the very people who disdain such opportunistic pandering to popular demand.

People want to be given hope of a change to a better world for themselves and their families. Unless politicians offer a genuine sense of purpose they will get nowhere. But it is not enough to agree on the need for such a sense of purpose. Tony Blair, after all, has a sense of purpose, but it is one which is transforming Britain in ways which do not support human flourishing. Yet through the force of inertia, the public will not vote for another party unless it offers a real alternative.

That alternative is obvious — a defence of the nation and its values against all the forces that threaten their demise. That is the agenda now for progressive politics in Britain.

Posted by melanie at June 20, 2005