Dail Mail, 24 September 2005

The party conference season, which opened this week with the Liberal Democrats’ conference, traditionally signals a quickening of the political pulse.

In these few wind-blown weeks by the seaside in Blackpool, Bournemouth or Brighton, as the Labour and Tory conferences follow the LibDems, political life wakes up again after the summer holidays. This is because the conferences are supposed to be a showcase for the great clashing principles and philosophies that fuel the parties’ programmes. This is where we learn what makes our politicians tick.

So there is usually an air of expectancy and even excitement among political observers that the curtain is about to go up once again on the great drama of politics.

But not this year. Far from a quickening of its pulse, political life appears to be rapidly passing into a coma. Rather than a great clash of principles, it has degenerated into an unprincipled, unfocused and incoherent rearrangement of the stage scenery by politicians who appear to have not the slightest clue what script they are supposed to be articulating.

Take the Liberal Democrat jamboree which has just finished in Blackpool. One might have thought this would have been the LibDems’ moment. Conservative chairman Francis Maude floated the idea that the Tories might enter an alliance with them. Labour is nervously warning its members not to become mesmerised by the electoral threat they pose.

But can anyone really take the LibDems seriously after the antics of the past week? On three key policies, the leadership was defeated. The party doesn’t know whether to be carnivores or herbivores, split down the middle between tough ‘Orange Book’ free-marketeers and those who think the public sector should be declared a protected species.

In his final speech, Charles Kennedy declared he intended to be Prime Minister and rounded on those who claimed to have better ideas than he did. Yet only two days earlier he had admitted he was not a proper leader.

Given that they are patently a shambles led by a donkey, by any normal criteria the LibDems might be thought to be on their last legs. Yet so great is the malaise in our political life that they are talked about in all seriousness as a more potent challenge to the government than the Tories, the party which is still performing its long-running impersonation of a slow train crash.

The Tories’ own conference in a week’s time is likely to be something from which all sensitive types should avert their gaze. Instead of presenting a coherent alternative to the Government, it threatens to be no more than an unseemly platform for introverted navel-gazing and backstabbing around contenders to head a party that seems to have made changing the leader a substitute for thinking.

The problem is that the Tories simply do not know any longer what they stand for. The main consideration in their leadership election is not whether the candidates stand for the right things but whether they can win a general election.

Thus we have the comic spectacle of Ken Clarke, a fanatical pro-European, apparently being supported by Tories in the country who are viscerally anti-European simply because they think he can win. And why do they think this? Because he has charisma -- which translates into a beer belly and a forthright manner. But even given the lamentable conformity of most politicians, ‘blokeishness’ is hardly a political vision.

Other candidates are scarcely any more inspiring. None of them would set the world alight because none of them seems to be motivated by anything deeper than the desire to gain power for its own sake.

So while they are busy making speeches tacking to right or left as appropriate -- or both simultaneously -- or calculating on the back of an envelope whether David or Ken will scoop up David’s or Liam’s or Malcolm’s votes when they drop out, they are letting the Government get away with one policy disaster after another with at best only a pallid protest.

Indeed, they have been almost completely silent over the parlous state of the economy -- so much so that the LibDems’ carnivores, who have been landing some powerful blows on the Treasury, now appear to be articulating the conservative position more effectively than the Tories.

As for Labour, although it remains the only show in town because of the weakness of the Opposition, it is itself still riven by the poisonous feud between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor and the tension between New and Old Labour. Tony Blair remains an utterly devalued Prime Minister, isolated within his own party and unable to get his way however many czars and advisers and delivery units he establishes.

All Labour’s ambitious social reforms have foundered. Truancy has got worse despite the millions spent on trying to reduce it. Teenage pregnancy has actually increased in areas where the government’s teenage pregnancy initiative has operated. The Sure Start child care project has made no difference to children’s well-being. The crises in law and order, health care or education remain unresolved. The government can’t even get it together to carry out the necessary housing revaluation.

So what is the reason for this strange death of political Britain? How have we managed to arrive at a situation where an entire political class has nothing coherent, distinctive, useful or inspiring to say?

One important reason is that all three parties are stuck in the politics of the past while the world has utterly changed around them. They have all lost their identities in a universe where old certainties have been torn up and divisions that once defined the political landscape no longer exist.

Instead of parties opposing each other, they are now deeply divided within themselves. Over taxes or public spending, whether the public services should be run by the state or the market, or moral issues such as family life, gay rights or drug legalisation, it is hard to say what any of these parties believes because they are so divided. Indeed, if you shut your eyes you cannot tell a Tory social liberal or Europhile from a Blairite believer or a LibDem.

This is because three parties are still structurally organised around issues that are no longer the ones that divide people -- while the issues that do divide people very profoundly cross all party lines.

Parties once organised around issues of class and money have lost their defining fiefdoms. The Tories once represented the boss class, landowners and big money; Labour was the party of the workers and the trade unions while the Liberals were the party of free trade and progressive ideas.

Throughout the last century these great fiefdoms of distinctive vested interests dwindled. The relentless rise of state power after World War I finished off the Liberals and replaced them by Labour. In turn, Labour saw its working-class base shrink, and the Tories correspondingly lost their boss-class base, as the rise and rise of the middle class flattened these old antagonisms and created a constituency that all politicians equally had to win over.

This middle class was created and nurtured by the welfare state. But this came to trap all politicians in a culture of undeliverable expectations. Having led the public to believe they were entitled to demand unlimited benefits from the state, politicians of al parties found that they couldn’t ever satisfy this open-ended demand.

In addition, the more services they tried to deliver the more of a hash they made of it because central control doesn’t work. But having created this culture of entitlement and expectation, no politicians were brave enough to admit that the structure was flawed for fear of the backlash and lost votes.

So they have all ended up merely making managerial changes -- trust hospitals and city academies -- which merely echo each other in failing to address the core of the problem.

But while they were all dancing on the heads of these various pins, a host of really divisive issues emerged which the three parties had no interest in addressing because they did not reflect the vested interests around which these parties had been formed. Worse still, they deeply divided the population. So for politicians looking for votes, these were issues which spelt political disaster and were therefore best avoided altogether.

But they happened to be the most important issues of all because they were deeply connected with enormous changes in British society which would change it beyond all recognition. These were not to do with economics or class. They were cultural and moral issues -- family breakdown, drug abuse, social disorder, the erosion of discipline and punishment, immigration, multiculturalism.

These issues were rooted in a profound set of challenges to the foundations of moral and social order, which arose from the development of a culture of extreme individualism which saw all constraints on behaviour as an attack on the sacred right of self-expression.

This was coupled with an excessive guilt complex arising from the retreat from empire, resulting in a pathological loathing of the nation, its traditions and its values and a corresponding obsession with privileging minorities over the majority population and culture.

The result was a systematic attack upon the country’s bedrock values. But despite the seminal importance of what was happening, politicians shied away from it -- partly because of the confusion that resulted from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This led some to claim ‘the end of history’ -- or in plainer language, the victory of capitalism and democracy over totalitarianism. This was an error since, although the collapse of the Soviet Union undoubtedly ended the argument over economics in favour of the free market, the battleground then shifted to the cultural and moral agenda as a means of destabilising the western world.

In Britain, however, this great shift was not properly understood. In particular, the Conservative party made a disastrous mistake. Because Tony Blair junked Clause Four and embraced the market, the Tories concluded that he had parked his tanks on their lawn. The worst they could throw at him was that he was only pretending to be conservative.

What they missed entirely was that, unlike most politicians, Mr Blair had understood the great shift that had occurred and was in the forefront of the new politics. He thus presided over a cultural revolution -- tearing up the British constitution; progressively undermining and then nationalising the family; reversing a century’s efforts against vice by liberalising drug law, drinking and gambling; changing the whole identity of the country through a covert policy of mass immigration and ruthlessly promoting multiculturalism; and weakening the nation and its founding values even more fundamentally by ceding more and more power to supra-national power-brokers such as the EU or human rights lawyers.

One would have thought that such a revolutionary programme which has left millions of British citizens aghast would provide a golden opportunity for an opposition party to draw up the clearest possible battle-lines and provide voters with a very clear choice between fundamentally conflicting political principles.

But because the Tories failed to grasp what had happened, and wallowed instead in the outrage of being deprived of their supposedly natural role as the party of government, and because these issues do bitterly divide the population, they became unsayable.

The issues that mattered most were therefore the ones about which no-one spoke. There was silence or only muted protest because they were considered too difficult or too risky, or because opposition politicians were competing to be Blair wannabes.

So there has been silence over the drift towards disaster of the economy; silence over the massive pensions scandal; silence over Europe; silence over immigration; silence over the disintegrating family. Instead we are subjected to a series of stage-managed seaside farces which will tell us little except who is up and who is down.

Is it surprising therefore that voters are so deeply disillusioned with politics and have turned off in droves?

What we are suffering from is a dearth of political leadership. There is no-one with a deeply held vision and the charisma to put it across that can galvanise the country. That is because the best and brightest no longer go into politics; and that is because this is no longer where the power is. Influence now lies elsewhere -- because politicians have made the big issues off limits and because power has drained away to bodies such as the EU.

Both the assault on the country’s values and the consequent decline in political leadership are rooted in a profound loss of confidence in Britain as a nation. Only if politicians have the courage and vision to acknowledge this collapse and vigorously address it will political leadership return and politics will become interesting once again -- and there will be at least a chance of halting our lethal democratic malaise.

Posted by melanie at September 24, 2005