Dilettante

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: The shape of a regulated press

2012-02-14T11:22:00.000Z

My latest piece for the ASI blog is a response to last week's Question Time, and warns that a 'regulated' free press would be shaped by the more sanctimonious readers of unpopular newspapers in line with their own prejudices.

Do Students Need a 'Union'? Dilettante on The Student Journals

2012-02-13T11:55:00.000Z

In my latest TSJ contribution I posit that the framing of student issues in labour rather than consumer terms damages students interests for the sake of playing up to the left-wing fantasy of 'solidarity'.

An abridged version of this article also appeared on the Adam Smith Institute blog.

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: Could industrial 'Patriarchy' ever survive the market?

2012-02-10T13:29:00.000Z

In my latest article for the ASI, I posit that the economically groundless and nakedly sexist employment practises Cameron hopes to counter with boardroom quotas could not - and probably have not - survive the rigorous competition of the free market.

Dilettante on The Commentator: Why mandates matter in the fight for the Union

2012-02-08T11:19:00.000Z

In my latest Commentator article, I point out that even devolutionary unionists have to start defending the legitimacy of Westminster and the British parliament before they find themselves unable to justify the continued existence of the British state.

As expected, a cybernat immediately starts getting nasty in the comments.

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: Would Salmond make a colony of Scotland?

2012-02-07T08:37:00.001Z

I'm on a two week internship with the ASI as a prize for winning the Young Writer on Liberty award. The placement involves writing blog pieces for them and my first is on Scotland: I look at the SNP's proposals for post-Union Scotland and ponder whether it will end up a very large Overseas Territory.

They decided to change my original title on this one.

The Tyranny of the 'Anonymous': Dilettante on The Student Journals

2012-01-16T13:18:00.000Z

In my latest TSJ article I attack the so-called 'Anonymous' hackers after their attack on Stratfor, and make the case that these people represent the rise of a new and totally unaccountable form of censorious internet dictatorship.

Help me pick my Orwell Prize submissions

2012-01-07T17:27:00.002Z

The start of a new year means that it is Orwell Prize nomination time. It's a nice opportunity to look back over the writing I did in the last year and try to pick out the ten I'm most proud of.

However, given that being long-listed is relatively unlikely I thought it might be useful if I used the opportunity to see how other people rate my pieces. So instead of narrowing down to ten pieces I've narrowed down to twenty.

Some of these I'm definitely submitting, some I'm probably not, but anybody interested in letting me know which they'd send is welcome to either leave a comment or email me at henrychhill[at]btinternet.com.

Update: Bold indicates articles finally selected. Thank you to all who offered their suggestions.

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1) Initiation or Incubation: Left Wing Leaders and Student Politics

2) The Soft Bigotry of Lowered Expectations

3) Oppose Lecturer Strikes

4) How do People Simply 'Decide' to Overthrow a Regime?

5) Republicans Killing Catholics? Four Lions Called It

6) Were the Liberal Democrats Ever Viable as a Concept?

7) Jonathan Freedland in Denial

8) Rumours of Lords Reform: Three Criticisms

9) Why on Earth are Greens Nationalist?

10) A Safety Net or a Padded Cell? Universal Healthcare and Freedom

11) We're Not a Family: Why the Right Doesn't do Marches

12) So... what is a Conservative?

13) Simon Hughes is Wrong

14) Yes to the UK

15) Asking the Wrong Question on Riot Control

16) Long Lived Messiahs Always Disappoint

17) First Flickers of a Unionist Fightback

18) The 'One Per Cent' Do Not Have a Monopoly on Greed

19) Death and Freedom

20) White Poppy? White Flag

21) Long Live the Kings*

*Added afterwards.

Dilettante on Mancunian Matters: Are the Lib Dems finished in Manchester?

2011-12-26T13:50:00.000Z

In a feature for Manchester-based news website Mancunian Matters, I examine whether or not the Liberal Democrats have a future in the city following their collapse at the last local elections.

Dilettante on Open Unionism: The Dream Lives On - The Conservatives in Northern Ireland

2011-12-25T23:16:00.001Z

In a feature I prepared for my journalism qualification, I examine the history, performance and prospects of the Conservative Party in Northern Ireland from Home Rule to the present day.

Dilettante on Gossip Tory: Turnout Problems Aren't Going Away

2011-12-19T04:06:00.000Z

My first piece as Chief Reporter for Gossip Tory is an article I originally wrote as a London Spin column in the aftermath of Ben Howlett's re-election. It looks at the failure of online voting to seriously impact turnout and examines why this might be.

The End of Retirement: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-12-12T09:04:00.001Z

In my latest TSJ article, I moot that the concept of 'the pension age' is an outdated relic of post-war policy that needs fundamental reform, and that the younger generation should not feel entitled to a long retirement the nation can't afford to give them.

Dilettante in BullsEye:

2011-12-08T12:45:00.000Z

I've got an article in the December issue of BullsEye, the magazine of the European People's Party youth organisation European Democrat Students. You can download it here.

My article can be found on page 14 and is entitled 'No New Christendom', and makes the argument for the admission of Muslim states into the EU. I also had an article in the previous September issue arguing for a reform of European energy policy.

Dilettante on LondonSpin: Will the Next CF Election Resemble 2011 or 2010?

2011-12-07T08:58:00.000Z

In my latest piece on the Conservative Future elections, I postulate that next year's elections will be closer to last year's brutal contest than this year's soporific effort.

The Unions are Doing Their Job – and Must be Beaten

2011-12-06T06:05:00.000Z

There are times when I fear the pro-market right can be guilty of a double standard. On the one hand, we decry any leftist who claims that businesses should be run ‘in the national interest’. It sounds like the opening of an attempt to bring private enterprise under the long shadow of the state.

We quite rightly point out that the business of business is business, and that government attempts to co-opt businesses into the state are usually authoritarian and wrong. We defend the right of private citizens to run their own affairs and defend, within the constraints of the law, their own interests.

But with this public sector strike some of the right has turned on its head. Suddenly, the unions are selfishly refusing to subsume their private interests into the national interest. Their strikes are ‘irresponsible’. The distinction between the private and the public interest, which we so keenly defend for businesses and individuals, gets inexplicably blurred for unions.

Yes, people get hurt when schools and other public services close due to strike action. But people get hurt when factories close and companies move to more business-friendly countries. Why should we believe that unions have some kind of duty to people other than their membership?

Of course, the unions bring some of this on themselves by striking ridiculous poses. Claims that the public sector unions are somehow striking for all workers, or for the nation, are absurd. The idea that public services would simply cease to function if public sector workers were paid private sector wages is a fantasy.

But the right should not sink to their level. Rather we should always seek to point out the blunt truth of the matter: the public sector unions are doing their job. It might seem hypocritical for people who pose as selfless public servants to be causing so much disruption in defence of an unsustainably generous wage and pension settlement, but that is an argument for the conscience of the individual public servant, not the union.

The union’s job is not a heroic defence of justice or social democracy, whatever their spokespeople might claim. A union’s purpose is the ferocious defence of the interests of its members, and that alone. The state of the public finances is not their duty. Why should it be?

A union in under no more moral obligation to refrain from striking ‘in the national interest’ than a business is to pay exorbitant taxes for what a left-wing government believes is the national good. They are both private concerns with private interests that the market right should recognise and accept.

If the job of the unions is to deliver the best possible deal for their members, the government has an opposing function. As an employer it has a duty to get the best value for money out of public labour as possible on behalf of its stakeholders, the taxpaying public.

Unlike a private sector employer the government has for a long time failed in this duty because while a private company cannot simply wish profits into existence, when the government comes off badly from a wage negotiation it can simply tax the money it needs out of the public.

With the new and desperate need to bring down government costs, the government is finally starting – and only starting – to do its job and face down the public sector unions in order to deliver the best possible value for money on the public wage bill. This is the opening salvo in what will probably become a long-running battle between successive governments and the last trades union dragons in the public sector, which needs fundamental reform.

I opposed the strike, like many millions of others, but I don’t think it’s somehow illegitimate for the unions to be trying to defend their settlements and it is hypocritical of many rightists to claim such. Industrial action is a simple trial of strength between organised labour on the one hand and the employer and their stakeholders on the other.

The fight between an employer and the union is thus a natural and morally neutral result of their opposing functions. The unions represent their members, and the government represents the rest of us.

The government must make that message clear, and not let the unions continue to pretend they’re striking for anyone but themselves. Then we must defeat them, and remove one of the most formidable barriers to meaningful public service reform.

Dilettante on LondonSpin: Enough of These Timidly Clean Campaigns

2011-12-01T23:33:00.000Z

In my latest article as LondonSpin's CF election columnist, I criticise the candidates for confusing a 'clean' campaign with a timidly inoffensive one and call on them to start attacking each others' policies and records.

Dilettante on the Radio: BBC 5 Live's Tony Livesey

2011-11-30T18:29:00.000Z

I was invited back to be part of a 14-strong panel in Livesey's Lounge for their Strike Special, debating the strike and pensions proposals. Listen in iPlayer here.

Of Death and Freedom

2011-11-29T01:26:00.000Z

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C. S. Lewis
English essayist & juvenile novelist (1898 - 1963)

This year, millions of people across the Arab world have risked life and limb to topple entrenched dictators. A man in Tunisia literally lit the powder keg by setting himself on fire. In Egypt, protestors continue to die in clashes with security forces. In Libya, a poorly armed and badly organised rag-tag rebellion defied a ruthless and well-equipped regime – their heroism leading to NATO intervention, not stemming from it.

From the sixties through the eighties, oppressed blacks marched, fought and died to overthrow racist regimes in the American South and South Africa. They faced down hostile mobs, police crowd-control, and organised mechanisms of state persecution. Many died.

In the forties, a huge collection of nations across the world saw tens of millions of men and women perish resisting a horrifying form of ultra-nationalist totalitarianism rolling across the globe from Japan and Germany. They could – the gay, communist and racially impure aside – have elected to preserve their lives by finding some accommodation in their soul with their would-be masters. They fought, showed exceptional courage and died far from home to preserve a world better than that.

Do you understand the logic of these people? I think most people do. I’ve not come across many people who look at a great struggle for liberty and instinctively ask ‘why?’ Whether the reason is cultural or instinctive, the war of liberation is a concept we understand, and usually admire. In short, dying for freedom is something we get.

It is interesting that our attitude to dying of freedom is totally at odds with that. When we calculate what an acceptable ‘cost’ of freedom is, the context is everything. Millions of men dying on the battlefield for freedom? That makes sense. A few thousand people a year dying of lung cancer caused by smoking? Totally unacceptable.

The list goes on. We wring our hands over adding 10mph to the speed limit in case it causes a few more deaths. We whack huge deterrent taxes on products we deem to be harmful. We grumble about but fundamentally tolerate an ever more restrictive health and safety culture. We see people willing to tolerate swingeing restrictions on personal liberty with the justification “if it saves just one child…”

Does it make sense that we can justify paying millions of lives for freedoms we sell for only one?

There are several reasons this bizarre disconnection might have happened. The first is that when we see soldiers fighting for a cause, they aren’t fighting for the little freedoms with which we’re personally acquainted. They’re fighting for Freedom, the sweeping, capitalised abstract concept that most people agree is fundamentally important. The enemies of freedom often come offering such unappealing prospects as racial purging or, latterly, clerical authoritarianism, which helps us appreciate Freedom all the more.

Freedom feels harder to defend, however, when its opponents attack it piece by piece and with good intentions. Defending the rights of people to kill themselves with cigarettes doesn’t have the same heroic feel to it that dying for democracy does. To launch a big defence of little freedoms can seem disproportionate and petty. People might even think you’re some kind of libertarian.

Another reason might simply be that when we measure up the two transactions in our heads, freedom is not actually our primary concern. The people dying in the big battles for the big issues look and sound heroic, and we admire the heroism. The people fighting for the small freedoms can sound petty.

Perhaps we instinctively dislike the idea of letting people make bad decisions, but just don’t like this authoritarian instinct shoved in our faces with uniforms and barbed wire.

Or perhaps it is just a product of becoming dependent on the structures originally put in place to protect us. I’ve written about the impact of universal healthcare on liberty before, but I approached it from the government’s perspective. Consider it from the people’s perspective.

Morally speaking, the fundamental principles of the NHS seem argumentatively bulletproof. Everyone, everywhere in Britain, shall have access to the healthcare they need free at the point of delivery. There is no way that someone can fall through so tightly woven a safety net – our consciences will not permit it. You’d surely have to be a monster to oppose such a thing?

If we were prepared to apply this honourable principle in conjunction with personal freedom, that might be fine. But we’re not. While with one hand we push universal medical cover onto everyone in Britain and offer to foot the bill, with the other we try to claw back as much of that money as possible.

‘Cost to the NHS’ has become the justification du jure for the restriction of personal freedom. Smoking; obesity; idleness: all of these cost the NHS money. We’re not prepared to meet that cost, but our ‘social consciences’ refuse to let these people out of the system to choose for themselves. So to spare our wallets we take their freedoms away in the name of doing them good.

This is perhaps the most ingenious vehicle for oppression yet devised, because it is powered by the very people whose freedoms it takes. A people who have come to value the safety net more than their personal liberty are left to languish in the long shadow of their own charity.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I mean, stripping cigarette branding, or minimum alcohol pricing, or banning marijuana. Those are only little freedoms. Who died for them?

What we lose sight of is that ‘Freedom’ is made up of all the spaces in which we are left to choose for ourselves. In trading them piecemeal in exchange for being better protected from ourselves, we’re part of a terrible long term transaction.

It is a certainty that free people will not live as long as those who are the prisoners of good doctors, but nobody aspires to imprisonment. Put the question to someone in those terms and they’ll reject it, the same way they reject authoritarianism when it comes with jackboots and brown shirts.

Today’s authoritarians march in small steps, so we must always be prepared to fight for small freedoms. To paraphrase the popular phrase: look after the little liberties, and Liberty will look after herself.

Dilettante on LondonSpin: Challengers Must Wake Up to the Advantages of Incumbency

2011-11-28T18:02:00.000Z

In my role as CF election columnist for London Spin, I outline the serious advantages held by an incumbent and try to wake Southworth and McDonough up to the fact that they're completely wasting their campaigns. Read it here.

Mancunion Article: It will never be easy to find a graduate job again

2011-11-28T08:01:00.002Z

My old university newspaper, The Mancunion, invited me to contribute a commentary piece to their feature on youth unemployment. You can read it here.

White Poppy? White Flag: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-11-24T15:56:00.002Z

In my latest article for TSJ, I argue that pacifism has no place in Remembrance ceremonies.

Dilettante on LondonSpin: Do Endorsements Matter?

2011-11-23T01:17:00.000Z

Political gossip site LondonSpin have taken me on as a columnist to cover the Conservative Future elections. This is my first piece, pondering whether or not the branch endorsements focused on by such sites actually matter.

A further response to Ian James Parsley

2011-11-15T23:35:00.005Z

I've been neglecting writing for a little while due to a bout of flue and an exam. Hence I wasn't aware that Ian had posted a response to my critique of his federalist position until I got a message about it on Twitter. I've since brought myself up to speed and will respond again.

However, this isn't going to devolve into a fisk-fight, with Ian and I posting increasingly long line-by-line rebuttals of each other's positions. Instead, I'll simply provide a succinct presentation of my views on the various issues Ian raises here.

Edit: The succinct thing got lost the moment I hit the thorny issue of 'Englishness'.

First, I would like to clarify that I do not believe that a Conservative government can reverse devolution, nor do I think I argued thus. What I do believe that unionists need to do is hijack devolution and change its shape. Instead of the 'devolutionary centralisation' of the SNP and Plaid, where they simply seek to claw as much power as possible to the national assemblies, we should be advocating more radical localism. Local councils, elected mayors and so forth can all be used to sate people's lust for localism without boosting nationalism.

Ian's point about adopting a make-or-break option to the nationalists is one I completely concur with. The Scots have a right to decide whether they're in the UK or out of it, but if they choose to be in it then they must negotiate that position with the rest of the British. The idea that the SNP can simply cherry-pick their relationship with the UK is as ridiculous as the belief that the UK can do such with the EU.

The 'Greater England' point is one which Ian and I are not going to agree on. Put simply, it is all a matter of perspective. Ian sees an over-mighty English bogeyman squatting at the heart of the union because he insists on viewing the union through the prism of the home nations. I take the position that whether or not you are Mancunian, Brummie, Glaswegian or from any other corner of our country, you are British and that in order for Britain to continue to warrant existing we must be governed as British.

This is what lies at the heart of my argument that unionists need to start fighting for the conscious British identity. Labour first started undermining it when they adopted anti-English posturing in Scotland in the Eighties, and the nationalists have piled on that bandwagon since.

Ian says that at a recent event the idea of 'Northern Irish' as a primary identity went unchallenged. That's fine. Unionism is not about choosing whether or not you are Northern Irish or British, but about being Northern Irish AND British. The understanding that you can be both is one of the things that makes unionism superior to nationalism, with its worship of a primary identity.

His very focus on 'England' serves to undermine Ian's argument. He is right to note that England and Scotland have diverged economically, but that masks the true story. The north of England is economically and politically very much like much of Scotland (sans the nationalism). Any story about the 'divergence' of the areas of the UK should be about how the capital-driven, well-connected and prosperous south has increasingly left behind the post-industrial, remote fringe.

But that narrative doesn't fit into the arbitrary lines of the Home Nations. Given that the North of England has suffered a similar fall from industrial grace as Scotland, Ian's treatment of England as a single unit is no more legitimate than my belief in Britain as one, and his statements about how unconsciously recent policies have represented 'English' interests are thus wrong. If anything, they represented Southern interests.

England's lack of identity does not mean that British identity is English. Ian commits the fundamental flaw - common amongst ideological nationalists - of assuming that 'England', as a cultural unit with convergent economic interests, has to exist. But this isn't the case - the only thing making Scotland's relationship with the South different from the North's is the lack of a border. The English nation is a cartographical fiction, and Ian's adoption of arbitrary national boundaries rather than actual regional politics and economics demonstrates the anti-unionist world view that underlies his argument.

Finally, I maintain that Scandinavia was an absurd example for Ian to use in his first post, and his explanation confirms that. He is right to say, in his counter-rebuttal linked above, that a Scandinavian model is where a lot of Scottish and Welsh nationalists would like to end up. I don't doubt that. But Ian was using it to illustrate an apparently 'unionist' argument. And as an example of an end point unionists are supposed to find desirable, pointing to Scandinavia is a bit like pointing to Austria-Hungary.

In short, my original position is unaltered. The frame of reference Ian uses when he forms his world view really shapes his conclusions before he starts. He adopts the Home Nations as the fundamental building blocks from which an argument must be formed despite the fact that 'England' is just as arbitrary a construct as 'Britain'. He continues to play down the role of 'Britishness' and explicitly states that Britain is not a unit.

This is an entirely honourable world view for a nationalist to adopt. But it is a very strange one for a unionist, because it holds that Britain is a fundamentally illegitimate concept. The idea of deciding policy on a British level is seen as 'doing what England wants'. If you view the Home Nations as fundamentally sovereign then the Union simply doesn't make sense. If Ian thinks like that, I'd be interested to know whether or not he actually considers himself a unionist.

For myself, I continue to believe that unionism requires a believe in the validity of the British state and conscious identity. The assumptions behind nationalism, including those behind Ian's argument, are at heart arbitrary. Pan-British democracy could be viewed as doing what England says; but it could be equally said to be doing what the South and Midlands say or even just what the majority say. Choosing 'England' rather than one of the latter two is the product of a fundamentally nationalist view of the world where those lines have some special importance.

Unionists - the best unionists, anyway - hold that no particular line on a map holds some sort of mythical, fundamental importance. That's why I'm proud to be one.

A Leading Partner in a Modern Power: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-11-11T07:09:00.000Z

My latest TSJ article rounds off my three-part contribution to the Atlanticism-vs-Continental foreign policy debate, by making - or in less than 1000 words, summarising - the positive case for British engagement with the European Union.

Dilettante on The Commentator: The 1% Don't Have a Monopoly on Greed

2011-11-10T18:01:00.000Z

In my second article for The Commentator, I challenge the Archbishop of York and postulate that the Church has no place taking sides in the 'Occupy vs. Capitalism' dispute.

Dilettante on the Radio: BBC 5 Live's Tony Livesey

2011-11-10T10:51:00.000Z

Myself and Mahyar Tousi, Chairman of Manchester Metropolitan Conservative Future, were invited back on to Tony Livesey's show as part of another student panel, this time debating tuition fees.

I open with a sparring match against Caroline Dangerfield, President of the University of Salford Students' Union, before its opened up to the wider group.

You can find it here, with our segment starting about fifteen minutes in.

Madness Built on Fantasy: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-10-31T09:53:00.000Z

In my latest article for TSJ, I take a look at why the Conservative backbench rebellion over 'renegotiation' was such a pointless folly.

Note to Times readers - I wrote and submitted this before Phil Collins' excellent comment piece in that paper.

Murdo Fraser Answers Some Questions

2011-10-22T18:40:00.002+01:00

During work I fired some questions off to the Murdo campaign about how exactly his new party would work in relation to the national Conservative Party. To his credit - and my surprise - I received responses fast and (it appears, at least) from the man himself. For those interested I've put the questions and answers below.

Q: Would a Scottish MP be able to lead the whole group, including the sister party, and become Prime Minister?

A: I can confirm that under the new arrangements I will seek to put in place a Scottish MP from our new centre right party which will be a sister party of the UK Conservative Party and take the Conservative whip at Westminster will be able to lead that whole group and become Prime Minister. I often use the example of Alex Douglas-Home: he was elected as the Unionist MP for Kinross & West Perthshire but then became UK Conservative leader and Prime Minister. I would envisage us having similar arrangements to those that applied pre-1965 and comparative to those that exist between the German CDU and the Bavarian CSU where CSU members serve for example as Cabinet Ministers in the federal government.

Q: Would I be able to be a member of both the new party and the Conservative Party? I would love to remain involved with the Scottish Conservatives if they took on your new shape, but I am resident in England at present. The Conservatives allow membership of any party that does not compete against them in an election, would your new party do the same?

A: If I win the leadership contest and the special constitutional conference of the Scottish Conservatives decides to move towards setting up a new centre right party then I would be delighted if you wished to join it. The UK Conservative Party under these circumstances would cease to operate in Scotland and so the new party would not be competing against them in any elections here.

Q: Would you have the two parties cooperate in setting policy for reserved areas? How would that work? Obviously the party would set its own devolved policy, but reserved policy must surely be worked out by some body representing the national alliance of Conservative parties?

A: I would expect the new centre right party to co-operate closely with the UK on policy towards reserved matters in a similar way to how the Scottish party does now, via strengthened policy forums and through our elected representatives. I want to help David Cameron win a majority at Westminster in 2015 and this means Scotland needs to do more than return a single MP to support that government; I genuinely believe that the creation of new centre-right party, building on the current Scottish Conservative Party, gives us the best opportunity to increase our number of MPs at that election and therefore increase our ability to influence UK policy in Scotland’s interests.

Q: By what mechanism would a Scottish party MP become leader of the alliance? Would there be an allied conference of some kind where they were elected? Or would there be a separate position of 'allied leader' with the leaders of the UK and Scottish parties being put to a cross-party ballot of members?

A: Under the current arrangements for the election of a UK leader candidates must be nominated by any two MPs taking the Conservative whip and this would apply to any Scottish MP elected from our new centre right party. If more than two candidates stand, then MPs first hold a series of ballots to reduce the number to two. At this point an all-member ballot takes place and party members of the new centre right party would have a vote in this leadership ballot.

I hope these answers are helpful and thank you for your interest in the current leadership contest.

Kind regards,

Murdo Fraser

Dilettante on Tory Hoose: Scottish AND British Conservatives

2011-10-12T19:30:00.000+01:00

Scottish ConHome equivalent Tory Hoose have kindly published an article of mine that I wrote in response to a pro-Murdo article I read there. Please take a look.

Dilettante on The Commentator: First Flickers of a Unionist Fightback

2011-10-08T14:47:00.001+01:00

In my first article for The Commentator, I look at how this Conservative Conference showed the first inklings that the Conservative leadership is preparing for face Salmond, and look at the problems Cameron will need to overcome to turn his party into a well-oiled anti-separatist campaigning machine by 2014.

Unionism Without 'Britishness' is Nothing: A rebuttal to Ian James Parsley

2011-10-05T20:31:00.002+01:00

I've decided to structure this piece as a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis (and where necessary refutation) of Ian's argument, in a manner that appears similar to a fisk. This is often used as a format for quite hostile articles - you need only read my own fisks to see that - so I'd like to stress that no hostility towards Ian is intended.

A sudden inflow of links led me to this article by Ian James Parsley over on his blog. Saddened as I always am not to see the UCUNF logo at the top of it, I went to take a look.

He has taken two articles on the issue of federalism - one by me, another by an English nationalist on Open Unionism - and used them as a basis for concluding that federalism is the only hope for unionism. Ian raised some interesting points which I would like to take this opportunity to counter if I can for I believe that his reading of what unionism actually consists of is wrong on quite a fundamental level.

Let's begin.

I have been increasingly of the view that Federalism and Unionism (both in the very broadest sense) need to be the same thing if the Union is to survive at all (I am not stating a particular preference for it to survive, merely my views on how it can).

The article of mine that Ian links too makes clear my reasons for thinking that federalism and unionism are, in the British context, fundamentally incompatible. I don't see the need to repeat those arguments here. What I would like to know is that Ian means by 'the very broadest sense' of Federalism and Unionism.

Firstly, my judgement is that Unionists in England (and occasionally elsewhere) too often make the mistake of trying to present the Union as some sort of “Greater England”. This may or may not be intentional – in Dilettante’s case I have no doubt it isn’t – but it is the outworking of most English “Unionist” logic.

The 'Greater England' line is one that crops up a lot in nationalist critiques of the Union. The rationale behind assuming that unionists in England were 'greater Englanders' is the idea that they shared the nationalist pre-occupation with a sub-British identity - that their primary identification was with England and they were only comfortable with Britain because they had projected England onto it. Even England football fans used to waved Union Flags, which must only have confirmed this suspicion in the minds of many of the more paranoid nationalists.

Yet this belief is predicated on one fundamental misconception - the idea that most 'English' unionists prior to devolution had any serious conception of 'England' at all. Hard as it might be for a Celtic nationalist to believe, 'Englishness' really isn't - or certainly wasn't - much of a thing. 'England' was too diverse in makeup and origin to sustain a cohesive identity without institutions to frame it, and so the Kingdom of England quite happily blended into the United Kingdom. Lacking the myth of a unified celtic origin that sustained Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism, during the birth of nationalism in the 19th Century the English simply accepted Britain.

Even today, the business of reimposing 'Englishness' on the English is largely left to external nationalists, especially the SNP. The English are being defined negatively - they are the ones who don't have a parliament, who don't get free prescriptions or tuition fees, or whatever. There is little to nothing by way of a grass-roots nationalist movement in England, and the country is all the better for it. So the word 'unionist' has no place in scare quotations in Ian's paragraph.

Secondly, following on from this, English Unionists have been distinctly discomforted by devolution. Yet the opposite of devolution, implicitly advocated by Dilettante, is centralisation in England – with 85% of the UK population, that means English rule, intentionally or otherwise, with people in England prepared to justify it on numbers alone if necessary. English rule only gives ammunition to Scottish, Welsh and Irish Nationalists to present their case in national and even anti-colonial terms.

Just to clarify, I'm not 'implicitely' anti-devolution: I'm explicitly anti-devolution. I believe as I always have that devolving power to the nationalist - rather than the local - level is wrong.

Now, this paragraph really gets to the nub of my problem with this piece. Before I get to that though, I'd just like to clarify something that came up in the comments: it is not a straight choice between devolution and centralisation. I advocate, as others such as Airey Neave have in the past, that unionism ought to be combined with genuine localism - devolving power to institutions such as county councils.

Indeed, at the core of Neave's sadly abandoned integration proposals - probably the greatest missed opportunity in the history of unionism after the failure to pass Catholic Emancipation in 1801 - the permanent abolition of Stormont went hand in hand with the resurrection of the province's county councils. This tandem approach ensures that great power rests in the hands of people to decide local issues while ensuring the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom.

Yet Ian's complaint about 'English rule' giving Gaelic nationalists an 'anti-colonial' mandate is telling, because it reveals what I consider the key flaw at the heart of his argument. His whole piece is a comparison of the balance of power between England and the other Home Nations. At no point in time does he consider Britain, and the mandate of Britishness.

If Britishness exists, then it stands to reason that a decision voted for by a majority of the British people is legitimate across the UK. If not, that raises serious questions - was the South of England living under 'colonial rule' since 2001? Can a government really claim a mandate to govern a constituency that didn't vote for it?

Assuming that Ian doesn't hold this absurd view (and I don't think he does) then his analysis demonstrates a complete lack of any consideration for Britishness. This is expanded upon in his next paragraph:

The only chink of light for the Conservatives post-devolution was in Wales, where the party – unlike in Scotland and Northern Ireland – moved quickly to embrace devolution and the opportunities it brought about, and backed subsequent yes-campaigns for more powers. This is not a coincidence. The social trends are towards greater devolution, a great sense of English, Scottish, Welsh and even (unmistakably in recent years) Northern Irish identity. That doesn’t stop anyone being British any more than being Bavarian stops someone being German, or being Norwegian stops someone being Scandinavian, but it does have implications on where people expect decisions over the laws and policies which affect them to be made.

I'd like to make it clear, Scandinavia is a terrible, terrible example with which to illustrate a supposedly 'unionist' argument. Since the dissolution of Sweden-Norway in 1905 Scandinavia has consisted of entirely separate countries which share some very broad cultural similarities - which is where Britain and Ireland are now and where the nationalists would like all the Home Nations to end up.

At this point, I think Ian's clarification above about not actually being a unionist is very important, because he isn't describing anything I'd really call unionism. His response to the social trend towards the fragmentation of identity across the UK is one of enthusiastic acceptance, not reticence (the sign of a hard-core unionist) or balance (the sign of a moderate unionist). He shows no sign of mourning or wanting to defend the concept of British identity, nor to strike a balance between identities that allows both to function. Instead, he is yet another advocate of the idea that unionists should simply resign themselves to running with the nationalists. I'll deal with this in more detail looking at his final paragraph.

His invocation of Germany and Scandinavia are as ill-suited to this argument as the CDU/CSU comparison is for the Conservatives, has he himself pointed out earlier in his article. In both of those instances, the devolution or independence was underpinned by a deep sense of blood-and-soil nationalism. In the pan-Scandinavian case it never got anywhere, but the identities that underpin Scandinavian and German identity are of the gut-instinct kind that nationalists work with. The British identity, based as it is around the idea of quite distinct nationalities overcoming their differences for cooperation and mutual enrichment, is both richer and more fragile than that.

Britishness has evolved; indeed, it has devolved! Deepening devolution – thus, in fact, a form of government within spitting distance of federalism – is the only route seriously open, and any party unaware of that aspect of contemporary Britishness has no right to call itself British. Or to call itself Unionist, for that matter.

Of the whole article, this is the only paragraph I find actually objectionable. I find the suggestion that anybody who rejects the idea that we need to carry the nationalists to the brink of breaking up our country cannot call themselves unionist or British frankly insulting. In fact, the very idea that someone who goes against received opinion should be disowned is fundamentally wrong. I hope that Ian will withdraw this statement.

It comes back to the question I wanted to raise at Conservative conference - why should unionists only be unionist when the polls permit them to be? That sort of thinking would never have got the nationalists anywhere. The SNP didn't give up after 1979, and both they and Plaid came from very humble beginnings indeed. Plaid and the SNP have achieved what they achieved by fixing a goal in mind and working tirelessly towards it, undermining both the fact and the idea of Britain at every turn. Unionists have shown no such resolution.

Rather than simply treating the supposed Zeitgeist as part of an inevitable historical tide to which we are powerlessly subject, unionists should wake up to the fact that human beings are things whose minds can be changed, that public moods can be altered. And that includes standing up for the concept of Britishness, the marked absence of which lies at the heart of Ian's article.

Britain and Britishness are, like most identities born of a union, mutually dependent. Britishness invests legitimacy in British institutions - in turn, these institutions provide a point of identification for 'Britishness'. Without those institutions the cosmopolitan, civic identity of the union withers against the pressure of 'purer', blood-and-soil nationalism. Ian's article thus fails to do several things:

First, it fails to describe how 'Britishness' would actually survive the disembowelling of the British state - the rapid implosion of the 'Anglophile' tradition in southern Ireland suggests it wouldn't. Contrast Northern Ireland, where the latest Life and Times survey shows a Catholic majority in favour of the union, with the Republic, where even the suggestion of joining the Commonwealth of Nations is now beyond the pale as the pro-Treaty tradition faded away. This is the same Commonwealth that countries like India are comfortable joining.

Second, it fails to justify the continued value of any sort of residual union in a scenario where Britishness is so weak that it cannot provide legitimacy to any meaningful central government. If Britishness is not enough to sustain a government, where is the positive case for sustaining the state?

Third, it fails to explain how unionists running with the ball right to the edge of the abyss would prevent the likes of Alex Salmond pushing us over it - again, the evidence of experience which suggests that the very opposite is true. For example, the Welsh nearly rejected devolution in 1998, but returning to that scenario is certainly difficult in the medium-to-long term. Every concession offered the Scottish nationalists has simply loudened their demands for concessions. The idea that weakening the British state somehow strengthens it is one I hear a lot from defeatist 'unionists', but I've yet to hear of any evidence that it will work.

Looking over the article as a whole, what strikes me is that it isn't really a 'unionist' argument at all - it barely even bothers to dress up as one. Ian doesn't make a positive case for the union he outlines here. He doesn't even describe which parts of his 'union' would actually remain. The entire tone of the article is one of "Britain is over; unionists best get on the winning side while they can!" That isn't unionism. That's giving up.

Unionists are unionists because they believe in Britain and what the union represents - multiple peoples coming together to build something stronger and richer (in both the cultural and economic senses) than their individual nations. They believe in being British and being governed as British, and they are loyal to British institutions. They believe that the many tribes of these islands are one people and should remain so, and no argument that doesn't can be described as 'unionist'.

This isn't antipathetic to being Welsh, Scottish, Irish or even 'English', but it involves balance. Any unionist proposal must maintain a meaningful role for the united state, which this proposal fails to do. Implicit in Ian's argument instead is the complete resignation of the concept of Britishness and any legitimacy it bestows upon British institutions and instead 'deepening' devolution because the course of history is telling us to.

In short, he isn't describing a way that the union might survive - he's surviving how we unionists might collude with its ending, in exchange for wrapping its corpse in the Union Jack for a while.

Dilettante at Conference 2011

2011-10-04T22:15:00.001+01:00

I decided not to write a day-by-day account this year, not least because I'm in college for most of it. Instead, I thought I'd report back on the significant moments of my wanderings through the two days of Conference in one post. I've promised a more complete 'Conservative Conference from a Unionist Perspective' to The Commentator too.

1) The 'A United Kingdom' Debate: Hosted by Secretary of State for Wales Cheryl Gillan, the panel consisted of:

Andrew R. T. Davies: Leader of the Welsh Assembly Conservatives.

Owen Paterson: Secretary of State for Northern Ireland

David Mundell: Conservative MP for Scotland

Annabel Goldie: Leader of the Scottish Parliament Conservatives.

I noticed an interesting dynamic here. The Welsh and Northern Irish speakers did little more than name-check their achievements. On the other hand the Scots, perhaps needing something other than achievements to talk about, gave strong unionist speeches. Annabel Goldie's especially remains for me a highlight of this years conference - probably the most passionate unionist address I've heard a mainland politician give, and you could tell she meant every word.

I did put down to ask a question here, but I was not reached. None the less, it caught David Mundell's eye and he recalled it when I spoke to him the next day. For posterity's sake, the question was:

"If Nationalists argue their corner at all times, and Unionists only when the polls permit, is it any surprise that the momentum is all in one direction?"

2) Meeting Annabel Goldie: Alright, this one probably has no long-term significance to the future of unionism. But in the middle of an edging-to-aggravated debate with Iain Dale over the future of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel wandered past and stopped to say hi. When she looked at my name tag, she said:

"Oh, Henry Hill! I know you, you're a blogger."

That blogger almost died of pride right on the spot.

3) Murdo Fraser's Reception: After my encounter with Iain plus a particularly heated exchange of views with a fellow Tory in the bar upstairs, I wasn't up for taking on Murdo's separatism for the third time in one evening, so hid at the back.

Got quite a long chat with his campaign manager. While a perfectly nice man, he failed to assuage the fears I raised in this piece, and I remain hostile to Murdo's proposed dismemberment of the party.

The main thing I noticed - and I noticed this at the hustings the next day, too - is that Murdo and his team are ferociously trying to mask his fundamental proposal with a strong emphasis on continuity. As very little of substance was said at this meeting, I'll address that point more fully when describing the hustings.

Speaking in support of Fraser were Iain Dale of Total Politics and Struan Stevenson, Conservative MEP for Scotland.

4) Scottish Conservative and Unionist Leadership Hustings: See here.

5) Scottish Conservative and Unionist Reception: Despite rushing as fast as I could, I couldn't make it across Manchester in time to see Annabel Goldie's speech. I did see the Prime Minister's, including his laudable statement that he will share a platform with anybody who wishes to stand by the union.

As the Prime Minister was leaving, I managed to resist the less-than-subtle attempts of his security to block me to ask the following question:

Me: "Prime Minister, should Conservatives across our United Kingdom be able to stand as Conservative and Unionist Party candidates when they face the electorate?"

Cameron: "In a word - yes!"

David Mundell also expressed support for my campaign to allow southern Tories to appear as Conservative and Unionist on the ballot paper, as did Jackson Carlaw and Annabel Goldie. A productive evening indeed.

I took the opportunity to ask some questions of Mr Carlaw, mainly clarifying points in his speech. One thing that did stand out for me was his pledge that, if elected leader, he would try to establish a precedent that the Deputy Leader of the Scottish Conservatives was always sitting in Westminster, either as an MP or a Peer, in order to improve coordination between Edinburgh and London.

6) Northern Irish Conservative and Unionist Reception: If I have a regret about the Northern Ireland reception, it is that I only got to exchange about ten words with Owen Polley, of 3000 Versts fame. As he put it, I went 'haring off after Lord Empey' and lost track of him.

However, the meeting itself was fine. The speakers were not a particular highlight, although given the nonsense he's had to put up with I was mightily relieved to see Irwin Armstrong at the podium again this year. I also had a chat with the Chairman of the North Down association about the boundary changes - depressingly, he thinks that the new seat of Glenshane will effectively put unionist-held East Londonderry into SF hands. All the more reason for a unionist party that can reach out to Catholics, I suppose.

I did get to speak to Lord Empey, which was very useful. Our discussion this year was not so much about Northern Ireland as the developments north of the border in Scotland. Showing foresight that contrasts markedly with the 'England's difficulty is Ulster's opportunity' nonsense one sometimes hears from unionisms apparent leaders in Northern Ireland, Empey identifies Scottish nationalism as "a bigger threat to the union, and Northern Ireland's place within that union, even than Irish nationalism."

I asked Lord Empey if he feels that Northern Irish unionists should play an active role in any Scottish independence referendum, and he was unequivocal in saying that they should. He added that he would personally take the stand in Edinburgh and Glasgow during any referendum campaign. With luck, this means that representatives of each of the Home Nations will be making the positive case for the union come 2014.

7) Welsh Conservative and Unionist Reception: Shouldn't really be on this list, because I couldn't go. Nor could many people. I wasn't even aware one existed until I bumped into Iain Dale's assistant Grant Tucker, who mentioned he was going. When I asked where it was and why it wasn't in the fringe guide, I was informed that: "We've kept it out of the fringe guide. It's secret, invite only. The Prime Minister's going."

Brilliant. I met a fair number of delegates at the Scottish and Northern Irish receptions who had been looking forward to attending the Welsh event, to find out how this Celtic Fringe Conservative Party had managed to rally so well after 1997. A chance to come together and share expertise squandered, then. I hope that Mr R. T. Davies and the rest of the Welsh Conservatives thought it was worth it.

P.S. Next year, oh Conference overlords, would it kill you to try to schedule the Scottish and Northern Irish (and CF, come to that) receptions at different times? They're the three wings of the party in most need of cultivation, yet they're scheduled so that proper attendance of all three is impossible.

2011 Scottish Conservative and Unionist Leadership Hustings at Manchester

2011-10-04T21:12:00.001+01:00

"This party has to stick together or it is nothing!"

Murdo Fraser MSP, being ironic.

To my delighted surprise, the hustings was a really good event. I ended up writing about it at sufficient length to split it off from my conference diary, and my report is below.

Candidates had to outline their vision in short speeches, then take questions, then summate at the end. The candidates drew lots on the speaking order, and Murdo Fraser went first. This was something of a mixed blessing.

Fraser is a good speaker, and of the opening speeches it was he who roused cheers and applause from the audience (although not, I should point out, for his own proposals). But once Carlaw, Mitchell and Davidson took the stand the direction of travel was clear. Each of them, in more or less explicit terms, outright rejected his separation proposal.

One thing I really noticed about Murdo was how far he's having to play the 'no change' card in order to try to sell his main idea. It was he who specifically name-checked the national leader when he spoke of 'electing MPs to support David Cameron in Westminster.' In his speech he also made many allusions to the old Unionist Party, indicating that this could well be the new party's name. His campaign manager the previous night had seemed substantially less keen on it, however, and the Scotsman lists several (terrible) alternative proposals that he is apparently considering.

The denial ran deeper than that, though. Fraser mentioned several times how he wanted 'a new political direction for the party' and that his proposal was 'more than just a name change'. Yet he also consistently argued that the problem didn't lie with the Scottish Conservative leadership, activists or policies.

The tension is apparent: if Fraser genuinely thinks there's been nothing holding the party back except its image with Scots, surely his proposal is primarily an image makeover. On the other hand, if he believes his own rhetoric that a fundamentally new direction is required, how can he heap praise upon policies, strategies and strategists that he clearly considers deficient? It appears as if he's either trying to claim his name-change is more fundamental than it is, or trying not to insult the party faithful so they'll vote for him.

As he had gone first, Fraser had no opportunity to respond as each of the other candidates in turn rallied their supporters and went on the attack. This trend only got worse over the course of the debate. With one or two exceptions, questioners were all pre-occupied with Mr Fraser's proposal and were almost universally hostile. After one particular round of answers from the panel the Chair felt moved to offer Fraser a second response, that he might try to pry out some of the knives the others had planted in him in their responses.

Yet it was to no avail. Although ToryHoose's exit poll (which I sadly had to miss) found a percentage-point lead for Murdo, the problem is that all of the remaining two-thirds of respondents are hostile to his core proposal. If he wins, but fails to get his split ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Scottish Party, he will be left at the end of what will undoubtedly be a bitter and divisive road without a shred of credibility left, just as Salmond is gearing up for the referendum. Yet despite Fraser's supposed position as the front-runner, chances of this scenario appear to be narrowing - the Telegraph's Alan Cochrane describes his chances of winning as "akin to pushing water uphill."

To me, the hero of the hour was Jackson Carlaw. I'm personally in the Davidson camp, because I think she represents the sort of change the Scottish Conservatives need, but I hope that if she wins she finds Mr Carlaw a key position in the party. A confident and charismatic public speaker, instantly likeable, with a firm grasp of the issues and the most sophisticated and effective critique of Murdo's proposals to boot, he's a debater I can see going toe-to-toe with Alex Salmond and an asset any northern leader would be a fool to squander.

Ruth Davidson performed credibly, emphasising her youth and the new perspective she hopes to bring to the party. Her slogan - "Scottish. Conservative. Unionist." - makes her position on the name-changing proposal perfectly clear, and she was probably the least-subtle knife-wielder of the three. One perception I left with was that she is much better at being generally positive - for example talking up the party's future - than being specifically hostile i.e. attacking Fraser. If she wins, the job of going toe-to-toe with Salmond would probably need to be deputised.

Davidson went into the meeting having recently gained the support of David Mundell, who has declared that he'll have no part of a new party and will stand as a Conservative regardless. Whether or not a growing perception of Davidson as the 'establishment' candidate - ironic, given her recent election - will help or hinder her campaign remains to be seen.

I felt a little sorry for Margaret Mitchell. I've been in her shoes - nervous and under-prepared, stumbling over lines, repeating points and casting around for things to say. Difference is, I did that when I was asked to speak at the University Debating Union at an hour's notice, not when I was running for leadership of a party at that party's annual conference.

As the apparent arch-unionist candidate, I had expected to like Mitchell. Her politics might still be brilliant, for all I know. But she is not leadership material. She's a quiet and nervous public speaker who cannot command a room or project an argument. Sending her into battle against Salmond would be like rowing out to sea in a sieve.

We Aren't the Magic Key to Palestine's Problems, Nor They to Ours: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-09-29T12:15:00.004+01:00

In my latest contribution to TSJ, I rebut an article by Sabine Saade that argues that UN recognition of Palestine would not only resolve that benighted region's problems but also provide the solution to our own foreign policy problems in the Middle East. In my view, it would do neither such thing, and only make matters worse.

Dilettante on the Radio: BBC 5 Live's Up All Night

2011-09-23T19:37:00.002+01:00

I was invited back on to the Young Parliament panel on Up All Night last night, battling the twin plagues of flu and socialism. Topics covered include nuclear power, the Palestine vote at the UN, alcohol pricing, foreign intervention and the coalition.

My segment starts an hour and a half into the program and runs for 90 minutes.

Apologies to those who can hear me coughing, I am currently in the throes of a nasty cold. Still, you do not turn down a radio invitation if you ever want another one, so I drugged myself up to the eyeballs and got through it. Other than the coughing and my slowed responses, I don't think I performed badly.

Dilettante on Open Unionism: How will Fraser's 'Made in Scotland' be any better than Carson's 'Made in Ulster' Conservative Separation?

2011-09-18T12:41:00.001+01:00

In my first contribution to Open Unionism since becoming Editor, I argue that Murdo Fraser's plan for a 'Made in Scotland' Conservative Party will be just as bad for the Conservatives and the UK as the separation of the Ulster Unionists was, if not worse. I also explain and demonstrate how hard it is for regional parties to work in the national - rather than regional - interest.

I originally wrote this article for ConHome, but they've not expressed interest so I've published it on OU - that's why the tone might be a bit more self-consciously Conservative than my usual writing.

Edit: This piece has also been published on Tory Hoose, ConHome's Scottish equivalent.

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: Devolving to Freedom?

2011-09-17T15:34:00.000+01:00

In the last of my submissions to the Adam Smith Institute, I make the libertarian case against devolution and local government.

Ignore the Fuss, the Boundary Review is Fair: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-09-17T01:38:00.000+01:00

In my latest article for The Student Journals, I contend that the equalisation of constituency sizes is a just and necessary reform, and that identity politics is no just cause for an unequal franchise.

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: The Tobacco-Stained Torch of Liberty

2011-09-15T00:11:00.000+01:00

My second article is up over at the ASI blog, discussing the libertarian solution to the smoking ban.

TP Blog Awards 1: Right Wing Blogs

2011-09-14T11:44:00.002+01:00

To nobody's greater astonishment than my own, Dilettante is now a Top 20 right-wing blog, ranked 18th! Thank you so much to all who voted.

The Mathematics of Defeat: The Illusion of Anti-Conservative Scotland

2011-09-13T19:05:00.001+01:00

If the decision of certain elements of the Scottish Conservatives to try to found a new party by taking a section of the Conservatives is distasteful, it is at least understandable. They've been losing for quite a long time. Not losing the way the old Liberals used to lose, of course - they've still been getting a fair number of MSPs, councillors and votes.

But in Westminster terms their performance has been soul-crushingly poor. Or has it? In terms of MPs delivered the party has certainly failed, but what about the popular vote? I decided to run a little exercise that Liberal Democrats are often fond of running: divide the popular vote of each party by the popular vote they got to see 'what it takes' to elect an MP. Here are the Scottish figures for the 2010 General Election:

Party: MPs - Votes - Votes/MP

Labour: 41 - 1,035,528 - 25,257

Liberal Democrats: 11 - 465,471 - 42,316

SNP: 6 - 491,386 - 81,898

Conservative & Unionist: 1 - 412, 855 - 412,855

In other words, the Conservative vote would, if distributed as efficiently as Labour's, deliver 16 MPs. If distributed like the Lib Dem's, it would deliver ten, and if like the SNP's a decent five.

Now, like most Conservatives I consider First Past the Post to be a good and fair system of electing representatives to parliament. But it does serve to mask total support behind regional variation. While only having one MP is disappointing - and something I hope Ruth Davidson will work ever harder on if she wins - why on earth have we as a party allowed the other parties to talk up this myth of a vanished Tory Scotland? Particularly the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, neither of whom command a popular vote much greater than ours despite their more favourable representation.

Murdo and the other defeatists need to take a good, long look at those figures, and snap out of it.

Dilettante at the Adam Smith Institute: Libertarians, Employment and the Unions

2011-09-12T17:35:00.000+01:00

The first of the articles I submitted as part of my winning Young Writer on Liberty entry has gone up on the Adam Smith Institute, discussing how a libertarian state would approach employment regulation.

Taking the Reins at Open Unionism

2011-09-10T22:30:00.000+01:00

Just a little update to let everyone know that I will shortly be taking over from Geoff McGimpsy as Editor of Open Unionism. I'm also delighted to announce that Paul, of Unionist Lite, will be returning to manage the site's Facebook and Twitter feeds. OU was one of the first places to publish me when I started out, so I'm particularly grateful to Geoff for all his efforts.

It will remain a place where anybody can submit content, and I plan to broaden its scope to cover unionism across the United Kingdom. So if you're a reader of this blog and fancy writing something yourself, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Federalism and Unionism: Not the same thing.

2011-09-06T22:42:00.006+01:00

Since I first heard about Murdo Fraser's plan to abscond with the Scottish Conservatives a few days ago, I've been trying to work out how to respond. Whilst trawling my archive to see what I've written on the subject in the past, I realised that I have written about why the party splitting is a terrible idea before. I've also written about the need for an optimistic, courageous unionism to replace the staid, defensive, defeatist version we have at present. Neither of these cases really need restating.

Instead, I want to look at the issue in more specific terms: namely, with reference to the federalists and other separatist fellow-travellers within the unionist tent, particularly the Conservative and Unionist Party. I've taken a few days out before writing this, as anything I wrote in the immediate aftermath of my hearing Mr Fraser's proposal would have been unprintable.

Now I'm a counter-devolutionary, and proud to be so. I see no reason to hide the fact that I am an integrationist as a matter of principle. However, I'm not a fantasist. I fully accept that devolution is here to stay for the present, and that Conservatives must work within the British constitutional framework, even as they try to change it. As long as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments, the Conservative Party should do its utmost to engage with them all. I believe there are few members of the party who don't hold this view.

United yet distinct: the Conservative and Unionist Party reflects our country.

However, a distinction must be drawn between those unionists who are compromising with their political circumstances on a pragmatic basis, and those who demonstrate an ideological inclination to go far further than is right or necessary. There are those within the Conservative Party who argue that only by out-doing the nationalists at their own game can the party and the union be preserved. Their argument appears to be that if you actively pursue a fully autonomous parliament, support divisive language differences and assist in the cultivation of completely separate political arenas in each of the home nations, then maybe, maybe, we'll get to keep the currency, the crown and the flag.

The logic of this argument is - at least from a unionist perspective - ridiculous. It's like trying to head nationalism off at a pass that doesn't exist. Every step taken to weaken the union does just that, weaken it. The federalist 'solution' would reduce this country to a mere alliance, a defensive and economic contract between the home nations with Westminster and the monarchy providing a skeletal constitutional superstructure. The United Kingdom is more than a flag and a name, and any unionism worth its name should defend the fact of union as well as the appearance of it. The day that Great Britain is not governed in the greater part as one entity, the union is already half-gone.

Which of the two schools of devolutionary 'unionism' is Murdo Fraser from? Is he simply defeatist, unable to see a future for 'old' unionism and thus determined to redirect it down the disastrous road upon which he himself is set? Or is he, as evidence suggests, a committed and enthusiastic pseudo-federalist, who would be set on pursuing an autonomist agenda even if he could not make the case that electoral exigency was forcing his hand? If he is of the former school, he is selling the Scottish Conservatives short. If he is of the latter school, he is betraying their principles. In neither case should he be leading them.

Selling them short, or selling them out?

Mr Fraser's new party, should it happen, might see a partial recovery in the electoral fortunes of the Scottish centre-right. But it would come at an unacceptable cost to the political unity of the UK. What the Scottish Conservatives should be pursuing is the renewal of the British centre-right in Scotland. Creating a separate party in the style of the Ulster Unionist Party is (as I explain more fully in a ConHome article that may or may not be published) a terrible precedent that plays right into Alex Salmond's hands.

Mr Fraser may dream of setting up a centre-right pseudo-separatist party. So, too, might whoever it was that proposed that the Welsh Conservatives rebrand themselves to "Ymlaen" - an idea even Nick Bourne dismissed as "nonsense". But these people should have the decency to go and found their own party, rather than trying to abscond with the assets, both material and political, of the national Conservative Party. Murdo should not have the gall to try to enact his separatist vision under the label of a 'new unionism'.

Unionism must aim to preserve the union in fact as well as in name. British Federalism is its own ideology, currently espoused principally by the Liberal Democrats. In my view, it pays lip-service to the cosmetic aspects of unionism whilst abandoning its fundamental principles. This is not always the case where federalism is concerned: in Europe, for example, federalism represents an historic attempt to overcome centuries of bitter divisions and move towards "ever closer union". But for a country as old and well-integrated as the UK, every step towards federation is a step backward.

Layton Would Have Let Them Down in the End: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-09-05T12:41:00.002+01:00

In my latest article for TSJ, I examine the popular reaction in Canada to the death of Jack Layton, examine similarities between Layton and other populist politicians like Blair and Obama, and make the case that Layton will be remembered as a great prime minister who never was precisely because he never had the opportunity to disappoint.

ASI - Young Writer on Liberty 2011: Winner!

2011-09-02T21:23:00.001+01:00

It is with great pleasure and not a little surprise that I have found out that I've won the Young Writer on Liberty competition run by the Adam Smith Institute. Applicants had to submit three 400 word articles on libertarian approaches to policy dilemmas. My winning articles will be appearing on the ASI blog in the next couple of weeks, and I shall link them here. My sincerest thanks to the judges and everybody at the Institute.

Her Majesty's Marshalcy: Separating Consensual and Coercive Policing

2011-08-30T00:24:00.003+01:00

I recently discovered a couple of interesting articles in the Telegraph, one recent and one less so. Each of these outline proposals - an old set from the Conservatives in 2007 and a post-riots set from a Telegraph columnist - for creating a Territorial Army-style police reserve force. I was originally going to do a post arguing for much the same thing here, but I think that as the ground has been so well trodden those links should be sufficient.

However, establishing a Police Reserve would only solve one of the two major problems facing British policing: the manpower shortage. It would do nothing to address the second - and perhaps more important - problem: the political debate about whether or not British policing is 'consensual' or not. The lack of clear political direction at the top will do as much to cripple British public order policing as a lack of people, and risks more damage to the police's public image.

The photographs of police standing around, observing riots without intervening, outraged many. Yet it is very hard to place any blame on the shoulders of the officers on the ground. For years now, police action at riots has been met with relentless criticism, and their response to public disorder has been enfeebled as a consequence. This is especially true where the upper echelons of the service, more politicised and fearful of bad press, do not command the full confidence of the troops on the ground. If a police officer does not feel that their superiors will back them up one hundred percent, they will not risk life and limb only to risk dismissal or prosecution if he survives, and nor should they. And when British riot police now all come with ID numbers for ease of lawsuit, it starts to become somewhat miraculous that they dared step in at all.

With the advent of elected police commissioners, this trend is likely to get worse. After all, who wants to be the elected official responsible for an incident of police brutality, alleged or real? When democracy is introduced to the top of the UK's police forces, the gloves will most likely stay firmly on.

Beyond this, there are some good arguments for consensual policing. Critics of hard line public order policing are right to point out that it is hard for a police force to be cracking skulls in armour of an evening and comfortably patrolling those same streets in regular uniform the next day. Once the local police are put into an adversarial relationship with an element of the community they operate in, it is harder for them to operate at maximum effectiveness. The debate is often cast between the oh-so-British option of policing by acceptance and goodwill, and the somehow continental alternative of policing through force.

What if there was a solution that allows for both?

Ta da!

In France, and many other francophone countries, there operates an organisation known as the gendarmerie - a military police force with (almost) exclusively civilian responsibilities. While the French operate many different gendarmeries for different purposes, the model I'm proposing to copy here would be the Gendarmerie Mobile - the last line of defence in French riot control.

The idea behind establishing a British marshalcy is simple - it allows for the separation of consensual and coercive policing. Day to day patrol work, low level public order policing (as performed by the CRS in France) and most of the duties of a civilian police service would continue to be carried out by the regular police services. Specialised security work and dealing with severe public disorder would fall within the purview of the marshalcy. They would be trained in such tactics as CS gas, water cannon and rubber bullets and authorised to use them. Their job would be to go in and shut riots down, fast.

This could have several advantageous effects. Being a distinct organisation allows marshals to enjoy a clearer mandate and less politicised command establishment than the civilian police services. It also means that the impact of tough public order measures will not fall so much on the local police force, allowing them to focus on the consensual, community-focused policing that serves Britain so well most of the time. By having a national footprint (much like the British Transport Police), the marshalcy would be able to draw upon out-of-area manpower to avoid having to put local police officers into battle against local rioters.

By taking on most of the police-with-guns security tasks and absorbing such anomalies as the Ministry of Defence Police, a marshalcy could combine all the 'hard-edged' aspects of UK law enforcement into one well-trained, focused organisation. This would lend it one final - sad, but necessary - advantage: rioters would fear it. The problem with having a relatively conscientious, open policing style in the UK is that criminals are emboldened when the police are put up against it. Many were drawn onto the streets during the recent riots because the media was reinforcing a preconception that the police would do little to stop them. With this force, once they were deployed no looter would be in any doubt about their mandate or their capabilities. The line in the sand would be clear, and few would cross it.

Policing is not really a choice between British 'soft' policing and a 'harder' European approach, at least not in this day and age: a truly effective police policy must acknowledge the need for both.

Asking the Wrong Question on Riot Control

2011-08-20T13:09:00.004+01:00

Two zoo keepers are discussing a recent tragedy. For a long time they have prided themselves on the openness of their zoo: the animals are orderly, the visitors safe, restraints few. Unlike zoos in other countries, they have not needed to use iron bars and electric tags to control their animals. Their reputation is a source of pride.

Yet recently there have been problems. The animals had been growing more restive, more threatening. Guests were becoming more nervous and less frequent. All of this had come to a head last night, when a lion went on a rampage, eventually leading other animals to do the same. Thousands of pounds worth of damage had been done, many people had been injured and, worst of all, four people had been killed. Perhaps even worse was the fact that many were blaming the limp response of the zoo keepers for the rampage being so long. Something has to be done, and the response of their visitors is clear: get tough, cage the lion.

One zoo keeper, greatly attached to the idea of an open zoo and the reputation of his well-ordered animals, asks: "Are we the kind of zoo that cages lions?!"

The second, perhaps more realistic one asks himself: "Is it the sort of lion that needs caging?"

Which do you think is the right question?*

----------------------------

I've never opened an article with a parable before, to the best of my knowledge. Yet it seemed a nice way to sum up succinctly the thoughts that go through my mind whenever I hear people talking about how certain types of riot control 'aren't British' or 'aren't how we police in this country'. This has always struck me as focusing on entirely the wrong thing.

If one was to boast about how peaceable and law-abiding Britain has been, the form of words must surely be "Britain is a country that doesn't need to use water cannon and rubber bullets to control her people - they control themselves". The riot policing techniques that we don't use aren't key to the boast, they are simply an illustrative symptom of the style of law and order required on the UK mainland. The source of pride must surely be not that they aren't used in Britain, but that they aren't needed.

Yet many commentators, both left and right, appear to have turned illness and symptom on their heads. To them the main source of pride appears to be simply that we don't use certain tactics, with no reference to the task that these tactics are supposed to perform. Theresa May's comments about the deployment of water cannon, which I quoted in a previous article, provide a good example of what I mean.

Surely it is foolish to presume that there is any inherent moral value in disdaining certain policing tactics, none of which are horrifying, regardless of circumstance. If Britain doesn't need rubber bullets and water cannon, then boasting that we don't need these things makes sense. But if British rioters do need to be controlled in such a fashion, taking pride in failing to take necessary measures to protect life and property is outright idiotic.

Why do people on the left and right end up taking this bizarre position? I can think of a couple of reasons.

For the right, its a bit like sticking one's fingers in one's ears and watching a slideshow of the 1950's while humming God Save the Queen: a form of denial, of escapism as public policy. As long as we don't start using 'nasty' riot policing like they do on the continent, we can continue to cling to the tattered myth that the British are, in their own quiescent way, the morally superior people. Admitting that the sort of outstanding good manners and public order that used to be a hallmark of the 'English' has faded away is too difficult. As long as we don't use water cannon, and they do, then we can pretend that Britain is still a land of almost mystical public order and - importantly - we're better than France, which isn't.

From the left, it tends to come from those who are in sympathy with whichever cause they have projected onto the rioters. The fact that the police can't use these measures is a good thing because these commentators don't want them to, rather than the other way round. I've written about the sometimes excessively liberal approach of the Metropolitan Police to civil disorder once or twice on TSJ. None of these commentators want to risk the British public, political establishment and police overcoming their reluctance to use hard riot policing techniques, lest they be used to prevent the next assault on CCHQ.

The moral nature of riot police tactics, like many other things, is contextual, not absolute. Using CS gas or baton rounds on a few people holding placards on a high street is wrong. Using CS gas or baton rounds to disperse a mob attacking buildings, jeopardising property and human life, is not. Without the right perspective, policy makers will fail to establish policy that restores the respect and confidence of the public to the police. Before they try to find the answer to preventing future riots, those in charge must make sure that they're asking the right questions.

*As there are always a few humourless people reading this blog, I'll pre-empt a couple of responses to this parable now. 1) No, I do not believe that the rioters are animals, and 2) "but what if, like, we lived in a world without zoo keepers, man?" is not a good comeback. People would get eaten.

Introducing: Another Liberal Unionist

2011-08-15T22:09:00.003+01:00

I'd like to welcome Liberal Unionist to the blogosphere. It is very nice to see another liberal unionist - and an actual LibDem to boot - adding some fresh blood to the unionist blogosphere after the recent resignation of Unionist Lite, and I'd encourage you all to check him out - just click on the logo below to be taken through. Apropos of nothing, I designed that logo...

...and I'm rather proud of it.

Dilettante on the Radio: BBC Radio 5 Live's Up All Night

2011-08-13T21:11:00.001+01:00

I appeared - alongside former sparring partner Michael Atkins - again on 5 Live's Up All Night with Dotun Adebayo discussing the recent civil disorder. My section runs from 2.30am to 4am, starting an hour and a half into the program on iPlayer.

Total Politics Blog Awards 2011: Voting is Open

2011-08-11T17:56:00.005+01:00

If you want to vote, please read this post first.

For those interested in voting, please follow the link by clicking on the image below. In order to vote you must select at least five blogs and five writers, but that is the only minimum requirement. If the form refuses to allow you to leave without filling everything in, but "N/A" and "Non-Aligned" into the rest of the boxes.

For those of you thinking of voting for me (and thank you kindly, if so), put "Dilettante" in the blogs section and "Henry Hill - Dilettante" in the individual bloggers section. In both instances, the relevant categories are "Right Wing" and "Conservative".

If you're not heavily into blogging and can't think of five to vote for, perhaps this might be a good time to explore a few new ones. My blog list on the right contains some excellent blogs, but below is a selection of the ones I'd consider, in no particular order, along with their relevant categories:

Cicero's Songs: Liberal Democrat

Liberal Vision: Liberal Democrat, Right Wing, Libertarian

Nationalist Mythbusting: Right Wing, Non-Aligned, Scottish

ConservativeHome: Right Wing, Conservative, Group Blog

Political Betting: Non-Aligned, Group Blog

New-Right: Left Wing, Conservative, Scottish

Charlotte Gore: Right Wing, Non-Aligned, Libertarian

Byrne Tofferings: Right Wing, Non-Aligned

Three Thousand Versts of Lonliness: Right Wing, Conservative, Northern Ireland

Norman Tebbit: Right Wing, Conservative, Media

John Tyler: Right Wing, Conservative, Wales

The Online Society: Non-Aligned, Group Blog, Media

Nick Cohen: Left Wing, Media, Non-Aligned

Alex Massie: Right Wing, Non-Aligned, Scottish

Coffee House: Right Wing, Group Blog
The Student Journals: Non-Aligned, Group Blog, Media

Enjoy voting!

EDIT: Turns out that you also need to list five writers for your vote to count. Tedious. Here are my five:

Henry Hill - Dilletante: Right Wing, Conservative

Tim Montgomerie: Right Wing, Conservative

Norman Tebbit: Right Wing, Conservative

Nick Cohen: Left Wing, Labour

Alex Massie: Right Wing, Conservative, Scottish

For you heroes who can still be bothered to vote after reading the process, a round of extremely grateful applause.

British Policing: By Consent, or Cowardice?: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-08-10T23:38:00.000+01:00

I've another article up on TSJ, this one examining the concept of 'consensual' riot policing and possible reasons for the rather limp response given by the police in the early days of the riots. Please take a look.

Ulster Streets are British Streets: The double standard in riot policing must end.

2011-08-09T18:25:00.004+01:00

The response to the riots that have convulsed major mainland British cities – particularly London – over the last few days has been telling. Many people, after watching the television footage of citizens terrorised, shops looted and historic buildings torched, are calling for a more ‘vigorous’ approach to riot policing. The sight of hooligans trashing the capital seemingly with impunity is, in my view, frankly embarrassing.

The authorities, however, have a different view. Theresa May announced this morning that water cannon will not be used. I have no problem with this myself, because water cannon are distance management tools that I don’t think would be of much use in the sort of decentralised, looting-focused riots we’re seeing at the moment. What vexed me was her justification:

"The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon," she said. "The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities."

The Telegraph, 09/08/11

There are two objectionable errors in this statement: the idea that we don’t use water cannon as a part of British riot policing; and the idea that ‘community consent’ means allowing law-breakers to run rampant. I will be addressing the second in an article on TSJ, but let’s examine the first.

It sends a worrying message about this government’s attitude towards Northern Ireland if the Home Secretary can claim with a straight face that riot control tactics that are a regular feature of Northern Ireland policing have ‘no place’ in British policing.

A British Police Service.

This isn’t simply a matter of my unionist sensibilities being rankled by semantics, it hints at a deeper problem with the attitude of the British government towards Northern Ireland and the double standards it operates when it comes to protecting its citizens.

There are two ways of looking at this. The first is to look at it from the rioter’s point of view: if it is politically unacceptable for the government or Metropolitan Police to use water cannon and baton rounds against English rioters, why is it acceptable to use such tactics against rioters (whether Protestant or Catholic) in Northern Ireland? Through the other end of the telescope, why should British citizens in Northern Ireland be able to expect a more vigorous police response than their compatriots in the South-East and the Midlands?

That isn’t to say that the P.S.N.I’s approach is perfect – the Metropolitan Police are at least conducting mass arrests and recovering stolen property, which the P.S.N.I. – at least according to the News Letter – does not. Yet Northern Ireland’s representatives in parliament should ask the government why it condones tactics against the Northern Irish that it refuses to use on the mainland. Northern Ireland is not a foreign land, and if a tactic is used in Ulster, it is ‘in use’ in the UK.

The Second Siege of Wapping: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-07-27T13:58:00.009+01:00

First, apologies for the radio silence this month - my laptop has packed it in so I have limited internet access.

My latest article on TSJ is a plea for a more rational consideration of Rupert Murdoch and News International's position than is to be found at present. Read it here.

The Fantasy of Atlanticism: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-06-30T18:38:00.001+01:00

The first of two articles examining Britain's relationships with America and the EU, and arguing that our long-term interests are better served by the latter.

Simon Hughes is Wrong: It is state schools, not universities, that are failing disadvantaged children.

2011-06-27T01:12:00.002+01:00

Simon Hughes, in his new role as 'Access Tsar' (I know...) has produced another assault in the integrity of higher education. The proposal is simple: force universities charging over £6,000 under the new fees regime to "tackle the admissions gap" and "take on a fair proportion of state school students." To enforce this, Mr Hughes proposes putting new regulations on university admissions onto the statute book to bring them into line. Such a move against university independence must be strenuously resisted.

To deal with an obvious point first, what constitutes a "fair" proportion of state school pupils? A meritocrat might suggest that a "fair" proportion is the proportion that can pass the entrance procedures. Not Mr Hughes, however. His conception of a fair proportion, shared by the sort of people who demand all women shortlists and other forms of positive discrimination, is to have university intakes "reflect society" in the number of state-educated pupils they take in.

There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting the make up of a given group more closely resemble the broader society from which they are drawn (although there is little to suggest it is inherently right), but simply trying to legislate that it be so, regardless of actual levels of attainment by state-educated pupils, demonstrates clearly the terrible temptations laid before the overseers of state education, and their consequences. For the fact that universities are not admitting a representative proportion of state-educated students is not their fault, it is the fault of state schools.

Let me explain. In a system untouched by political meddling, everyone knows where the goalposts are. Employers know what they want, and universities, colleges and apprenticeships work towards that, or towards academic ideals of their own. Schools know that they have to work towards these standards if they are going to be successful in getting their pupils into higher education. Everyone knows what must be achieved and has no option but to work towards that goal.

Of course, in a totally private system many people would be disadvantaged by background or circumstance, and this is where state education comes in. The purpose of state education is to ensure that all children, regardless of background or financial circumstance, have the chance to fulfil their academic or vocational potential and achieve the same high standards as more fortunate children.

However, somewhere along the line, those in charge of state education started to veer off course. Attainment fell, social mobility began to stagnate and the relative advantage of private education began to increase. The reasons for this are the cause of much debate, but in my opinion it was the advent of comprehensive education combined with 'trendy teaching' in the state sector, while the private and what remained of the selective sector retained more traditional, effective teaching methods. The 'why' isn't vital to this piece: that is vital is how those responsible for state education responded once it started to fall behind. Rather than altering their manifestly failing methods, to which many teachers had developed an ideological attachment, it occurred to state educators that their connexion to the state offered an alternative: move the goalposts. This has manifested itself in a couple of ways.

The first is the concept of 'value-added', whereby the League Table position (or perhaps in future even the grades) of public sector schools dealing with 'disadvantaged' groups such as ethnic minorities and the poor are inflated to represent how well educators think they did as poor or black children. This approach is outlined and criticised effectively in this article over on Spiked!, under the sub-heading "Defensive Over Standards". In short, it represents the idea that a C or worse is to an ethnic minority or poor child as an A is to a 'privileged' child. It allows teachers and schools whose methods are producing woefully sub-standard results to stand back and go "Yes, it isn't brilliant, but given that we only had black children to work with didn't we do well?"

It is an utterly abhorrent, borderline bigoted approach to the education of the disadvantaged, whereby the state education sector attempts to duck the difficulties of teaching the disadvantaged by dressing up poor results as good ones. This is a system that places the image of the education providers (schools, teachers and their unions) over the actual results of the consumers (the poor pupils), because saying that a C 'counts as' an A doesn't mean that it makes a child as employable as someone who actually got one. The children receive the same poor grades they used to receive, but the new system makes providers look better.

This approach runs into problems, however, once the children leave school. Sure, the teachers and school might be patting each other on the back for providing excellent 'value-added' results, but out in the real world employers and universities are looking at a string of poor grades as... well, as a string of poor grades. With state-educated school leavers not coming up to standard, universities draw an increasing proportion of their intake from public schools. This suggests that private schools are providing their students with an education that better prepares them for university.

How do state educators respond to this? By acknowledging that their standards are not up to scratch and seeing what lessons they can learn from the private sector? Not on your life. Rather, they move once again to lower the crossbar, courtesy of Simon Hughes' recommendations. Instead of fixing state schools, they simply want to force good universities to take pupils who have not achieved sufficient grades to get in fairly. Cosmetically, this will look like achievement. The government will be able to say that "more students from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to university than ever before." Yet these children will not be adequately prepared for rigorous academic courses. As I have written before, simply placing someone into a university does not guarantee that they will succeed. The 'graduate dividend' is not a product of going to university per se, it is a product of getting a good degree in a sought after subject and then getting a high-earning job.

I wrote at length in the previous article about how those on the left have misunderstood the advantages of Higher Education to the detriment of state pupils, and I won't repeat those arguments here. Yet it is nonetheless true that even if the crossbar into university is lowered (and perhaps we'll see 'value-added' degrees in future), the crossbar for entering good employment - especially in an increasingly competitive, globalised world - will not have shifted, at least not downwards. These children, showered with illusory 'value-added' rewards by a state education establishment unwilling to face up to its failings, will find themselves unready for the brutal realities of the job market. Those who have followed a path of rigorous standards and high achievement will always (rightly) have the advantage. What will Mr Hughes and his ideological bedfellows do then? Another legislative solution, another Equalities Act, to force employers to hire weaker candidates?

Children who go to private school are 'privileged', but it is not simply a matter of money. Money can buy fine grounds, good teachers, cricket pavilions and sports equipment, but it is not fundamental to academic success. No, the principle advantage enjoyed by a privately educated child is that their teachers cannot cheat. They can't blame their circumstances, they can't lean on the state and regulators to conjure false achievements. Unlike state schools (although the Gove reforms might change this), private schools know that their survival depends on providing an excellent academic education. They don't indulge the fashionable nonsense that has wrought such havoc on the state sector because, unlike the recipients of state services, the customers of private schools can very easily up sticks and leave.

Mr Hughes is write to think that the relative dearth of state educated pupils in our finest higher education establishments is a problem, but he has arrived at entirely the wrong solution. If he persists in forcing universities to take substandard pupils, they will not retain their current world-class standing: that standing is entirely connected to their intake procedures. Instead of castigating universities for insisting on excellence, he should turn his fire on a state education system that has failed to insist on it for far too long.

If Greece wants the Elgin Marbles, let's see if they'll trade for them.

2011-06-22T17:46:00.002+01:00

Just a short one today, about a minor story that vexes me rather.

The Guardian reports today that David Cameron has rejected a call from Liberal Democrat (of course) MP to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Certainly, this might do something to ease the tempers of the Greek citizenry, although it is hard to see why that is Britain's concern. However, it would only do so by playing to one of the ugliest aspects of modern Greek nationlism: their absurd pretensions to be the sole people with any sort of right to the legacy of Hellenic culture.

The main victim of this absurd position is the embattled Republic of Macedonia. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties, Greece has strenuously opposed any notion of Macedonia being called Macedonia or using a traditional symbol of Macedonia on its flag, using the quite absurd justification that this implies territorial irredentism by Macedonia against the Greek province of the same name. Regardless of the fact that a portion of the old Kingdom of Macedon did lie within modern Macedonian borders, or that the idea that the modern Greek state being a direct and sole successor to a fractious group of city states two and a half millennia ago is absurd, this position worked to further destabilise Macedonia in the early Nineties and today acts as a roadblock to Macedonia's ambitions to join the EU.

From Wikipedia.

Above is a map of the major Hellenic states following the breakup of the Alexandrian Empire in 323 BC. Look how big it is. Even if we discount the myriad Greek colonies in the Western Mediterranean and the Indo-Greek civilisation beyond the Indus, that map suggests that countries that can claim some connexion to Hellenic culture include: Italy, Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and yet more besides.

In my opinion, if we do return the Elgin Marbles to Greece we should at least take the opportunity to support the Republic of Macedonia (as the UK thankfully recognises the country) in their bid for normalised relations and EU membership. We might remind them that the original nationalist creators of modern Greece only settled on the 'Hellenic' aspects when the rival camp of 'Byzantinists' were undermined by Ottoman retention of Constantinople. We should make the return of the marbles conditional on Greece' recognition that the Hellenic legacy is one shared by many tens of millions of people in nearly twenty countries throughout the former Hellenic world.

Will David Cameron be a defining Conservative figure?

2011-06-16T23:54:00.003+01:00

Somebody asked me this question recently during a discussion of Margaret Thatcher, musing over whether the Cameroons will be remembered as the vanguard of a new breed of Conservatism tomorrow the way the early Thatcherites are today. During that conversation I immediately answered the negative - and had I got round to writing this article in a reasonable time, I would probably have stuck with my original title of "Why Cameron will not be a defining Conservative figure." Yet further consideration led me to think I might have answered rashly. So instead of self-assured polemic, this post is now me trying to make up my mind, which is probably less fun to read. Oh well.

First, let us consider the evidence that supports the idea that Cameron will be remembered as a significant, perhaps defining figure. First and most obviously, there's the coalition. The bold manoeuvre performed by Cameron in pursuing a formal coalition in the aftermath of the 2010 election was one of the things that led many - including me - to believe that he might be the next Thatcher, the man whose vision would guide Conservatism and the country at large for the next quarter-century or more. On top of all the talk of the post-Rose Garden 'realignment' of the Liberal-Conservative axis, you have the sterling work of individual reformers. Michael Gove's schools reform and Ian Duncan Smith's universal benefit system will, if they work, be remembered alongside right-to-buy and privatisation as reforms that transformed the British political and cultural landscape in important ways.

So too, if the government fights and wins, will be the slaying of the last remaining Trades Union dragons from the public sector. The growth of what The Economist's Bagehot describes as "Gordon Brown's social democratic client state" is probably one of the most intractable problems facing future British governments. Drastic reform of public services is necessary and this will entail defeating the entrenched special interests that dominate them. If Cameron can achieve this, then he'll be remembered as a historically significant Prime Minister.

Yet there is every sign that he might not achieve these things. In the great tests of his ministry in recent days - liberal justice reforms and NHS reforms - Cameron's instinct has been to retreat. He's compromised Lansley and fed Ken Clarke to the wolves, both of whom were only advancing policies that had already received Number 10 approval. And for all his calling for workers to cross the picket lines during the British Airways dispute during the dying days of the last government, there is no concrete evidence that Cameron has the stomach to take the more combative unions on. In the pursuit of popularity and fearful of not being re-elected, Cameron might squander the opportunity afforded him by the financial crisis to effect necessary and lasting change.

Even if this does not come to pass and Cameron is remembered as a great Prime Minister it does not - and it is important to make this distinction clear - make him a man of historic significance to the shape of Conservatism. First, it should be remembered that the best reforms being undertaken by his government are the brainchildren of the minister responsible. Whether its Gove on schools, Eric Pickles' localism agenda, Lansley's embattled healthcare reforms or IDS' personal crusade on benefits, these reforms are very much the property of ministers, and can't really be perceived as component parts of some great 'Cameronite' vision. While Lady Thatcher was preceded in her vision too, she took Sir Keith Joseph's message to heart and made it her own in a way that Cameron hasn't really done.

The message that Cameron has tried to make his own is the 'big society', and that has become an ill-defined embarrassment. Seldom has a policy so key to the personal convictions of a Prime Minister been sold so poorly. It was deployed, completely untested, at the last General Election, and it has not been clearly articulated then or since. This lack of definition creates problems on two fronts: those who might favour it find little to get enthusiastic about, while those suspicious of it find ample fuel for their fears, suspecting that the vague language betrays a cover for ruthless cuts.

This vagueness stems from Cameron's core problem, and the heart of the reason that he'll never define the party the way Thatcher did: he is still defined by Thatcher himself. Since its earliest days his leadership has been dominated by the need to 'de-toxify' the Conservative brand. Some of this certainly needed doing, and much of it still needs to be done. But the way Cameron has set about it means that he has become too pre-occupied with image, and the short term. He doesn't play to right-wing strengths because he's afraid of appearing, well, right-wing.

Not only does this lead to things such as defence cuts and legally-enshrined aid commitments, which play well with the Guardian despite being of at best dubious benefit to the nation, but it also means that Cameron lacks the spine to stand firm behind reforms he fears will tarnish his image, such as Lansley's health reforms. It also means he can't properly articulate his vision for the 'big society'. While he is free to stress the upsides - community engagement, personal responsibility, localism etc. - he cannot state in plain language the obvious corollaries: a decline in the size and scope of the state. He sprang the 'big society' so late upon an unsuspecting nation because it isn't something he was confident in proclaiming - certainly not before the crash, when perhaps the truest indication of Cameron's fear of his own party was that he was committing to Labour's own utterly reckless spending commitments.

Despite the fact that polls demonstrate that this message is popular with voters, Cameron can't clearly talk about the consequences of the big society because it would sound dangerously like the 'individual responsibility' rhetoric of the Eighties. He has not yet worked out how to sound like a 'compassionate Conservative' while cutting the state, and even twenty years after she left office Lady Thatcher's long shadow is making him jump.

That weakness is why I don't think he'll ever be a defining leader of Conservatism. A defining leader has to be their own person, confident of their convictions and good at advancing their own ideas. Nobody who identifies as an '-ite' of a previous leader, like a Thatcherite, can ever hope to define a party in their own image, but neither can someone with a cringing, subconscious aversion to that leader and their legacy.

Yes to the UK: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-06-08T11:41:00.000+01:00

I've got another article published over on TSJ, this time setting out in broad strokes why I'm a unionist and why others should be too.

So... what is a Conservative?

2011-05-30T04:55:00.007+01:00

Apologies if this reads a little muddled, I'm writing it as I think about it which is rarely conducive to perfect clarity. If it does read oddly or could use work please just leave a comment and I'll cast fresh eyes over it and tidy it up.

An odd question, I'll admit, but its been puzzling me lately. It comes up whenever a debate I'm having with a fellow member of the party gets heated, which happens from time to time. When the argument has raged for a while, with myself and my interlocutor expressing wildly divergent views, almost inevitably one or the other of us accuses the other of just 'not being a Conservative', or asks why on earth the other is in the party at all. A recent example of this would be my reaction to Dean's post over on New Right wherein he supports social democracy, 'positive' discrimination, Keynesian tax-and-spend policy and all manner of other frankly left-wing things, but I don't want to single Dean out - this happens with other people too. He's just a convenient, linkable example of what I mean.

I thought it might be interesting to address this on the blog because I've been on both sides of the looking glass in these circumstances. Sometimes, I'm arguing with somebody who to me seems completely, sopping wet or an outright traitor. They might be supporting the abandonment of grammar schools, positive discrimination, all-women shortlists, breaking up the UK or abolishing the monarchy, and I'll be filled with righteous fury that these people purport to be Conservatives. Other times, I'll be arguing with someone who I hold to be a complete dinosaur - they might be obsessively anti-Europe, anti-immigration, an absurd aristocrat, a closet UKIP supporter or a die-hard Thatcherite ideologue. To these people I maintain the line that the party has to modernise, that every generation of Conservatives sees the death of 'its' party, and that digging into an ideological ditch and waiting for the British people to come around is a delusion. I dismissed as ridiculous their claims that they represented 'true' Conservatism.

It was a little while ago that I had the obvious-in-retrospect realisation that my treatment of these two groups of people is entirely at odds with itself, and that it is grotesquely hypocritical of me to claim great swathes of my own beliefs as inviolable Conservative doctrine while lecturing those I perceived to be political fossils that there was no such doctrine at all. I remembered how angry I got when wets told me that there was 'no such thing as an inviolable Conservative principle' while trying to excise things I believed in passionately from the party program and realised that I was exactly the same in the eyes of those Tories to whom I appear a ruthless moderniser.

Although my love of debate - combined with an unfortunate tendency to let my passions get the better of me when arguing about deeply held principle - means that I've not become markedly less vigorous in my skirmishes with opponents, the insight has allowed me to take a better-informed look at my position within the Conservative Party, and the position of ideology within the Conservative Party itself.

For example, I'm a monarchist. Not simply a supporter of the British monarchy for reasons of profit or tradition, but a genuine believer in the benefits of constitutional monarchy and its general superiority to the republican form of government. I consider royalism - if not the pan-monarchism bit - to be a natural and inseparable part of what the Conservative Party stands for. Yet I have met a (very) few republican Conservatives. Who is to say that they are any more wrong than previous generations of Tory rebels, some of whose actions - such as the Peelites - I support? Who is to say that in a century or two's time, the Conservative Party politicians of the day will not look back on monarchism the way we look back on the limited franchise, the supremacy of the Lords, or the Corn Laws?

The end result of this - long and slightly rambling - thought process was the realisation that nobody, regardless of their views, can ever claim to be a 'true' Conservative. Unlike the Labour Party and perhaps even the Liberals, there is no font of ultimate ideological authority or legitimacy that any single strain of Conservative thought can draw upon as a trump card. Attempting to de-legitimise an argument by claiming that it deviates from 'true' Conservatism is wrong.

Yet this does not mean that the Conservative Party stands for nothing, or that any view can be considered incontestably at home within it. Rather, the identity of the party and its beliefs are defined consensually. The core of the party, if one exists, is a sum of those areas where the great majority of its members can reach a consensus over a long period of time - and I mean a long period of time. Beyond this core, the philosophical outlands of the party consist of those areas where there is divergence and debate, but within broad, commonly accepted parameters.

For example, it is generally accepted that you can be a Europhile Conservative, rare and much disliked as we might sometimes be, whereas radical redistribution of wealth and support for trade union militancy lie without the accepted parameters of the Conservative debate. To demonstrate the vital importance of time to something becoming a 'core' value, I can point out that Thatcherism has not killed off entirely the more left-leaning brand of Butskellite Conservatism, nor has Cameroon doctrine eradicated Thatcherism, nor yet has Euroscepticism become an inviolable article of faith. On the other hand, aristocratic High Toryism is essentially dead, for it has been outside the Conservative debate too long, and defence of the monarchy is still taken as an article of faith by the great majority of Conservatives as it has been since our party was founded.

So the parameters of these contested areas are still defined by a rough consensus of the membership. In this way, when I claim that Dean's membership of the Conservative Party is illogical, it is not because he has strayed from some 'true path' of Conservative doctrine, but because so many of his deeply held beliefs - social democracy, positive discrimination, republicanism, near-separatism - fall outside the discourse of contemporary Conservatism, and there are other parties which better match him. I'm not so much a Pope excommunicating a doctrinal heretic as a priest bemusedly watching a man recite the rosary inside a Hindu temple and suggesting that there are other, more suitable places for him to pray. An avowed social democrat in the UK has two relatively social democratic parties to choose from, after all.

In this reading, there are no rigid absolutes in Tory thinking but that doesn't mean that anything goes either. Those who seek to change the party can do so, but only by winning a debate with the party, effecting change, and then retaining support enough to consolidate that change. If you having a vision of how you want the Conservative Party to be, you can make it so, but you have to fight for it. Similarly, you can't simply de-legitimise an argument you dislike on narrow, doctrinal terms.

The other realisation I had - and I might do a full post on this - is that you can't simply divide the party into 'modernisers' and 'reactionaries'. As my own case demonstrates, any Conservative can be one or the other depending upon the extent to which any change impacts upon their own beliefs. In my instance, I'm generally on board with moving the party with the times but only as long as we try to move the times with us as well. I'm also pretty fervent in my defence of many things that might be considered traditionally Conservative, and I'm an utterly committed unionist. Similarly David Cameron, Dean, and other people that I and others might perceive as 'modernisers' must have been drawn to the Conservative Party by something, and if that was threatened I fancy you'd see their 'reactionary' sides too.

P.S. I've been finishing up my exams, hence the lack of posting. Normal service has resumed.

We're Not a Family: Why the Right doesn't do marches

2011-05-14T17:09:00.002+01:00

The 'Rally Against Debt' was a predictable disaster. Thomas Byrne, over at ByrneTofferings, provides a nice summary of why it was a disaster; I'd like to consider why that was predictable.

I've been keen on the Right emulating the Left's tactics in the past. As somebody who wants right-wing students to engage with their representative structures, how could I not? Plus, those marches just look intoxicating if you're a sympathiser. Hundreds of thousands of people, dozens of organisations, banners, chants, music, the thrill of being part of a great, visually striking mass of people. Often in the past I wondered why the British right didn't have such great rallies, and wished they would. But we don't. Its a damn good thing, too.

There are several reasons the modern right lacks a marching, protest culture. P.J. O'Rourke quipped that it was because right-wingers have jobs, and the Economist's Bagehot has taken similar vein in the past. There's truth in that - the 'disaffected', the jobless, and students just tend to have more time on their hands. However, I realised the real reason a couple of years ago, when I did two things. First, I read Nick Cohen's excellent What's Left?, in part of which he complaints bitterly about how the supposed 'family of the left' means that moderate lefties show an unhealthy tolerance to the extremes of their own wing. Second, I spoke to a few lefties and looked at the sort of groups who go on marches.

The main reason left-wing marches can get such a body count to a major event is that, in the spirit of 'solidarity', many, many groups from across the red-tinted end of the spectrum will show. An anti-cuts rally will attract anti-fascists, greens, communists, socialists, feminists and all manner of other fringe groups, which which gets mixed in with an enthused mass of students and the ranks of union members bearing their professionally printed placards. It is this ideological flexibility and sense of common cause that allows so many people to operate in a vaguely coherent fashion as one protest.

It also helps to gloss over the fact that some of the fringe groups present are genuinely disgusting, including defenders of the likes of Mao, Stalin and Hoxha, who were present at the anti-debt march that Ed Miliband so grandiosely addressed. To paint you a right-wing comparison, its like David Cameron addressing a rally attended by Combat 18. In fact, a fuller right-wing comparison makes clear just how ridiculous the idea of the right having a mass rally of the sort the left occasionally throw actually is:

We'd have a march put on by the CBI and the Countryside Alliance. The TaxPayers Alliance, the LPUK and the Freedom Association would be in attendance, as would the English Defence League and tons of Conservative Party members. Conservative Future branches from all over the country would attend in strength, making up most of the numbers. On top of that we'd have ultra-royalists, neo-nazis, and fundamentalist clerics. The N9S would probably be running a street stall somewhere. To give us that international flavour, we can throw in the likes of the CDU, the Fronte Nationale, the Kuomintang, Danish Freedom Party, Republicans from the USA and all manner of weird and exotic fringe organisations from across the world. Shah supporters? Ultramontanes? The AWB? Why not, all are welcome to show 'solidarity' with us about whatever we're marching about.

The example above highlights the main two reasons, in my view, that the right don't do mass protests the way the left does. The first, big one is that 'right' is not in any way ideologically cohesive - it is essentially defined as 'not left'. This gives us few common causes to rally around. My brand of right-wing politics is probably completely different to most other righties I meet and I'm sure its true for plenty of others too. While politics might be just as personal on the left (for all I know) they have the myth of the common cause to bind several hundred thousand bored people together in a park for an afternoon. When the right tries it, you get a few hundred bedraggled-looking libertarians and some bad press.

This leads to the second reason: we can't turn a blind eye to the horrific nature of the people's we'd be sharing a march with. Unlike the various impenetrable communist parties, right-wing groups tend to be at least identifiably distinct and - because fascism bombed us and communism bombed other people - elicits greater revulsion from the ordinary person. While that revulsion is utterly merited, the lop-sided nature of it means that the left can tuck all kinds of strange things on the edge of its marches that moderate right wingers could not get away with and would not wish to try.

That covered, my final thought is utter bafflement that sensible right-wingers would want to try to emulate the left's marching culture. I was tempted by it once, but having seen the last few such events I don't see how it would be an asset for us. Marching around, shouting, breaking the odd thing, inconveniencing people and occupying shops, all the while scaring centrist voters away in the process? What does it accomplish?

We have little to win and much to lose if we try to outdo the left at one of their most pointless strengths. If we aim to spend years the corridors of power, we don't need to begrudge them a few hours on the streets.

P.S. That said, the cockles of my heart could not help but warm to Brian Micklethwait's photographic collection of hand-made right-wing protest signs. Refreshing to see.

Mancunion Article: We're Not All Children of the Revolution

2011-05-13T18:12:00.000+01:00

Published in The Mancunion, issue of 09/05/11.

It is sometimes quite challenging, being a Right-Wing student in a Student Union with a political culture quite as introverted, Left-Wing and often hostile as Manchester’s, but it’s rarely dull. In less than a month I will have sat my last exam as a University of Manchester student and must thus surrender my council seat and hang up my hat as UMSU’s token Righty. I thought I’d use my last article for The Mancunion to relate some of my motivations and experiences of politics inside your Students’ Union, and try to encourage more people who are neither flower children nor Communists to step up and take my place in years to come.

Not that it’s a particularly appealing prospect, on the surface. Perhaps the most egregious slander I’ve sustained during my time here was a persistent rumour in my first year that I was a member of the British National Party. Whilst this rumour was thankfully discredited by the (remarkably timely) leaking of the BNP membership list to the national press, it serves as useful illustration of the gauntlet of hostility any dissenting student politician has to run if you want to stick your head above the parapet. Other examples include my being mobbed at the 2011 student elections (one of my gallant defenders was punched in the face by a newly elected candidate, I was merely spat at) and a faintly laughable but nonetheless intimidating Socialist occupation of the Conservative Future AGM last term. We had the nerve to hold our meeting in the Students’ Union, you see.#

So why on earth should you, the Right-Wing student of tomorrow, put yourself through all that? Why did I? Fundamentally, because our Students’ Union is supposed to represent all of us, and I don’t think that many people can honestly claim that it does. That’s why I think that Centre-Right and Right-Wing students need to brave the horrors of Left-Wing intolerance and take part in the Students’ Union. For too long, UMSU has had systems that empower tiny special interest groups to enact their agendas in the name of every student. Would a Union that was genuinely responsive to the great majority of its students ban meat from our bar on Mondays, or Coca-Cola from our shop, or outright ban the word “Fresher’s” from ‘Welcome Week’? I don’t think so. The Students’ Union will remain a remote and largely irrelevant institution until it represents the broad spectrum of student opinion.

Thankfully, some of the worst of the constitutional monstrosities are being phased out. General Meetings – wherein the whims of a few hundred activists are held above the mandates of execs with many thousands of votes – are going at the end of next year, replaced by general referendums where all motions are put before the full student body. This offers an excellent opportunity for people from a broader range of political viewpoints to engage the next generation of Manchester students with their union, but this opportunity is only as valuable as what students do with it.

So this plea is to you, all the centre-right students who aren’t graduating this year. Next year, get involved. Write for this paper, stand for election and generally make nuisances of yourselves. Demonstrate to the wider world that not all students are socialists, communists, radical feminists and greens. It’s the only way you’re ever going to change the union, and the left will continue to present itself as the universal “voice of students” until you do.

Complaint!

2011-05-10T00:17:00.001+01:00

Ordinarily, I only post articles on this blog. I tend to shy away from short pieces, links, and other such things. I couldn't resist printing this though. It is a complaint my student paper received to my article attacking weak arguments against war. You can read that article in all its glory here. I'd advise doing so, if you haven't already, so you can enjoy this complaint all the more. Below the complaint - which the paper published as a letter - is my response, which sadly they did not have room for. Without further ado:

Dear Mancunion,

Last week I had the pleasure of enduring Henry Hill’s flimsy excuse for an article on western foreign intervention and I was enamoured by the prevailing ignorance towards affairs in the Middle East. Maybe Hill is a devious media troll, revelling in the inevitable wealth of responses generated by his moronic interpretations; still, I had to write in just in case he really had been corralled by the deceits of the neo-conservatives.

Firstly, Hill flippantly equated attitudes towards Iraq and the current war in Libya. This is inherently misguided and a pairing that often occurs in the media narrative. The two present drastically different situations and many who were rightly against the former opposed the latter.

More to the point however, Hill presents a clichéd straw man of the arguments against Iraq with the usual buzzwords, oil, Imperialism but more astoundingly, implies that we were right to go into Iraq and our success in that part of the world legitimised further intervention. Perhaps Hill should be employed at the foreign office equipped with a map of the Middle East, a set of darts and a blindfold (just to make declarations of war a little more fun) so we can maintain our conflicts.

My response to the article may seem overblown to some but such an ill informed opinion of our recent interventions in the most politically volatile part of the world seem plainly offensive. Implying that the lives of Iraqis has been vastly improved by deposing Saddam is almost as stupid as believing that the motivations behind the conflict were based compassion for the Iraqi people. It is surprising to me that so many have failed to understand that the Iraq conflict represented the greatest example yet of the military-industrial complex directing US foreign policy. Iraq represented the triumphs of arms companies like Blackwater (now XE services) and private security firms, not the liberation of the Iraqi people, who are now forced to adopt daily suicide bombings as a part of life. Iraq was the privatisation of war in action. Perhaps our action in Libya is the right thing to do, but that remains to be seen. Iraq was not the right thing to do, and of that we were sure before the first pair of ‘boots on the ground’.

Jack Armstrong

Enjoy that? I know I did. Below is the letter I wrote in response:

Dear Jack,

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to respond! I've carefully read your letter, which is a greater courtesy than you paid my article, and I'm happy to clarify what seems to be our central problem. My article is not about the rightness of Iraq or any other war. Indeed, I dedicate a whole paragraph to clarifying that there are legitimate reasons to oppose war, and the entire article is urging people to use those arguments.

It is not about whether or not Iraq was a good thing for Iraqis (although I do hold that view) but rather that the arguments that war in the Middle East is 'hypocritical' or 'imperialistic' are very bad arguments because a war could be both of those things and still benefit the people of a targeted government. In short, they are not harms in and of themselves. It seems particularly fatuous to accuse me of picking on straw man arguments against war in an article whose express intent was analysing and demolishing weak arguments, but as stated above clearly you could not discern that theme.

The rest of your letter isn't really related to my article at all, but we can go through it quickly. I do not draw any comparison between Libya and Iraq whatsoever beyond including them both in lists of western interventions, which they both are. I do believe that the long term prospects of the Iraqi people are better now than under Saddam's rule. This is a view also held by many Iraqis - I recommend to you Republic of Fear by Kanan Makiya for a glimpse of what Saddam's regime was actually like. I do not believe that the Iraq War was motivated by compassion but it is a fallacy to presume that something has to have pure motivations to have good outcomes. The idea that the war in Iraq was simply the product of private enterprise is a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Finally, it bears saying that your decision to personally attack me and grossly misrepresent my case, rather than try to engage with the actual argument put forward in my article, is simply further evidence of the very behaviours and weaknesses amongst a section of the anti-war debate that my article was actually about. Thank you for the demonstration.

Peace and love,

Henry

I hope it will be the considered view of my readership that, regardless of whether or not you agree with me, I got the better of that particular encounter.

Buzz: A Safety Net or a Padded Cell? The NHS, Universal Healthcare and Freedom

2011-05-07T19:50:00.000+01:00

I have an article published over on ConservativeHome USA arguing that the NHS - not universal healthcare per se - operates in a way that undermines liberty in British political culture. I wrote it as buzz to this article over on Smitten by Britain.

P.S. CH have edited it slightly, putting in American spelling and restructuring a few sentences, in case anybody feared I'd gone over to the dark side and started writing "ize" instead of "ise".

Better Safe than Sorry: Dilettante on The Student Journals

2011-05-06T12:38:00.000+01:00

I've got an article published over on The Student Journals, defending the security arrangements from the Royal Wedding from another TSJ contributor who attacked them.

A Referendum on Independence Could be Good for Scottish Conservatism and the Union

2011-05-05T12:26:00.002+01:00

Originally written for submission to ConHome, as part of my long-running and apparently doomed attempt to get published there.

Like most Conservatives from the “ardent unionist” branch of the party, I have long been vehemently opposed to a referendum on Scottish independence. I always thought that such a thing might call into question in the minds of the electorate the very existence of the United Kingdom in a permanent fashion, even if won, and as such should be fought against as hard as humanly possible.

That is, until recently. One of the reasons I decided to start blogging and getting seriously involved in the party is because I realised that unionism is too often a pessimistic, defensive creed, prone to bouts of apologetics and despair. This is one of the reasons I feel that, compared to the dynamism, charisma and vigour of some of its nationalist opponents, defenders of the union continue to struggle to make the case for it, and display little confidence in the ability of the union to survive or the capacity of the people to support it.

As an Irish citizen of Catholic heritage, perhaps my perspective on the union is different, although I’m not entirely alone in my diagnosis. However, it seems to me that unionist defensiveness is the reason that the initiative when it comes to the great constitutional questions about the fate of our nation continues to lie in the hands of the nationalists. The Conservative Party is still too determined to show that it accepts devolution to suggest ways in which it could be improved, and unionists are too preoccupied by the supposed fragility of the union to meet nationalists head on, for fear of upsetting people.

If – as is possible – Alex Salmond and the SNP win enough seats to gain a majority with the support of the also-separatist Scottish Green Party in the upcoming election, then we could very soon see a referendum north of the border on the continued existence of our United Kingdom. As a unionist, I find that prospect frightening. But get past that fear and there could be a great opportunity in this for Scottish Conservatism.

The reasons why the Scottish Conservatives have yet to rebound like their counter-parts in England and Wales are varied. In his latest article on Comment is Free, Kevin McKenna argues that it is because the party has not been right-wing enough. Another commonly accepted reason is that the SNP has displaced the Conservatives and attracted most of its centre-right votes. These are two maps, one from the Scottish Parliamentary election of 2007 and the other from the General Election of 1992, the last creditable Conservative performance north of the border. You will note that the great swathe of SNP constituencies in the centre and north-east of Scotland are seats that were formerly held by Conservative candidates.

The true answer is probably a fusion of both. The Scottish Conservative Party’s position has been eroded by being a largely irrelevant third party without a distinctive position, a crisis exacerbated by its own timidity. This is where a referendum on independence could help. Polling has consistently demonstrated that support for independence is stuck at roughly 20% of the population, and it is very likely that a referendum held soon could be won, and won convincingly, by the unionist parties. Such a reaffirmation of commitment would not only be good for the union, but by making the SNP the party of independence it could finally allow the Scottish Conservatives to reclaim their old heartlands amongst the pro-union centre-right in Scotland.

The SNP continue to poll substantially higher than the prospect of independence itself because they have become a broad-spectrum party of government and the natural recipient of anti-Labour voting. For too long the Scottish Conservatives have been unable to make political capital out of their unionism because, in a debate driven almost entirely on the nationalist’s initiative, they have feared appearing anti-devolution, and because the union was simply not a political issue. Without that, there was nowhere for the Conservatives to carve themselves a proper niche in Scottish politics. The centre-right Scottish electorate need a reason to distinguish between the SNP and the Conservatives if the latter is ever to rise again, and the Union is it.

The breakup of the United Kingdom in Scotland, as in the rest of the country, remains the province of a vocal minority. The success of Labour’s recent switch to a relentlessly anti-independence message in closing the SNP’s poll lead in recent days is evidence that independence may yet be the SNP’s Achilles ’ heel. The more closely the SNP can be wedded to a hard-line position on separatism, the narrower their electoral appeal will get. This provides the opportunity for a well-led and confident Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party to seize the initiative, and start its long march back to relevance. If a referendum must come, we should have confidence in our arguments and our country, meet the challenge head-on, and win.

Canada 2015: Harper must triangulate the NDP

2011-05-03T18:16:00.003+01:00

The results of the general election were good for both Conservatism and Unionism in Canada last night: Stephen Harper's Conservative government now governs as a majority, a gift caused by splits in a balkanised left, and the nationalist Bloc Québécois was annihilated. The Conservative Party broke out of its strongholds in Western Canada to seize 71 seats in Ontario and make gains throughout the Liberal's Maritime heartlands.

Triumphant

Only in Quebec did the government suffer a defeat, and it is from Quebec that the challenges of this Parliament for Canadian Conservatism stem. Although the province now lies overwhelmingly in unionist (federalist in Canadian political parlance) hands, the Conservative Party held only six of the eleven seats it held at dissolution. According to a national Canadian paper, not since 1917 has a majority government been so under-represented in Quebec.

Furthermore, Quebec has provided the main game-changer of this election: the rise to prominence of the New Democratic Party, formerly the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Canada's answer to the Labour Party. Almost a century after its British equivalent, it appears to have finally overtaken the Liberals as Canada's second party. Moreover, it won its Quebecois landslide by making many of the same promises to sovereigntists (nationalists) as the shattered Bloc did. Canada's Official Opposition is now a decidedly left-wing, perhaps socialist party committed to proportional representation and in thrall to a separatist electoral base. The need for a strong, broad-based and cleverly-led Conservative Party has perhaps never been greater.

The federalist darling of the separatist electorate?

Harper is a natural pessimist, and tends to favour incremental gains and an assumed low overall ceiling of support to playing for high stakes. Yet the next parliament is crucial. Deplorable as the NDP are, it would be foolish to sit back and hope the Liberals bounce back. Nor can the Prime Minister afford to make the fatal error of ignoring either the opposition or Quebec. There are those who argue that the NDP's success is ephemeral, and won't last. Perhaps they're right, but that doesn't mean that the Conservatives can afford to ignore them or fail to exploit the opportunities now presented to them.

Some believe that the breakthrough of the NDP in this election has redefined Canadian politics. In my view, the real opportunity to redefine politics is this parliament and the 2015 election, and the initiative lies with the Conservatives. Despite the challenges, if they choose too this could be the parliament where they set in motion Stephen Harper's dream of becoming Canada's natural party of government. The way to do this is the method used so effectively by Tony Blair to consistently outmanoeuvre the British Conservatives: triangulation.

The nature of the parliamentary NDP has two advantages for the Conservatives. First is the quite startling lack of calibre amongst some members of their new Quebecois caucus: paper candidates have been elected in numbers, and while it makes for a mightily impressive election result the influence of these people on the future of the NDP could be anything but good. Even if not actively malign, the fact that the NDP caucus will be presented as inexperienced and gaff-prone will only exacerbate the Conservative's incumbency advantage and their self-image as the sensible, reliable and trustworthy custodians of the nation. The NDP will be under scrutiny as they've never experienced before, and if their MPs aren't up to scratch all the charismatic leaders in the world won't save them.

Harper's Canada this morning (03/05/2011). Six large NDP ridings -
(E-W) Skeena-Bulkley Valley, Western Arctic, Churchill, Timmins-James Bay,
Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou and Manicouagan - visually mask
the scale of the Conservative victory.

The second potential advantage for the Conservatives is the NDP's surprise dependence upon a previously unimagined Quebecois base. The long-term impact of this isn't entirely knowable at this point, but it is fact that Jack Layton won many Bloc sympathisers by making many of the same promises to the sovereigntist electorate that the nationalists usually do. There are several ramifications to this. First, it could be used to damage the NDP's federal credentials by turning their position on Canadian unity into something of an Achilles' heel, if cleverly exploited. Second, it makes cooperation between them and the avowedly federalist Liberal Party more difficult, which is a boon to a Conservative Party that profited so greatly from the balkanisation of the left at the last election. Third, it means that if Layton and his NDP don't have a good parliament, and especially if they are seen as not standing up for the province, their Quebecois base could evaporate.

The third advantage for the Conservatives lies not in the NDPs specific parliamentary makeup but its overall position on Canada's political spectrum. Unlike the centrist Liberal Party, the NDP is decidedly on the left, perhaps even socialist in character. Its rise and the eclipse of the Liberals means there is now a window of opportunity for Harper to try to annex the Canadian centre ground permanently for the Conservatives. Analysts on the CBC's election program last night attributed the Conservative's ground-breaking result in Ontario (seventy-one seats out of 106) to the collapsing Liberal vote "breaking right" to avert an NDP-led administration.

If the Conservatives can occupy the political centre ground, it will harm both their main rivals. It will further rob the Liberals of any raison d'être they might have still have, which will either lead to them merging with a united left (and shedding what remains of their centre and right-leaning figures in the process) or engaging in a life-or-death struggle with the NDP, depending upon how the latter fairs in the next few years. The end result of such a struggle would either be a revived Liberal Party that had been pushed out of the Canadian centre, or a triumphant NDP nearly as remote from it as ever. Whether the NDP strengthen or the Liberals rebound, the Conservatives need to convincingly occupy the centre in order to maintain their hold on many of the former Liberal seats they gained at this election. Only by seizing the centre can the Conservatives ever 'incrementally' become Canada's natural political home.

The other Conservative Party imperative for the next few years must be Quebec. There are both tactical and strategical reasons for this. Tactically, the Conservatives need a resurgence in Quebec to help neuter the NDP. The latter gained the Quebecois vote at least in part on fear of Harper's Conservatives, and it would be foolish of the Tories not to try to undermine this representation before it solidifies and the NDP's position in national politics becomes entrenched. Strategically, the NDP's landslide reflected all the worse on a very disappointing performance by the Conservatives, who held only half a dozen of the province's seventy-five ridings and saw a senior minister unseated. Like the British Conservative Party and Scotland, lacking representation in a large and culturally distinct territory damages any party's claims to be a truly national administration, no matter how impressive the party's showings in the rest of Canada.

Gilles Duceppe and Michael Ignatieff, the unseated leaders of

the Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party of Canada.

When the next election comes, the Conservative Party of Canada should have acted upon these principles. If they have, they could well be in the position to start the historic shift in Canada's alignment they've long dreamed of. Come the next election the economy should be on the up, which the Conservatives will be able to take credit for. This would also allow them to step away from grim austerity politics and start offering more baubles in their manifesto. If so, it should not shy away from including measured, affordable spending commitments in its manifesto alongside tax cuts.

If the triangulation is successful, they should face an NDP pushed out onto the left of Canadian politics, with an appeal too narrow to win an election. If the NDP collapse, the should face a rudderless Liberal party unable to claim the centre-ground and uncomfortable anywhere else. If the result falls between those two extremes, they'll face the same divided, vote-splitting left that served them so well last night. If the Liberals and the NDP end up merging, the Conservatives face more of a threat to their centre and it becomes more vital than ever that they have strengthened their position there.

Stephen Harper understands that right-wing governments are only viable in centre-right political climates, and he has begun the long work of shifting Canada's political axis his way. If he can successfully rebuild in Quebec, outmanoeuvre the NDP and wrest the centre-ground from the parties of the left, he could well succeed.

Will Hutton's Hypocrisy: Electoral and constituency reform.

2011-05-01T05:15:00.004+01:00

Will Hutton opens his latest article in the Observer thus: "Only the Chinese Communist party, my old professor used to say, comes close to the British Conservatives in its understanding of power." His overall line of attack is that the Conservative Party is an effective, ruthless, power-fixated machine, and is committed to maintaining an unfair franchise for narrow party advantage. After meandering some, he finally concludes that the solution for this is full-blown PR, and that we should vote Yes to AV as a consequences.

Naturally I disagree with him over some of that, but that paragraph of common-enough left-wing sentiment is not what I'm writing about. It's only relevant when compared to the section that did raise my ire: Mr Hutton's condemnation of the Coalition's plan to equalise constituency sizes. I've been meaning to comment on this topic for a while, and this seemed as good an opportunity as any. Here is what Mr Hutton has to say:

"Legislation to reduce Britain's constituencies to 600 while standardising their size, overriding geographical or historical ties, was a priority... The system had to be in place by the next general election to help confer the required Conservative parliamentary majority... Tacked on to this bill, meeting the demand of the Lib Dems, was the provision for a referendum on the alternative vote to replace first past the post, the price of mounting what is an unashamed Conservative constitutional land grab."

Powerful stuff. Those three sentences highlight a key aspect of Mr Hutton's argument that I take issue with. He appears to assert that an unfair franchise can be justified by history, and that the Conservative manoeuvre to try to ensure that every vote of a UK citizen is weighted the same* is an act of grotesque "gerrymandering", to borrow Jack Straw's ridiculous phrase. The first seems to me to contradict progressive principle, and the second a highly unfair charge that - given the tone of the rest of his article slamming the Tories apparent desire to maintain unfair systems that favour them - make Hutton appear outright hypocritical.

It should be an obvious principle of a democracy that citizens should be equally enfranchised. It certainly seems contrary to progressive teachings that our relative democratic empowerment should be determined by quirks of geography, culture or birth. Yet that is exactly what Mr Hutton appears to advance in his column. Let us take the most extreme example: is it fair that the Isle of Wight constituency should have 5.6 times the population of the Western Isles - technically Na h-Eileanan an Iar for Westminster elections as of the 2005 General Election - while each only returns one Member of Parliament? Is it fair that Labour's industrial strongholds return more MPs per head of population than the Conservative shires? I don't think so, and I don't think if the positions were reversed many in the Labour Party would think so either.

Living on the Isle of Wight is not a good reason to erode the value of any citizen's franchise. On the level of principle, opposing the equalisation of constituency sizes is to support a geographical franchise lottery. Yes, it is important that an MP represent a geographical area where they can be held accountable by the residents of a clearly-delineated constituency. To believe otherwise is to support Israel-style total PR. But there is always a compromise to strike. To argue that we should operate a system where someone in the Western Isles exercises a franchise nearly six times that of someone in the Isle of Wight, or that being Cornish is sufficient to entitle someone to more franchise power than their neighbour in Devon - is to take communalism far too far.

It is not the principle of it that got me really riled up, though. That fell to the naked hypocrisy in attacking the Conservatives for trying to ensure that the vote of a country voter matches the value of an urban voter in the same article that attacks the Conservatives for trying to maintain unfair constitutional aspects that are to their advantage. You can either attack the Conservatives defence of FPTP or you can defend the entrenchment of Labour advantage via the deep exaggeration of their urban vote. You can't do both.

*To FPTP critics out there: by 'count the same' I mean that the same number of constituents - or as close as possible - should be represented by every MP and have a say in choosing that MP. I do not buy into the idea that the votes of people living in safe seats count for any less than the votes of people in marginals - a seat is only safe because the party that always wins commands great support amongst the equally enfranchised electors of that constituency. The supporter of another party in a safe seat is not disenfranchised, merely defeated.

Why on earth are the Greens nationalists?

2011-04-25T06:17:00.002+01:00

The British left puzzles me. I've been familiar with left-wing politics and ideas for a while now (I even used to be one, a long time ago) and one of the things that I've always found more appealing than the rest is the internationalism - and the anti-nationalism - of much left-wing rhetoric and action. After all, it didn't matter if your oppressed proletarian was Russian, British or Chinese, the struggle was essentially the same. Later on, the Seventies and Eighties saw white, middle-class people protesting about poor, black people in South Africa. Arguing that all humans were on some fundamental level the same and that we should care about people beyond our borders (even if events beyond those borders were substantially more complicated than those protesting envisioned) showed the left at its best.

I believe that, viewed from a left-wing perspective, the Union should be a progressive edifice. After all, the basis of the union is that what unites the Welsh, Scots, Irishmen and English is more important than what divides them, and that we're stronger together than we are apart. The nationalist, on the other hand, makes a fetish of division, worshipping lines drawn by medieval warlords and sanctified by nineteenth-century intellectuals. Where a progressive unionist asks "What do we share?" a nationalist asks "What makes us different?", and if they don't find a substantive answer - as in Wales - then strenuous efforts are made to resurrect linguistic and cultural barriers that time and progress have eroded. Surely the very opposite of rational, progressive politics.

Anti-nationalism: the best of the left.

But if left-wing politics is supposed to be rational, forward-looking, internationalist and inclusive, how did the British version come to be laced with nationalist toxins? I'm not talking about British nationalism of course, that remains the almost exclusive preserve of the BNP and the right. I'm talking about about the various Celtic nationalisms, which all seem to range from social-democratic to outright marxist in character. Now, nationalists being leftwing I've always understood - after all, caring equally about members of a nation makes sense from a nationalist perspective - but always from the position that these people where nationalists first, and that informed their other beliefs. On the other hand, people who claim to have a non-nationalist political preoccupation - in this case the planet, just about the most pan-human cause one can choose to adopt - supporting nationalism astounds me.

Yet throughout the Troubles the great bulk of the British left supported Irish reunification - outside the Union, of course. Only the British and Irish Communist Organisation - a group whose pro-Union position was still based in nationalist theory - took a different line, a position so unusual that it seems to have become their defining feature. I still know Labour friends who go beyond passive support for reunification and wish the active pursuit of "reunification by consent" was party policy. But these are old, Eighties symptoms. I thought perhaps the new left, no longer attracted to nationalism just because it tried to murder Margaret Thatcher - might be different. Suffice to say, it is not.

Until recently, I never realised there was ever a pan-UK Green Party. I knew about the Green Party of England and Wales, I knew about the Scottish Green Party and the Green Party of Northern Ireland, but I had always imagined those parties had separate geneses. Indeed, the GPNI is now "the Northern Ireland subdivision of the Irish Green Party". Apparently the fact that it maintains connexions with the mainland parties is a symbol of its cross-communal nature, although in my opinion there is nothing border-neutral about voting to become a regional wing of a foreign political party. The Scottish Green Party also supports Scottish independence, need you ask.

There are no border lines on their
logo. Does that reflect beliefs, or
just lazy designers?

Yet according to Wikipedia these groups used to be part of the Green Party (UK), before the Scottish and Northern Irish bodies voted for 'amicable' independence (the Welsh Greens, as seems to be the typical Welsh lot on such occasions, settled for autonomy with the GPEW). I've not been able to find anything definitive about the split, but given the direction of the Scottish and Northern Irish parties one can only assume that nationalism lay at the heart of it. These are people whose primary motivation in politics is the need to save the world and all the people in it and restructure it along their own lines and yet here they are, expressing the vital importance of ethno-cultural divisions to their politics. Its just bizarre.

I can't for the life of me work out why Greens are nationalists. Maybe its just a sign that the Green parties don't actually represent a new left. After all, the Scottish Socialist Party are also pro-independence and most of the hard-left factions across the UK are still anti-unionist, so perhaps this is just one more way in which the Greens are a twenty-first-century shell wrapped around a deficient nineteenth-century ideology. Its a shame, because green issues are important and it would be a good thing to tackle them. That can only happen, however, once the environment really ceases to become a non-aligned issue without automatic political or cultural assumptions behind it. As long as the Green parties continue to function in the same left-wing ideological space as their socialist predecessors, they're never going to reach out to right-wing or pro-Union voters. Which can't be good for the planet.

Think of the planet! Stop supporting
nationalism.

Last Orders

2011-04-21T13:44:00.003+01:00

Sadly, Paul, author of A Pint of Unionist Lite, has decided to hang up his laptop and retire from the blogging game. Unionist Lite was one of the blogs that first got me into blogging and supported this blog when it started. His opinions on many issues closely matched my own and his insight into Northern Irish politics was always a pleasure to read. I'm very sorry to see him go.

Whenever this happens, I always reflect on how changeable the blogosphere is. I've been blogging for not yet one year, and already most of the blogs that inspired me to start - Letters from a Tory, Tory Bear, the exceptional Scottish Unionist and now Unionist Lite have all ceased to be, and Charlotte Gore's postings are growing ever more infrequent.

These excellent people need replacing. If any of you reading this have ever considered setting up a political blog, I really recommend you give it a go. Its easy to set up, and whatever your political niche I'm sure there are people who'll help get you started the way Paul and Owen of Three Thousand Versts supported me. I'm also happy to give pointers and advice, just drop me a message via my blogger account.

In the meantime, I'm happy to report I intend to continue writing for a while yet.

Rumours of Lords Reform: Three criticisms.

2011-04-20T03:13:00.001+01:00

I'm sorry, I really am. I'm a pro-Coalition Conservative. I used to be a Liberal Democrat, long ago, and I have many friends who remain of the yellow persuasion. I normally try to see the silver lining in whatever storm-cloud currently besets our government. But this is too much.

I've heard it elsewhere, but one link will suffice: Liberal Vision report that, if the Liberal Democrats lose the AV referendum, David Cameron will have to throw them a serious bone. Worse still, rumour is that the bone in question could be a fully elected House of Lords. As support for AV "collapses" this scenario is looking ever more likely. It cannot happen. I'm not the biggest fan of much of what goes on on the Conservative back benches, but if David Cameron tries to push this through I may have to stain forever my reformist credentials and go to the trenches with them.

There are three main problems that need to be addressed: first, what is an elected Lords actually for; second, David Cameron can't simply continue making concessions he has no mandate for on issues as serious as the constitution; third, the Liberal Democrats need to grow up and get used to losing.

The House of Lords is a revising chamber. It doesn't have the power to initiate or veto legislation from the Commons. It is a mixture of appointed experts, party dinosaurs and fascinating constitutional relics who between them bring experience and specific expertise to legislation drafted by career politicians in the Commons, and then compile recommendations that the politicians with a mandate debate.

Before you can insist that the House of Lords needs to be elected to have a democratic mandate, you need to work out what it actually needs that mandate for. It doesn't require an electoral mandate to carry out its current duties - indeed, elections would probably negate its current function. Making the Lords elected would grant it a mandate to challenge the Commons - do we want that?

One thing I've not heard much (if at all, in my recollection) is why Britain needs a bicameral, American-style legislature. The logic simply seems to be:

We have a House of Lords = It is unelected! = Let us fix that.

That isn't good enough. If the House of Lords' role as a chamber of revision is unnecessary, that on its own is simply a case for its abolition. Supporters of Lords reform need to first articulate their case for an equally-weighted bicameral parliament, and then win the country round to the idea. Until they do that, they have no right to enact it.

It certainly can't be delivered as part of a grubby ransom payment, which brings me to my second point. Quite simply, the constitution of the United Kingdom is more important than David Cameron's premiership. Labour screwed around with the constitution, instituting the Supreme Court in place of the Law Lords and assaulting the integrity of our kingdom with devolution, but at least they changed the constitution because they believed in change.

David Cameron has never given much (if any?) indication of being in favour of serious reform to the Lords. He's certainly never articulated clearly why we need a powerful second chamber. The manner in which he's going about this is a sorry reflection on him. He should not - and certainly should not be allowed to - play fast and loose with the constitution of our union to try to preserve his rule in Number 10. He bounced his backbenchers into supporting the AV referendum, and that is quite far enough. They didn't sign up to anything more, and he has no mandate for it.

Really though, the final share of the blame must rest with the people putting Cameron in this position: the Liberal Democrats. As a Coalition supporter I'm very disappointed, but the Liberal Democrats are - to put it mildly - not performing particularly impressively in government, and their behaviour on this occasion is little short of disgraceful.

They lost the General Election. They didn't win a majority for their arch-reformist ideals, even on total share of the vote. They're a protest party that hasn't propped up a government since the 1970s and hasn't participated in one since the Second World War. Yet their stars aligned, a hung parliament combined with a particularly daring Conservative leader and they have their chance in government. This is their opportunity to demonstrate that they are a serious party capable of governing the country.

Their primary focus during this government should be accruing credibility, aiming for a payoff in 2015 when they can claim credit for helping steer our country through a dire economic crisis as part of a stable and effective coalition government. That would be a long-term view. Instead, they're constantly fretting over short-term popularity, and pandering to a party base completely unused to the discipline and realism required in a party of government.

Both the Conservatives and Labour have been very unpopular in the past. Both have had their 1983's and their 1997's, periods in which their rivals were totally in the ascendant and serious soul-searching was required. That both these parties remain the big players in British politics is testament to a key lesson the LD's need to learn: if you're doing anything important or difficult, to govern is to be unpopular. Governing parties do haemorrhage council seats whenever they have to enact a tough, serious measure, or tell the electorate something they don't want to hear. Short-term unpopularity is less important in the long run than being perceived as a sensible, mature party in the long-term. I don't think many people can claim the Liberal Democrats are there yet.

The other thing the Lib Dems need to learn to do is learn to lose with grace. They got a referendum on changing the voting system out of a Conservative party deeply opposed to the idea. They never got a guarantee of victory nor did they ever get promised some kind of insurance against defeat. If AV is defeated in May, the Liberal Democrats should stop, assess the campaign and try to work out why they lost. They should not turn to David Cameron and ask what serious constitutional form he's going to offer them without a referendum to keep then in government, to make up for the one they have failed to acquire from the electorate. That is not the way a mature coalition partner behaves, it is the thought process of a spoilt child.

Despite the macho talk of Vince Cable's 'nuclear option', the Liberal Democrats have a lot more riding on the Coalition than the Conservatives. This is their chance to prove two things: first, that the Liberal Democrats are a serious party of government; second, that coalition governments are strong and stable enough to steer the country through even this most tempestuous of times. If they terminate the coalition mid-term, in some fit of petulance over not being given something they had no right to extort from their coalition partner, that will stick in the minds of the electorate long after the ever-fickle anti-cuts storm has faded away. It will not only tar the Liberal Democrats, but it will taint the perception of coalition government - the very thing they claim to champion - in the minds of the electorate. The LD's terminating the coalition will just demonstrate that, when times are tough, coalitions don't work.

Lords reform is a terrible idea that hasn't been put before the public even as a debate, let alone a vote. David Cameron should not butcher our constitution to hold onto power. And the Liberal Democrats should learn that being in government involves disappointments, defeats and dirty tactics, before its too late.

Update: Almost as if to prove my point, Liberal Democrat President Tim Farron writes in the Times (23/4/2011) that a House of Lords elected by PR would have more legitimacy than a First-Past-The-Post Commons. That's the best argument against PR for the Lords I can think of.

Coalition Politics on your Doorstep: Why I'm No2AV

2011-04-16T01:18:00.007+01:00

It should surprise none of you if I confirm now that I am an opponent of a change to the voting system. I can be entirely honest about my reasons. Despite being in favour of this government, I am not at all keen on the idea of coalition government in the long term - it is simply that the Liberal Democrats are a better coalition partner for the Conservative Party than its own lunatic backbench fringe. A healthy majority Conservative administration is preferable. More than that, I don't attach great significance to an MP gaining 50%+ of the vote on people's multiple preferences, and I think that any step towards PR is a bad idea. I just straight-up like FPTP and the principles behind it.

But such honesty doesn't preclude consideration of AV as a system, and whilst debating it I got thinking about one of the points that keeps coming up: under AV, minor parties will have more influence because their votes will be counted multiple times. I think this is true, but I've seen it knocked down a few times, mainly because it gets the emphasis wrong. So this is a short post just to outline why I think that AV will grant inordinate influence to the supporters of minor parties.

The key issue isn't some basic mathematical calculation of vote worth (i.e. if my vote is redistributed four times it is worth four times as much as your non-redistributed vote), but rather the greatly magnified influence of minor parties due to AV encouraging practises that, if they occurred, would effectively neutralise the supporters of main parties. The number of times a minor parties support is redistributed beyond one is irrelevant; its that they're redistributed at all that counts.

One key point hammered home by AV supporters is that it will help to take the adversarial edge off politics (although why this is good I don't know), and another of the main selling points, according to many of its proponents, is that it brings an end to the necessity of tactical voting. Whoever your first choice would be, you can place a tick (or rather, a 1) in their box, and then with a clear conscience set about tactically voting with your preferences. This is fine, if you're a fan of a very small party. But once the supporters of major parties start doing this we run into problems on both counts.

Lets examine the impact on marginal seats. In a two-way marginal, the normal course of electioneering is that each of the parties in with a shot of winning tries to woo the other party's supporters, with Conservative candidates pitching to the left and Labour candidates pitching to the right, and so forth. This has the effect of orienting politics towards the centre: each candidate has to compromise to some extent in a bid to win the support of people naturally inclined to support the other candidate. Would this happen under AV? In most cases, no.

The problem with AV is that there is no longer any point in major parties pitching to each others supporters. If the supporters of major parties all cast their votes in a purely non-tactical manner, those votes will not be redistributed. They're gone, stacked up in the red, blue or gold column and entirely unreachable by the other side. The only votes in play are the votes of those minor parties further down the ballot who will get disqualified, your UKIPs, Greens and yes, your British National Party's.

It is the votes of their supporters that will actually get redistributed and thus decide the election in that seat. Suddenly, the political centre of gravity shifts to the poles. Instead of trying to woo the other sides supporters by moderating their views, each side is in a race to rack up the preferences of the extremes, with Conservative candidates chasing UKIP votes whilst Labour hare off after Green and TUSC preferences. Not only is this the very opposite of the moderating influence AV supporters claim, but it means that a minor party need only build up a certain low level of support in a constituency to get policy concessions laid at the feet of its voters every election. In genuine two-horse races you might end up with both contenders desperately offering bigger and bigger carrots to the third-placed party in order to secure its transfers. Its all the undemocratic demerits of coalition politics, but actually played out on a constituency level. Charming.

Perversely, this means that people 'disenfranchised' by the current system by living in a safe seat (an interpretation I reject, but many electoral reform advocates subscribe to) will be joined in their sad state by all those who are solid supporters of a major party, even in marginals. When their non-tactical vote can be counted on, parties are bound to neglect the base in pursuit of those elusive extremist deciding votes. Supporters of minor parties replace people in marginals as the only people whose votes - if you buy this interpretation - actually 'count'.

The worst thing is that if you support a major party, your best bet is still to vote tactically, precisely as you would under FPTP. If you're a Lib Dem in a Labour/Conservative constituency but it isn't so tight that the Liberals will get knocked out and their preferences distributed, a vote for them is just as 'wasted' as ever it was, and you're better off - as far as actually influencing the outcome is concerned - tactically casting your first preference for your preferred potential winner.

So in the end, supporters of the major parties in a given constituency cast their first preferences just like FPTP, their second preferences being irrelevant. Supporters of secondary parties in a constituency that aren't likely to be knocked out are better off voting tactically, and probably will, as their second preferences are also irrelevant. Supporters of fringe parties, whose transfers are relevant, become the new political sirens, luring politicians away from the centre in pursuit of their few deciding votes.

Its coalition politics, on your doorstep. No thanks.

P.S. Quite a few of the debates I've had with people regarding this piece stem from their position that AV won't cause a serious shrinkage in the size of the floating voter pool. Given that I think a substantial portion (at least) of the floating voter pool is made up of people with soft partisan leanings who are willing to be wooed, I contest this assumption. And if anybody was in any doubt, the Yes campaign sent me an email today (29/04/11) containing this:

This week alone, more than 500 of your fellow supporters have donated to help win votes for AV. People like Robin, who told us why he decided to give to win fairer votes:
"I have voted in every election since I got the vote, many times for the candidate who I thought was most likely to defeat the one I didn't want. I want the chance to vote for the person that I want to win and this is why I have donated to the campaign."

Do you want to put an end to tactical voting?

This referendum is your chance, but time is running out - this time next week it will all be over.

So yes, the argument above is posited on the assumption that AV will significantly reduce the amount of people casting their votes tactically and contributing to the total of floating voters. Given that this is a stated aim of the Yes campaign, I don't think its an illegitimate line of counter-attack on my part.

Jonathan Freedland in Denial

2011-04-13T10:14:00.000+01:00

Jonathan Freedland's article over at Comment is Free is interesting for what it tells us about what - and how - Labour true believers are thinking. Sadly for them, it appears to be the same sort of denial-laced intellectual comfort food that was the die-hard Conservative fare of choice throughout our disastrous '97-'07 decade. The idea appears to be to sit tight, continue to claim that the deficit wasn't Labour's fault and wait for the magical pendulum of destiny to deliver another 1997. Its an appealing religious vision for the party faithful, but its a terrible idea for the Labour Party.

Several things in the article bear comment, but the most significant has to be this assertion that the progress of the pendulum is an inevitability, that the Tories must have our "1997 moment", to borrow Freedland's phrase. This seems to completely fail to take into account the fact that 1997 was the product of a range of Labour successes, Tory disasters and outside influences that aligned like malignant stars to completely decimate our electoral strength. It is no more a natural part of the electoral cycle than the result of any other election. This reads like little more than wishful thinking, and if heeded would doubtless do little more than foster dangerous complacency and encourage self-indulgence - again, see the post-'97 Conservatives.

The other key thing to read is Freedland urging Labour not to take responsibility for the deficit:

It's not Labour profligacy that caused the deficit – if the last government was spending too much why did the Tories promise, until summer 2008, to match its largesse?

The fallacy there is that it implies that Mr Freedland sets great stock by Conservative opinion, which is palpably false. In my view, the Conservatives supported government spending plans during the boom years because the public did not want to hear the case for public spending restraint, and fundamentally a party exists to get elected. Something can be a bad idea and still command enormous public support: see how David Cameron has completely ring-fenced NHS spending rather than daring to attack wasteful largesse in that organisation to ameliorate deep cuts elsewhere. Furthermore, the banking crisis was triggered by the trading of sub-prime debt packages that would not have existed if tens of not hundreds of millions of people had not wilfully tried to live beyond their means. Public popularity is not a measure of how fiscally sensible a given policy actually is.

Urging Labour not to take responsibility for the deficit is also a symptom of denial mode. Labour didn't cause the banking crisis, but the deficit is how much they spent beyond their income and that was their fault. The fact that they operated with wilfully irresponsible spending model on the assumption that the actions of one country's government had somehow banished the economic cycle from affecting Britain, even though Britain is deeply embedded in a highly responsive global finance economy, is just criminally irresponsible. Labour politicians should be pulled up on this whenever they try to play the "it started in America" line. Yes, it did. But Labour allowed Britain's economy to operate in a way that made it hugely vulnerable to financial changes in New York (or Hong Kong, for that matter) and yet ran their government in such a way as to completely fail to defend against it. Its like owning a castle, failing to post any guards and then when you're invaded bleating that the problem started abroad.

Labour need to avoid making the mistake the Conservatives made after 1997. That mistake was to assume that we were the natural party of government, that the public couldn't be that sick of us, that we'd automatically be back in power in a few years time, and that we wouldn't have to change. This attitude made us appear hubristic and out of touch, ensuring we couldn't even mount an effective opposition to the Blair/Brown government (instead leaving them to fulfil that role for each other) let alone seriously threaten the government in an election. If Labour wants to seriously challenge this government and return to office, it must beware the siren songs of the true believers who just want things back the way they were before the public passed judgement in 2010.

P.S. I really struggle with this claim that the Conservatives will 'destroy society'. I can't remember the exact year, but if I recall correctly our oh-so-horrific cuts to public expenditure are only taking spending back to roughly 2007 levels. Do you remember 2007? Labour had been in power for a decade, and I'm quite certain they were pleased with the state of the country back then. Mr Freedland appears to be peddling the idea that I hear from many leftists, that you can only cut a very small amount, if anything, from public expenditure before plunging the country into a terrible abyss. This seems to hold true regardless of how much public expenditure there has actually been, or what it has been spent on.

The Conservatives don't 'destroy society'. The Thatcherite government might have neglected certain areas of vital spending, but despite the sincerest wishes of the likes of Freedland this is not a Thatcherite government. The public don't perceive Mr Cameron as a foaming-mouthed, axe-wielding ogre because they accurately perceive that he's of the older, one-nation tradition. He's not a profligate spender or a socialist, but he's not an arch-cutter or libertarian either. Not to mention the fact that while Labour might be more willing to throw money at schools, its the Conservatives who are willing to face down the vested interests of the educational establishment to try to reverse the decline in standards that has been a factor of British schooling since Tony Crosland inflicted his terrible legacy.

No, It Isn't: Fisking David Cowan

2011-04-10T19:05:00.001+01:00

Although it is a practise I greatly enjoy, I don't fisk very often on this blog. This is mainly because regular fisking is really the proper domain of an attack blog, and it doesn't encourage one to develop flexibility as a writer. However, the odd one here and there can't hurt, and this piece on ConHome contrived to put me in a suitable mood.

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly about this article has me so wound up. Am I simply in tune with Clegg, and filled with rage at the author's enviable internship? Perhaps I'm simply jealous that my own submissions to ConHome (on both sides of the Atlantic) have yet to see the light of day whilst this sort of thing gets published. Maybe I just can't stand the sight of a poor argument being badly presented. Regardless of motive, let us proceed with our dissection:

The current division inside the Conservative Party is between the “Old Whigs” and the “High Tories”

This title inspired my own above. To its credit, it does serve as fair warning of what awaits.

David Cowan is an intern at the Institute for Economic Affairs and will be going to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the autumn to read History.

Just some information about the author.

There has been a public debate over the divide between “liberal conservatism” and “mainstream conservatism”. The focus has been on policy differences rather than the philosophy of the Party. If we choose to look at the philosophical outlook of the Conservative Party then a dividing line between the “Old Whigs” and the “High Tories” becomes clear.

By "public debate" I'm going to assume he means "a debate on ConHome". Whilst we're on it, I'd just like to express my contempt for 'mainstream conservatism' as a label. Like 'progressive', its a label that seeks to cast any opposition to it as instantly negative or outlandish by default, a habit I strongly dislike. Furthermore, it defines 'mainstream' as a majority opinion of Conservative activists on ConHome, which is not only a deeply unscientific sample but also smacks of a tendency to play to the party base, which is what cost us so dearly in 01 and 05.

Back on topic: the second line introduces the first flat-out mistake of the article. The idea that the debate between liberal, modernist, one nation, Thatcherite and traditional Conservatives has been about much else than the philosophy of the party is ridiculous. Policy debates have nearly always been drawn back to what faction a particular poster or Cabinet minister appeared to be from. The third line then proceeds to spell out the articles line of argument, which shall be addressed below. Suffice to say, such a dividing line does not become clear. From a writers perspective, I think the paragraph could have done with being a little longer, in order to help it flow better.

Conservative strands of thinking are firmly rooted in “love”. That is not just romantic love, but also love of companionship, love of family, love of community, love of nation, and love of God. They are the bonds between us and give meaning to our lives. It is not a view which embraces the harsh utilitarianism, brutal modernism, and rampant libertarianism of modern society. It is a view based on trust and cooperation. The state is an intruder as it denies freedom and coerces us.
Adam Smith recognised that we are not just motivated by “self interest”, but also by “sympathy” for one another. We emotionally invest ourselves in others by trying to make them happy, consoling them, or sharing their sorrow. Roger Scruton argued that Conservatism understands the human condition and recognises humanity's evolutionary nature as we develop traditions, values, and a culture which passes from one generation to the next.

These two paragraphs amount to a florid testament to traditional Conservatism and not much more, and bear little relevance to the actual argument other than letting you know which side the author is on.

The Conservative Statesman must seek to protect and articulate what the Conservative Philosopher values by focusing on family, education, and work. Of these the most important is family. It is the best social institution in which an individual can develop and be loved. For without love in our lives we cannot grow as individuals. Education also acts as a key part of our emotional development. It is the means of passing down knowledge, the appreciation of beauty, and self expression. At school we are elevated beyond our base instincts and learn about our history, culture, and morality. That is why it is essential that everyone has access to a decent education.

I debated whether it was even worth splitting this paragraph off. It is just a rather wordy exposition of the traditional Tory approach to education and the family. Four paragraphs and over three hundred words into the article, and there's no sign of Mr Cowan's argument. This is proving a dull fisk.

Once we leave education, it is important that we find a vocation which can be an act of emotional fulfilment and can give us purpose. The welfare system must allow work to pay, reward enterprise, and give independence. David Cameron has managed to abide by these principles.

I sense the David Cameron thing is the start of the actual argument, although it is presented in a novel way by opening with the supporting evidence rather than the thesis, which presumably is to follow.

The “Big Society” is at the heart of David Cameron's Conservatism. It is about cutting back the state in order to allow the voluntary bonds of community to thrive. The overbearing nature of the state has caused Britain to become a consumer society dominated by a focus on the individual's needs, alienated from our neighbours as communities become atomised, and a lack of clear meaning in our own lives. This has happened because the state coerces us into being charitable by taxing us in order to redistribute wealth and provide services.

I had been going to lump this in with the above paragraph and handwave it through, but I did spot something I took issue with. Whilst it is certainly true that the statist left destroyed many of the voluntary, mutual and co-operative bodies that were the bedrock of pre-war society, I think David is wrong to try to absolve Margaret Thatcher (who he describes as a 'High Tory', see below) and the consumer revolution of the Eighties of any blame.

Furthermore, society in general has become more individually-oriented as advances in science and communication technology broaden the scope of individual agency and lessen mutual interdependence. Tight-knit communities often lie within narrow horizons, and we simply aren't as geographically or materially restricted as previous generations were. Although without doubt a significant malefactor, sole blame for this process cannot be laid at the feet of the state.

We then conclude that we have done our bit for society and can thus focus our energies on the pursuit of our own happiness rather than the happiness of others. The “Big Society” is the means by which we can cooperate voluntarily for the public good without coercion from the state. That is not to say “self interest” is a bad thing. Adam Smith's example of the woollen coat is a classic example of how “self interest” results in mutual benefit. But, the principle of “sympathy” has been eroded away by the state.

The first sentence, presenting the argument that the philanthropic instincts and charitable mechanisms of pre-war Britain have ossified as the state usurps their functions (as argued by James Bartholomew amongst others) is solid, but the second one is puzzling. The big society (the constant scare quotes get vexing) is a means for cooperation? I always thought that a big society was the end, in pursuit of which Cameron will pass actual policies to encourage voluntarism and charitable giving. I can't see how the big society functions as a specific enabling mechanism.

The paragraph itself could also use a few improvements. First, the second and fifth sentences should be swapped (the latter losing the 'but' obviously), and the fifth sentence could perhaps even be added to the first one. As it stands, the paragraph is something of a non sequitur, as it shifts from problem to solution to counter-point within problem to problem again at the end. Re-arranging to address the problem, then the counter-example, and finally the solution is more sequacious and reads better. Also, when writing for a popular audience always explain examples, otherwise referencing Adam Smith amounts to little more than intellectual name dropping - a practise that university lecturers have no time for, apropos of nothing. Briefly summarising the woollen coat example to someone who hasn't heard of it would have taken about half a sentence.

550 words in, only three hundred to go, and still no sign of an argument. This article is resisting my fisk by studiously avoiding getting to the point.

However, David Cameron has not protected traditional Tory values. Ken Clarke's “Rehabilitation Revolution”, deep defence cuts, Constitutional vandalism, and increased European integration are the key examples. It is the erosion of the British concept of the nation state, and it is the Liberal Democrats who have forced this assault on Tory principles, thus allowing cover for ministers, like Ken Clarke, to pursue Liberal policies.

And lo! The point... has not arrived yet. That would involve Mr Cowan defining his terms and laying out his thesis, which he has completely avoided doing thus far. Nonetheless, we do now have some meat to get to grips with. It seems almost superfluous to say it, given that I imagine most of my readers are at least passingly familiar with the paleo-Conservative right, but there is little acknowledgement in this paragraph of attacks that we're in either a coalition or a recession, two things that seriously impede Mr Cameron's ability to govern as he pleases. Where the Liberal Democrats are mentioned, they are simply cover for nefarious liberals like Ken Clarke and Cameron to get away with doing nasty left-wing things. The idea that some of these might be the consequence of the necessary compromises of coalition government appear to be beyond the scope of our subject.

In terms of the actual arguments, the second sentence is a pretty standard shopping list of right-wing complaints, some of which (such as opposition to defence cuts) I share. However, I would dearly like to know how Mr Cameron - who has arguably the strongest Unionist credentials of any Conservative leader since Bonar Law took the salute of the Ulster Volunteers - is eroding the conception of the British nation-state. Setting aside the fact that I consider Britain to be a Union, not a nation (and better for it), devolution was enacted under Labour. Like many Conservatives, I would dearly like to return to the uniform rule of law across the United Kingdom - but it would be electoral suicide to pursue such a course, even if the way our regional parties have become cheerleaders for essentially nationalist projects is distasteful. Other than engaging with the devolved parliaments (which is counter-balanced at least by his commitment to the Northern Irish Conservatives) how is Cameron eroding the UK? I don't know, Cowan doesn't tell me.

However, the tide may start to turn as the recent motion on prisoners' right to vote and other Tory rebellions have proved. The “High Tories” are seeking to reassert the Tory principles of the Rule of Law, National Security, and Parliamentary Sovereignty. They have their roots in the reactionary wing of the Party which has produced a minority of the Conservative Party’s leaders, though its most prominent alumni are Lord Salisbury, Lord Curzon, and, arguably, Margaret Thatcher.

There are so many things going wrong in this paragraph, its hard to know where to begin. Lets start with the most glaringly obvious: Margaret Thatcher was not a High Tory, and was anything but a "reactionary". It was her election, supported by the 'Peasant's Revolt' of the backbenchers, that finally finished what Heath had started in killing off what little remained of the old High Tory tradition within the party mainstream. I'd be interested to see who else Mr Cowan considers a High Tory leader of the party, because as it stands he seems to simply use the term to mean 'right wing' and 'unyielding'.

Which brings me on to the second point. The contrast between the 'Old Whigs' and the 'High Tories' is supposed to have been the main thrust of this article. The paragraph above this one began with 'However' and then proceeded to outline Mr Cowan's case against Cameron and other liberally-inclined Conservatives. This should have been developed, and the use of the label 'Whig' justified. Instead, after one short paragraph of criticism, we have another sentence starting with 'However' and the narrative chicanes, bringing us to the second half of a criminally under-developed argument and a description of the 'reactionary' counter-attack. Given the author's obvious sympathies, we can hope that this side gets a little more meat on the bones.

They believe in the moral values expostulated by David Cameron but their loyalties to British tradition, culture, and patriotism are much deeper. They vehemently reject the modern Liberal consensus that David Cameron and the modernizers have sought to accommodate. This struggle between the “Old Whigs” and the “High Tories” may well define the course of this Parliament.

Right, I'll be brief to spare repetition. The traits described in the first sentence are not equivalent to High Toryism as it is commonly understood, being more in line with the 'Faith, Flag and Family' mantra of the Cornerstone Group. Mr Cowan continues to provide no justification for his appropriation of the label. No analysis is given for why the struggle between his two mislabelled groups may define the future of this parliament or the party, although this is what the article is supposed to be about according to its own title.

As for the 'liberal consensus' thing, I have two serious problems with it. The more immediate one is that we didn't win a majority. Maybe if we'd won a few more seats we could have been cutting deals with the Democratic Unionists and it would have produced a more socially conservative - although decidedly less stable - coalition, but Cameron had to play the hand he'd been dealt and he did so brilliantly. There is nothing particularly admirable about a platoon of die-hard true believers in very safe seats undermining the first government we've formed in thirteen years, jeopardising the careers of their more marginally-seated colleagues and the future of the party.

More importantly, the people who resist this 'liberal consensus' have already accepted the last one, and all the ones before that. Furthermore, they represent the sort of party faction whose defeat is always necessary for the party to survive. The great, enduring genius of the Conservative Party has been to continue as an electoral force through reforms and social changes that the left assumed would kill it. The Great Reform Act 1932, the defeat of the Lords in 1911, universal male suffrage and female suffrage, all were forecast as the death knell of our party. We survived by adapting, by accommodating change and continuing to reflect the wishes of the British people. When we abandon this policy for dogmatism - as Labour did in the Eighties - the result is certain disaster.

Referring back to Cowan's short paragraph on Cameron's 'Whig' betrayal, how far back to you take 'traditional Tory values'? In its long history the Conservative Party has supported homosexuality being criminal, the disenfranchisement of women and the poor, placed the interests of the land-owning few above the lives of millions starving in Ireland, and various other policies ranging from the distasteful to the detestable. Were they not once 'traditional Tory values' too?

David Cameron is very much an “Old Whig” Conservative in the tradition of Burke, rather than a “High Tory” Conservative in the tradition of Lord Salisbury. He has sought to take Conservative values into the 21st century by placing the focus on family and community, and by reforming education and welfare.
However, we have also witnessed his willingness to allow the erosion of Tory principles in order to appease the tensions of coalition politics. This is where the dividing line lies. The “Old Whigs” who wish to protect traditional values but also to accommodate with the Liberal consensus, and the “High Tories” who wish to conserve the British Nation State and a traditional way of life.

Finally, in the final two paragraphs, we get some form of explanation paid to what the title talks about. Fascinatingly, we see that Cowan appears to simply equate 'Whig' - sorry, always 'Old Whig' for some reason, as if there were new Whigs - with liberal. Let's take a quick look at what Whig ideology actually consisted off. Wikipedia lists their core ideological tenets as: classical liberalism, constitutional monarchism, rule of law and 'radicalism' (which equates to such things as demanding freedom of the press and the universal franchise). By those standards I, along with the vast bulk of the Thatcherite wing of the party, are 'Whigs'. Given that whatever definition of Whig Cowan is using covers Burke, that group extends to the vast majority of the party. The rest are social conservatives and perhaps those with authoritarian tendencies. I doubt we have any High Tories outside the Lords.

In summary, this is at best an inconsequential piece. What argument there is is presented backwards, as the reader encounters evidence to support points that aren't made until the end of the article. The core thesis is under-developed, with a substantial body of the article dedicated to an homage to traditional conservatism entirely beside the supposed point. Cowan frames his entire argument around the appropriation of Eighteenth Century political labels without ever taking the time to update them to a Twenty-First Century context, leaving them worthless if not flat-out inaccurate. The attempt to create a niche for the article by claiming that nobody has yet discussed the philosophical differences between liberal and traditional conservatism betrays either ignorance of the broader debate the author presumes to comment upon, or breathtaking hubris.

If we pare this article down to its core argument, all it says is 'traditional and liberal conservatives don't get on', 'Cameron has compromised for power' and 'I am a traditional conservative'. None of the other arguments are substantiated enough to warrant inclusion in such a summary. Thus this article manages to spend eight hundred words contributing next to nothing to the debate on the future of the Conservative Party.

The May Elections Beg the Question: Were the Liberal Democrats ever viable as a concept?

2011-04-09T01:00:00.005+01:00

The Liberal Democrats are often compared to the German Free Democratic Party, both by party supporters and outside observers. On the face of things, it is an attractive comparison. Both are liberal third parties in systems with big, dominant parties of the left and right. Furthermore, the way the FDP operate in Germany's political system is the way that Liberal Democrats have said they want to operate for a long time: a balancing act, working to check the illiberal elements of both major parties and quite capable of cooperating with either of them in government. Indeed, this idea goes back beyond the formation of the Liberal Democrats and can be found in the rhetoric of the Alliance at the 1987 General Election, as this famous PPB demonstrates (jump to about six minutes in).

However, watching the latest travails of the Lib Dems I'm not convinced that the parallel is particularly exact. This article by ConHome, in the latter half at least, encapsulates quite nicely the role that the FDP play in German politics. It is a centrist, genuinely liberal party that stands up for social justice in right-wing governments and market-economics in left-wing ones. A contributing factor to its current woes is that it hasn't managed to persuade Chancellor Merkel to make the tax cuts, as Tim Montgomerie writes:

"Part of the reason for the decline of the FDP has been Westervelle's failure to convince Merkel to prioritise supply-side tax cuts over and above her cautious fiscal conservatism. Lower taxes had been such a defining selling point for the FDP that a failure to deliver them has hurt Westervelle's partly very badly."

This does not sound much like the Liberal Democrats to me. Set aside some of the hugely capable right-of-centre liberals amongst the leadership, and the story of the first year of coalition has been just how uncomfortable the bulk of the party, including an overwhelming majority of the grassroots membership, is when working with the Conservatives. Every Liberal and Liberal Democrat leader alive today (save the one they presently have) admits that their hearts lie with Labour, that they viewed Labour as their natural partner, and that they viewed a 'realignment of the centre left' as one of the main goals of their party. One Liberal Democrat councillor rather tellingly recounted that they were a party "largely of social liberals, led by largely economic liberals." That division is significant.

Personally, I define as an economic and social liberal. By that I mean I'm liberal on economic issues (low taxation, strong private sector) and largely liberal on social issues (same-sex marriage, permissive society etc.). But the definition of Social Liberalism provided by the Social Liberal Forum is rather different. Their article explicitly divides the social strain of liberalism from the economic. You can't be both, and the majority of the membership are certainly the former.

This begs the obvious question: can the Liberal Democrats operate in the 'balancing' way they claim they want to, and could they ever? I've mooted before that the two wings of the Liberal Democrats would serve their respective causes much better from within the two main parties. However, while I argued that the separate, faux-third position party was far from the most effective means by which its various components could enact their policy agendas, I did not go so far as to argue that the party might actually be an unworkable concept. Now, I'm beginning to think that may be the case.

Since their foundation and before, all the way back to the Alliance, the Liberal Democrats have been a 'nice idea'. Good, decent, ordinary people, as uncorrupted by power as they were remote from it, who would promise you a utopian tomorrow if ever they got into power at Westminster whilst getting on with fixing your potholes or saving your library. They attracted a diverse spectrum of support and, much like a multi-faceted mirror, to some extent reflected back the political ideals and aspirations of any given supporter, allowing them to appeal to people from classical liberals to very left-wing non-authoritarian socialist types. As a protest party model, it was strong, and they managed to rebuild from six seats to nearly sixty over the course of half a century. Unlike governments, they didn't need to alienate anybody by taking actual decisions. I address this more fully in point three here.

Government, the ultimate stress-test of any political product, has opened up some glaring weaknesses. Key to these is the fact that the party lacks a distinctive third position, and its disparate elements don't balance each other out to create one. In short, the social liberals are far too strong amongst the wider party, and this lies behind the key problems the party faces now.

The overwhelmingly left-wing make up of their pre-election support presents them with a problem on two fronts. The first is with the right. They can't really go into coalition with the Conservatives without alienating much of this support, not to mention a lot of existential angst amidst even the upper echelons of the party hierarchy. As a result, the Liberal Democrats look to be facing serious defeats in both England and the Celtic nations. Their party lacks the experience of being unpopular, and appears increasingly to lack the discipline to cope with this new sensation.

If the Liberal Democrats can't cooperate with the right, then that opens up a second, even more fundamental problem: why do they exist at all? If their sole ambition is a 're-alignment of the centre left' and permanent coalition with Labour, then why not just be Labour? Is the party really nothing more than a clever left-wing branding exercise designed to win southern seats? Does it aspire simply to be a federal constituent of a united parliamentary left, in the same way that the Conservatives once sat with National Liberals and Scottish and Ulster Unionists up until the mid-sixties? As the fate of those parties has demonstrated, at the end of that road lies absorption.

Nick Clegg has an interesting few years ahead of him. He'll have to try to maintain the leadership and hold the party on course as the rigours of government wash away those Liberal Democrat gains that have, over the years, been built on the soft sand of permanent opposition. His challenge is not just to survive, but to demonstrate that the party is capable of behaving credibly in coalition with the Conservatives, and to ensure that it remains a place where he, Liberal Vision and other Orange Bookers can organise and effect change on the nation. If he loses, if Chris Huhne seizes his job and the party pulls out of coalition in a fit of left-wing petulance, it will discredit the Liberal Democrats not only as a party of government, but as a concept.

Manifesto, or memorial?

Dilettante for Manchester Council!

2011-04-06T23:26:00.000+01:00

A distant dream, of course, but nevertheless I'm standing for the Conservative and Unionist Party for the ward of Chorlton Park in the Manchester City Council elections. My dissertation is due two days before polling, so I don't envision a very long campaign, but you never know.

Pleasing as that is, there are a few things I would like to change about the way the party conducts itself vis-a-vis local candidates and elections in the future.

1) The below image, first seen at last years conference, has effectively become the emblem of the Conservative Party. It is far superior to the old tree logo. Please hurry up and register it so that it can appear beside our names on ballot papers across the land.

2) The official name of our party is the Conservative and Unionist Party. Whilst the latter half of that might matter to some of us more than others, the fact remains that it is our official party name and we should be free to use it. Not having it registered to appear on the ballot outside Scotland is a disgrace.

3) I addressed it not many posts ago when discussing the state of the Conservative youth movement, but the party really, really needs to give its members a little more leeway. When I filled in the candidacy forms I was given advice on precisely what I should and should not fill in on the ballot paper. I was not allowed to indicate how I would like to appear on the ballot (Conservative & Unionist, obviously) or even how I would prefer my forenames to appear (although I did that anyway). Maybe its just a different political culture, but the Liberal Democrats at least trusted and respected their candidates enough to let them fill out their own forms in full. I just found being a candidate a remarkably dis-empowering process.

Still, I can't complain too much - I have now got my name on Wikipedia, at least. One thing that fascinates me is why Manchester has no Conservative presence any more, even in wealthy areas that used to return them, whereas other cities like Birmingham have seen a Conservative recovery since the Nineties. Topic for another article, perhaps.