SOCIETY: Poor language
Poverty of expression
Who’s helping whom?
Let me give you a headline here — the new Labour project is dead.
Mr Blair may stay in Downing Street for a couple more years but his mission is over.
His Third Way has reached the end of the road.— Iain Duncan Smith, ‘A fair deal for everyone’, Conservative Spring Conference
As the chances are, what with one thing and another, that Mr Blair will be staying in Downing Street for at least a while longer, what should we make of the Tory leader’s historical take on the first few years of Blairism? Well there’s the thing: was there any Blairism? Which is to say, was there a project? or a mission? or even, come to that, a third way? A tempting answer to this one, variably phrased question is that of course there wasn’t. The only sense in which there was a ‘project’ was in that quasi-Tory seeking after power for its own sake which a narrow clique round Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have engaged in for more than a decade now. Communitarian, progressive and post-Social Democratic rhetoric have, in between consistent — and quite astonishingly vulgar — outbursts of right wing populism, abounded. But in terms of getting on and governing, the continuity in policy between this government and its predecessor is striking. Save for the fact that, with a secure parliamentary majority, Tony Blair has done things John Major would never have dreamt of attempting.
This suspicion — that there hasn’t in truth been much in the way of Blairism either attempted, or attractively paraded in front of the electorate — is surely further informed by the fact that whatever pretensions there were to a third way, they’ve now been very firmly dropped by the regime. So it’s sadly inevitable that today, when even ‘new Labour’ don’t mouth Third Way platitudes, the poor old Conservative leadership thinks it has hit upon on the next big thing. Or, as we will all too easily see, the last big thing. Could mouthing pseudo-Blairite rhetoric do the official opposition the same amount of good it did the Labour party in opposition? This depends, leaving to one side the skill with which it is done, on what one thinks the benefit to Labour, between 1994 and 1997, of this rhetoric actually was. The odds are that a mistaken causal relationship has been inferred, and that in fact Tony Blair didn’t become Prime Minister because he used to say the sort of stuff as leader of the opposition that Mr Duncan Smith is trying to say now. The proof of that will be the electoral outcome of essays in banality like ‘a fair deal for everyone’, but the signs are already there to be seen, and they are not good.
Fairness: the God that Failed
What do Conservatives do after Christianity? To suggest that Christianity, in any of its practical and applied forms, should still be the basis of such social policies as the party needs to have is to invite not derision, still less, extreme scepticism, but merely bafflement. There is neither an appreciation of formal Christian faith amongst sufficient Conservative politicians, nor an awareness of how Christianity qua democracy could meaningfully be pursued by those who do know, for this to stand any chance of being the contemporary Tory response to welfarism, urban decay, moral confusion, or any of our other diagnosed societal ailments. And in truth, it’s been like this for a long time. When the Edwardian Unionist Social Reform Committee contemplated possible, politically constructive British responses to, for example, post-Bismarckian social policy, they did not seek to follow the lead given by MPs like Lord Hugh Cecil. ‘Linky’, although concerned as anyone in Parliament for the ‘condition of the British working man’, thought the best that could be done to improve their lives was to go among them and urge them to lead more Godly lives. Thus even in age when personal improvement was still broadly defined in terms other than just the strictly material, it was felt by practising Conservative politicians that Christianity could not be the realistic basis of an effective social policy.
In some ways a kind of guilt at this stance — the perceived inapplicability of Christian belief to democratic social policy — has mutated among Conservatives into an angry resentment at the Church. It is grimly instructive to consider the witless abuse that Conservative MPs will hurl at Christian ministers who intrude into spheres no longer properly theirs. ‘Faith in the Cities’ served in the high Thatcherite noon of the 1980s as a splendid opportunity for backbench Tory MPs to instruct bishops to stick to religion, whilst they, presumably, would stick to politics, and never the twain should meet. This perplexing attitude is still the dominant doctrinal belief among MPs from all parties. The recent war in Iraq was again cause for politicians to stake out territory which was, apparently, theirs to dilate upon, but definitively off grounds for clerics. Yet as always seems to be the case, the elected scrutineers of the managerial state can of course adopt the garments of the clergy and make moral pronouncements themselves — up to and including legislating such opinions into statute law. There is indeed in public discourse a determination, shared by professional politicians and media alike, to deny ordained Christians a voice of any sort, for their claims, obviously and inevitably, trump those of the first two classes. Simply put: Christian arguments are too conceptually dangerous to be entertained by most contemporary politicians and journalists.
Are any of the arguments that Mr Duncan Smith is currently employing, discernibly Christian?
Our party — the party of Burke, Disraeli and Shaftesbury — fulfils its greatest purpose when it upholds fairness for every person in Britain.
Christians, self-evidently, can uphold, practise, sympathise with and esteem ‘fairness’, but it naturally would be a mistake to conflate fairness with Christianity per se. The two are not one and same thing. One is tempting, and rhetorically appealing, to advocate as a political objective, when one has given up, or written off as implausible, pursuit of the other.
Where then, as it seems to be the rock on which contemporary Tory social policy is being built, can fairness get us? Not very far; not, at least, if the goal is to gain more votes. Though with the inscrutable Mr Duncan Smith, it is hard to be sure that that is the point of the game.
Truth telling
In a recent interview with The Guardian’s Jackie Ashley, Mr Duncan Smith allowed this unfortunate women to take away the impression that, ‘he has, he says, spent a lot of time quietly visiting deprived estates, without the media, from the East End of London to Manchester, Glasgow and Bradford’. Let us imagine for a moment that this were in some sense ‘true’, that Mr Duncan Smith, far from being unusually covetous of hearth and home, in fact enjoys nothing more than squeezing in extra engagements in deprived areas of the country. Do try, for it’s essential in understanding why, even in its own limited terms, this hardly constitutes a social policy competent to fight that offered by the Labour government.
What would be the purpose of such visits? Clearly not to keep ‘quiet’ about them (for if that were the objective, well then Mr Duncan Smith wouldn’t be telling journalists interviewing him about them, would he?) It is of course possible that Mr Duncan Smith has here committed a sin well recognised by his own church — that of doing good, to a greater or lesser degree, for the sake of being seen to be doing good. Hence the ‘I do a lot of visiting the shiftless, but I don’t really like to talk about it: show her the pictures Mike’ moment. This, however, still leaves us with the conundrum of what ‘good’ Mr Duncan Smith thinks he is doing — for he inescapably considers these visitations to have some moral consequence — by appearing among the poor and dispossessed.
Is the good being done by him, to them? Or by doing this to them, is he doing some good to himself? If he believes in the former, we can assume that the Tory leader sees himself as an exemplary figure, that to behold him is to encourage uplift amidst the underclass. Therefore the more of these sly visits he can get in, the more good could be done to Britain’s damaged social fabric. On the other hand, it could be that Mr Duncan Smith has concluded that personal exposure to the unfortunate somehow makes him a better person. This is almost certainly the case (that he believes this), for it ties in neatly with the inevitable tendency of all party leaders to seek to morph into their parties. In other words, in these lonely moments of social concern, Mr Duncan Smith, in a very real sense, visits the poor on behalf of all Conservatives. He slums it so that we might not, as it were. Truly he is the poorest of the poor. I labour the point, but only because the sheer pointlessness of this exercise overwhelms me. Either it has the stated moral component claimed for it, or it is a calculated exercise in voter appeal. The latter is an entirely admirable undertaking, and is to be judged solely on the grounds of effectiveness. There is no evidence available to support the claim that visits to the poor, publicised or otherwise, by a British party leader, will increase his party’s popular standing. None. Not a jot — so we’re left with morality, and honestly, the score there’s not looking very hot thus far.
Not unreasonably we must begin to suspect that ‘a fair deal for everyone’ is still another flawed element to the ‘nasty party’ analysis. That by offering the former, however fraudulently, we will endeavour to sponge away the stain of the latter, no matter how ludicrous and self-defeating this critique has turned out to be. That it would be stupid to ape ‘the language of Labour’, even New Labour, in order to attain electoral support, precisely at the moment when, regardless of what importance that language had in achieving office, the government is resolutely abandoning it, is Mayism in action. That such specifics as this agenda might seriously have will in no way alleviate even the concerns it seeks to address, perfectly encapsulates the failure of government-led social policy in the twentieth century.
There really is another way
‘I want to be the party for the poor’ enthused Mr Duncan Smith to Mrs Andrew Marr. We will allow the errors of syntax to displace any Messianic notions inherent in this statement: most probably Iain Duncan Smith does not wish himself to be a party, but for the Tory party instead to become ‘the party for the poor’. Becoming being the essential movement to apprehend — for assuredly Mr Duncan Smith believes that we are not presently or recently that party. ‘Now, whether we are perceived’, the Conservative leader continued to Ms. Ashley, ‘by the people who are in that category as their party, that’s by the by. My view is that we must do what’s right’. We can all admire the du haut en bas tone, and it does rather settle any arguments as to what particular stripe of social concern Mr Duncan Smith is going to favour when he comes to power: the poor are going to have good (or ‘right’) done to them, whether they like it or not. But is he? is he truly, for whatever reason, and with whatever degree of political utility for the party, going to do good by or to the poor? Who knows, but since his concern is quintessentially for their material state of well-being, as opposed to the poor’s moral health, this is the test by which his policies stand and fail.
That any Tory must believe that Iain Duncan Smith will fail the poor is evident in his weirdest statement of all to Jackie Ashley: ‘it’s widening; it’s wider than it was 13 years ago’. The Congo? Saveloys in Strutton Ground? It’s impossible absolutely to know from what Jackie Ashley has written, but this remark would appear to relate to Mr Duncan Smith having ‘been struck by recent reports that, for all Labour’s great drive on poverty [sic], “there’s been no improvement”’.
Hopefully it is not an unfair guess that what has appalled the Tory leader is that the fabled ‘gap between rich and poor’ has ‘widened’. This, it would now seem, is intrinsically a Bad Thing. Whereas in the 1980s we knew and believed that it was an irrelevant thing, that though different income distribution curves were liable to have different societal implications in different places at different times, the fact of there being such a curve was neither here nor there. In fact, the starker among us argued that a prime purpose of the party was to defend (and thereby account for) such inequality. Whatever we thought about ‘the gap’, we knew that it was impossible for it simply to be inherently wrong. Children could have told you that: if everyone, rich and poor alike, became 10% richer, was this to be deemed morally less agreeable than the poor alone becoming 5% richer, and thus the ‘gap’ decreasing? The point forcibly, even tastelessly made by Mrs Thatcher was that, if all you’re concerned about is making the poor less materially poor, then the money has to come from somewhere. In the 80s, as we all remember, it trickled down, after having been created by those who create wealth. Or as the Prime Minister more pungently put it, ‘the Good Samaritan was only able to be good because he had money to spare’.
It will be noted that the definition of this crusade is pre-eminently material: let’s try and make, through state intervention, those currently badly off, not quite so badly off. This is the end in itself. All other goods that such a policy might by implied to entail are presumed to stem from this one achievement. To talk up a politician-led crusade to make the morally wretched less so is an undertaking even Tony Blair, with all his gifts, blanches at. That the language of right and wrong, of good and not-good, has been appropriated by Mr Duncan Smith to explain why we should make the poor richer is an elision to be expected but not admired. For it will neither make the cause at hand either righteous in itself, nor does it mystically transform it into being an effective means of winning back lost support. A trite cause, is still that, no matter how it’s dressed up. We can’t help the poor more than they can help themselves; attempting this foolishness won’t do us any political good. We knew that when we won elections.
John Rugby's next article will be on his Alpha course
John Rugby, May 19, 2003 11:38 PM