POLITICS: How can the Tory party be saved?
Gay marriage, obviously
ERO’s editorial comment
You’ve heard it all before
In the lapidary words of the Court Circular yesterday:
The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith, MP, was received in audience by The Queen today upon relinquishing his appointment as Leader of the Opposition.
And so that ends, though the unique gifts Mr Duncan Smith brought to the life of the nation are still, it would seem, going to be on show, in one venue or another. Today marks a different anniversary: the last time a Leader of the Tory party, capable of taking the party from opposition back into government, was put in place. And this remains the sole question worth asking of Michael Howard: is he to be the next one to take the party back into power? Have we a winner on our hands? Not much about winning or losing the next general elections is actually in the hands of the official opposition, but what it can affect at the margins is how it is perceived. In the hands of the current leadership is an opportunity to create the virtuous circle of self-belief that will come from Mr Howard looking like a winner, of him seeming credible as a Prime Minister. To that end, this week was delivered, to the Portilloite think tank Policy Exchange, the speech of a man looking to govern. Whatever the specifics, the tone is clear: these are the words of a man capable of office. Unfortunately, however — and how appropriate that this truth should be illuminated in a temple of modernisation — Mr Howard’s future is in fact his past, and his past points up very clearly why it’s not going to be him who next takes the Conservative party back into Downing Street.
In terms of the reaction to this speech, the silliest response has been to allege that ‘this was a speech Iain Duncan Smith could never have delivered’. Sadly he not merely could, but by the end, it would have amounted to one of his more consistently right wing efforts. That the chief headlines it garnered concerned ‘gay marriage’ probably says more about an endearing national predilection for giggling about homosexuality than it does about any hugely conscious intention by those who had to present it to the press. But as we’ll see, it’s hardly the case that the soft under belly of Labour’s support was being hit hard and often by this speech, and that sadly this was ignored in favour of trivia like Mr Howard’s personal endorsement of civil partnerships. What is evident from this speech, and the programme it aims to advance, is that neither sparkle nor revisionism, nor even adequate triangulation are the ways Mr Howard is going to take us forward. Instead his technique is going to be incrementalism tempered by opportunism. The chief outcome of this strategy as applied to an opponent as formidable as Tony Blair is that we are going to retard our electoral opportunities, and probably spend a full extra parliament away from a majority. This speech puts the next Tory Prime Minister out of office for probably the better part of a decade.
Big Enders & Little Enders
If the point of the speech was to listen to what Mr Howard said, there was a lot in it that was blandly unexceptional, and thus to be praised. Indeed positively Redwoodian passages about ‘sunset clauses’ for all new legislation reek of the fermented produce of Tory think tanks whose occupants are now a long way away from being pseudo-civil servants. No one could usefully disagree with any of that, even if the stale animadversions against ‘red tape’ are themselves habitually undercut by the solutions this speech mostly supposes. In other words, what is red tape other than regulation, whether centrally enforced or not? What solutions, masquerading as ‘setting the people free’, does the party time after time come up with? Why yet more regulatory imposts, but this time supposedly biased in favour of ‘freedom’. Instead of the freedom which comes from removing regulation, the official opposition instinctively wishes simply to replace those of the Labour government with those which would theoretically be cooked under by a Tory government. As we will see, for all the talk of bloated government, nowhere are specifics offered of where government will be removed from people’s lives, as distinct from the rather less satisfactory palliative of it being ‘transformed’ through virtue of being administered by Tories.
One especially gruesome example of this tendency in action comes in the dismal field of education policy. There is not a solitary inkling that under someone like Tim Yeo Tory policy will ever result in state schools being anything other than just so. Keeping them as wards of the state, rather than unleashing them as genuinely voluntary, autonomous and private institutions has grisly and inescapable consequences. Yet before we consider these, we should reflect on the sorry world of cliché a functioning democratic politician like Mr Howard feels he has to operate in. For windy even by the standards of British party political discourse was his necessary declaration that parents ‘want the best educational opportunities for their children’ when patently they do not. This, at best, is nervous bourgeois drivel; in truth, it is facetious, patronisingly dishonest nonsense designed to amuse the political class whilst they go about their managerial obligations. This whilst they protect their educational requirements just as they correctly disdain the lack of ambition displayed by those beneath them. In a phrase, it is precisely why Michael Howard’s fondness for grammar schools neither extended to sending his own son to one as opposed to Eton, nor to his making, for example, the dangerously brave case anywhere in this speech for their reintroduction. That ‘most’ parents see education either for themselves or their offspring as no more that crowd control is evident even to our politicians on their limited visits to their largely unlettered homes.
Paying obeisance to the idea that out of the sixty millions living in this country any more than a very generously estimated five million care two hoots about ‘education’, either for its own sake, or as a functional means towards economic advancement, is not the most rigorously observed lie in British politics (affecting to believe that most people vote rationally, and do so in possession of some semblance of factual knowledge probably is, and we can all see why politicians feel they have to do that). Education though remains that trickiest of subjects for Tories, precisely because in their own personal lives (vide Michael Howard) they have the issue ‘solved’ to whatever degree they care to, thus any genuine sense of engagement with voters is comprehensively absent. The Tory leader made great play of education as a theme throughout his speech. Both as far as what it did for him, and what he was of course going to one day do to it. These latter thoughts embodied all the most alarming notions Tory MPs peering at state schools can contrive to think. With easily the most horrendous being the notion that teachers should be ‘given more powers’, and that ‘legally-enforceable, tough home-school contracts’ would be anything other than a fundamental misapprehension of which way round this relationship should be working. That this contradicts completely the notion of empowering the individual, unless that individual in this instance happens to be the state-employed producer as opposed to the private individual consuming the ineptly produced public good, is neither here nor there it would seem.
Perhaps we should pause briefly to think on Lord Salisbury? In their chapter on the Great Marquess in the reliably entertaining Conservative Essays, Andrew Jones and Michael Bentley, make a, for some, startling observation about what his thought entailed:
The ‘enlightened’ landlord who, from a sense of duty, exercised ‘an edifying discipline’ over his cottagers, was, to Salisbury, grossly infringing their personal liberties. Neither should the legislator trespass. Legislation had for Salisbury a more unequivocal capacity for inflicting injury than for imparting benefit: in the moral mechanism of society he valued corporate or mutual charity, was sceptical of personal lay influence and disparaged the action of external authority.
That most contemporary politicians do willingly act as an egregiously pious clerisy may well be the unavoidable consequence of democratic politics, but what good it actually does them in terms of vote-mongering is open to doubt. Obliging parents to raise their children according to the dictates of the sort of people who end up teaching in Britain today is not likely to be an intelligent way forward. Though, understandably enough, no detail is entered into in this speech, there are many perils which await merely freeing state schools within the aegis of the state system, rather than conclusively divorcing them from it. Not the least of these is what happens too often in the United States. There, the governance of stand-alone but ultimately state-funded schools is subject to the nexus of a shifting parental electorate versus the ever present, Union-enforced power of the permanent staff. Regardless of whether ‘education’ is a good or even desired thing, preaching the virtues of the individual controlling his and his family’s life, whilst preparing to hand key aspects of it over to, for instance, teaching unions, lacks foresight. But more than anything else, it of course lacks care.
The prime of an angry young man
Much of this speech, and not just in its emphasis upon the educational, was meant to be exemplary — we were intended to divine Tory truths from the character and life story of Mr Howard. That’s why we learnt about his youthful ardour for hateful meritocracy (is there anything more cruel or self-serving?) and it’s why he was at pains to remind us of the general application of his personal lessons. Some of these parables were confused at best. Take the nation: sometimes we the British were praised for our still fertile imagination and creativity, whilst simultaneously it turns out that we have been exposed to generations of vigour-sapping big-government welfarism. Here we would learn that ‘change happens at incredible speed’ and government fails by not reacting quickly enough to it, there we would learn that Mr Howard himself has remained ‘absolutely constant’ as far as his ‘principles and convictions’ are concerned for fully forty years. A remarkable claim, to be sure, and all the more impressive for the sotto voce expression much of them must have found over, in particular, the last twenty years.
Inevitably, some of the ripest tosh came on what should be something Michael Howard can speak on more fluently and coherently than virtually all his fellow countrymen: namely societal relationships. Or to put that more prettily, what it means to be British. Despite the big state of now more than half a century crushing the life out of us [speech passim], we do, oddly enough, at least have ‘a richer culture thanks to the greater diversity that Britain now boasts’. Yet where really does Michael Howard, as an individual, stand on the vexed issue of accentuated differences as compared to assimilation? What has he done? Why aren’t they any synagogues left in Llanelli? Was the best thing for him personally to become an anglicised resident of London, or would the diversity of Greater Britain have been better served by the maintenance of an undoubted variegation his Welsh childhood home had but now lacks? These are troubling, involved questions which it must be terribly tempting to bypass by reaching for speechwriters’ auto-formulae in preference to whatever life has offered thus far.
Foreshadowing what is going to be the biggest problem the Tory party faces at the next two elections, there were times when it was blatantly obvious that no serious effort is going to be made to counter Tony Blair where has already outflanked us. Even the Prime Minister no longer simply resorts to inane offerings like everyone in the NHS ‘wanting the best’ when he can instead advert to the ‘lashes he bears on his back’ in trying to deal with those employed by it. A failure to attack the unpopular, where Tony Blair has already begun to do so, simply concedes in advance whole avenues for possible electoral gain. It’s what, in their desire to suck up to dissatisfied public sector employees suffering under long term ‘left wing governments, ‘right wing’ oppositions did in Australian and New Zealand in the 80s, and have done without success in Canada in the 90s too — and it is not a direction the Tory party here should sensibly follow. Mewling platitudes about the NHS will not obviate our problems in this field, rather they will reinforce them. Again, here we clearly can see the demerits of ‘nice’ Michael Howard, as opposed to what the nasty old one could be doing for the party, where he still with us.
What’s there to like?
Naturally, it’s possible to take some very cheap shots at the agenda set out in this speech. Notably, if Michael Howard (he of the unchanging principles) genuinely believed in nebulous notions of some form of popular control over the Police, why, during the four years he was Home Secretary, did he not take a single, even rhetorical, step in this direction? At one stage his family had ‘no advantages’, at another, he wants us all to have ‘the opportunities’ they did. Some of the speech’s flaws are merely those that come from poor scripting. It’s nothing more complicated than intellectual laziness which accounts for oppositional tropes such as, ‘what holds too many people back, is the one thing that's supposed to help them grow: the State’. When, obviously, if there was any internal consistency to this message, it would be precisely that the role of the state is to neither hinder nor help: it’s about individual self-reliance. Other weaknesses are those of forgivable politesse (Francis Maude’s ‘dynamism’, & etcetera), but we have to keep coming back to Michael Howard’s idea of the good.
No doubt it is unavoidable for leaders of the opposition to mouth, albeit from the lips of their parents, rubbish like ‘it does not matter what you do when you grow up as long as you do it to the best of your ability’. But does it, to any conceivable point of utility, actually connect? When next Michael Howard claps eyes on some voters, how many of those who gaze vaguely back at him does he imagine truly are voyaging through life, doing everything to the best of their ability? How many people do we suppose whom, after, before or during their contemplation of Michael Howard are otherwise engaged getting by, drifting along, making do, putting on a brave face? To anyone other than a politician making a speech what proportion of the British population is actually lunatic enough to go through life doing everything to the best of its ability? Would there be maybe ten thousand people doing this? Could we advocate a register for them? If we wanted to seek a point of reference with the British electorate, hitting the emotional bases of slacking and hassle evasion would be hugely more pertinent. But this, ineluctably, is to be negative, and we should never try that.
After trying to avoid it, we do reluctantly have to come to what the media has deemed to be the most noteworthy thing about the speech: gay marriage. ERO has already expressed its predictable opposition to this, chiefly on grounds of clerical obscurantism, but God knows, we may as well do it again.
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The Single Most Important Issue in Politics Today
We have to start with a question: why, as he repeats in this speech, does Michael Howard believe ‘conventional marriage’ is ‘best’? Is the source for this opinion of his idle prejudice? Or perhaps it stems from deference to prescribed custom? Does it alternatively arise out of some utilitarian calculation informed by frightening social statistics? Or is it possibly due to some moral precept he observes (though the basis of which he keeps hidden from public view)? We cannot say, because Michael Howard neither tells us why it is that he thinks ‘conventional marriage’ is ‘best’, nor what, in this context, best amounts to. These then are the unsure foundations on which his proffered and much-hyped support for gay marriage, but no, we should of course correct ourselves, ‘civil partnerships’ rests upon.
This mystery brings us onto the joyfully silly substance of his support. We should sorrowfully note that this support is evinced solely though Mr Howard’s personal intention to vote for the Labour government’s measure on a free vote (he, as party leader, doing the freeing of course). It is hard not to wonder if this weaselish route is entirely becoming: if this all makes sense, and is worthy of having your press creatures assiduously trail through the media, why exactly isn’t it party policy? That to one side, here, despite the above-noted superiority of proper marriage, is why Michael Howard supports civil partnerships:
But [now] many couples choose not to marry. And more and more same sex couples want to take on the shared responsibilities of a committed relationship.
So he proposes to palm them off with ‘not quite as good as marriage, but it will do for them’. Yet this statement begs so many questions, which not even a casual effort has been to supply answers for. Why does the Tory leader suppose so many couples now are not marrying? Is this actually the case, is the incidence of marriage in a sustained free-fall, as opposed to the sad fact that divorce rates have historically accelerated? If it is the case that fewer people now marry, given his stated support for the ‘best’ thing, i.e. real or first class marriage, are we to take it that, logically enough, he is opposed to this developing tendency in modern life? If he’s opposed, why does he respond to self-evident societal failure by seeking to legislate it out of sight, by deeming non-marriage to be, hey statutory-presto, a sort of marriage after all? More than anything else, the most uninspiring thing about this dissimulation is the cant, e.g. ‘same sex couples’ which means in fact gay couples, and not, for example, cottage sharing spinster sisters, or, ‘committed relationships’, whose responsibilities are to be effaced by civil partnerships, when what the phrase is directly equated with is, of course, marriage. In the end, he can’t say what he means, because he doesn’t mean what he says.
At it’s most fundamental, as previously argued here, if the Tory leader has established what passes for a fact (how?) and gay couples, having hitherto eschewed marital leanings now yearn for something approximating to this status, why will it only ever be this pitiful imitation of marriage he grants them? If there’s a case for gay marriage, it’s for marriage tout court, and not for the bureaucratic equivalent of a swimming proficiency badge.
Moreover, it’s serial dishonesty to pretend, as Mr Howard in full ‘freeing the people’ vein does, that supporting these miserable ‘civil partnerships’ removes ‘a barrier’ to the way people want to live their lives. For, and quite the reverse, it more accurately can be said to be the introduction of a statutory hurdle for gay couples to surmount, where previously there existed only utterly unregulated relationships. For gays, to civilly partner, or not to civilly partner, now becomes the question. This might seem like a species of libertarianism, and in truth, it owes something to it, to argue that a sudden statist imposition of 2nd hand, 2nd rate pseudo-marriage for pseudo-relationships is to be properly seen as undue interference by ‘big’ government, but as we have said, our opposition rests more completely on antagonism towards the secular state’s needless involvement with any kind of marriage, real or pretend.
Invariably it’s beneficial to try and see yourself by times as your opponents do, which is why we should heed the words of The Guardian. In relation to this subject, it’s leader column blithely declares, ‘Mr Howard has tacked sharply away from the right and towards the centre. On gay couples, the issue that wrecked Iain Duncan Smith's leadership, he made clear that Tory MPs will have a free vote on the government's civil partnerships bill, while he himself will vote in its favour’. Now in your ignorance it may well come as news to you that the leadership of either Mr Hague, or Mr Duncan Smith was wrecked by ‘gay couples’, but this does do us the signal service of showing us the preoccupations of others. Immediately this illustrates the worldview of The Guardian, but as you will also note, it is, obviously, exactly the same thinking which informs our friends the Portilloites. And both hail from the same Bennite madness which holds, ‘this matters to me, therefore it matters to you’. It is blind assertion piled upon factional fanaticism to contend that either the electoral appeal of the Tory party, or its wider moral standing, will be enhanced as a result of whatever support Michael Howard has hereby given to whatever imitation of marriage these proposals represent.
There are one hundred and one good reasons for not supporting ‘gay marriage’, but as with most things in life, chief amongst them is justifiable repulsion at the people who, for their own incoherent and dishonest reasons, do.
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Who’d be his friend?
It could have gone without saying, but nowhere, not once, not even in the form of an implicit allusion, is there any manner of reference to religion in Mr Howard’s speech. Liable, unfortunately, to be of more alarm to the Tory leadership is the reaction to the speech. The Telegraph tamely enough did its duty as a court paper, and printed a précis, but there was no evident enthusiasm in its leader columns. Indeed, some spine is discernible in its attitude towards the lack of coordination still surprisingly at play in the party, with the sainted Olive no longer receiving quite the free ride he once did in that paper. Hutton was the end of the honeymoon for Michael Howard, but only inasmuch as it marked the moment when public attention swivelled back towards the comings and goings of the Tory party. Rather more ominous are those little black clouds, ‘no bigger than a man’s fist’, beginning unmistakeably now to gather.
In a small way, his treatment of his sometime friend, and frequent host, Jonathan Aitken will not stand Michael Howard in good stead. There were more manly ways to go about spiking his aberrant candidature in Thanet than those which were in the end employed. This matters, to the small degree it does, in what Mr Howard’s parliamentary peers make of it. That’s unlikely to have emerged as a plus. Then there’s the marginally more febrile business of Europe. Causing more upset to his friends in Kent, Mr Howard has decided to pocket us in some lawyerly sub-section of the EPP. On this one, most of the damage has been done, as Michael Howard never had the affection of the hardcore Eurosceptic right anyway, so he’s lost nothing by confirming Bill Cash’s suspicions. But again, it was an area where studied ambiguity could have served the party leader slightly better than the course has ended up pursuing. Most distressing, however, for most Conservatives, inside and outside the party will undoubtedly have been the party’s recent economic foolishness. Promising more spending and no tax cuts may well be in line with the obdurate position Mr Howard often took against Mr Duncan Smith when he was party leader, but it’s going to do his cause no end of harm if he lets Oliver Letwin stick to it. Wait and see how many friends the party loses if it refuses to come out as tax and spend cutting party. More alarmingly, wait too long and watch as Tony Blair gets there first with the more credible promise.
It’s a grey, grey world
Were rural metaphors still the preferred vocative medium for Tory sagacity, we’d have to say that moving out of 32 Smith Square amounts to selling the farm. It’s a bad business that it has come to this, that we’re selling off what was handed down to us instead of passing it on to those who come next. Renting rooms in what’s a contender for Westminster’s ugliest street is a retreat from success, not a step towards it. Every argument there was for rationalising Central Office pointed to hiving off as many ancillary functions as possible to the private sector, and rehousing those administrative functions which had to remain in a warehouse on any plausible industrial estate anywhere there was a broadband connection. As ever these days, Labour have got it right, even in the substantially different circumstances of government, by keeping a relatively small, relatively elite HQ in central London, and dispatching everything else to the four corners of the kingdom. Nothing much more than space for what can’t be squeezed into the leader’s office at the Commons should have been the aim: there’s freehold office property in Old Queen Street right now, and it’s cheaper by far than the commercial rent paid for a short lease in Victoria Street. Send away CRD, they don’t need to be in London at all (why not Oxford, or any one of a hundred small city marginals we need to make an effort to win back?), keep only the ‘head shed’. That would have been the thing, indeed 34 Smith Square could well have been the place, but no, we’re selling up, and entering the party political equivalent of bedsit land. Even the Liberals can put in a more impressive performance than that.
Michael Howard’s speech was not a happy moment for the Tory party. There’s no point in pretending it was the sort of hysterically unhappy moment Iain Duncan Smith could induce at will — and indeed, that it does not scale those depths of awfulness, allied to the fact that the party is still substantially shell-shocked by the IDS experience, means it’s not going to cause the disquiet it ought to. For this was a speech where the vision thing and the strategy thing can already be seen to have failed for the next election. Homing in on small, disagreeable things (such as Mr Howard’s preposterous claim that he returned to frontline politics in 2001 because of his concern about the state of healthcare in Folkestone) should not be allowed to distract us from the wider problem. This, you may suspect, is Portilloism, but in fact, it is not. What is so terribly wrong with this speech, because it is what it so clearly reveals to be the case, is that what once again bedevils the party is — Majorism.
The speech was atrocious in parts (the ersatz ‘British dream’ is just tinny and awful and empty and unworkable), and fair in others (especially in its notion that ‘Labour have tried and failed’). What’s so depressingly wrong is that the whole style of leadership, from the unnecessary involvement with the EPP (who was going to object if we had stayed out?) to the ministerialist reluctance to advocate spending and tax cuts, screams just that one thing: retooled Majorism. It’s centrist and responsible, it’s worthy and dull, and worst of all, it’s been tried before, and Tony Blair has beaten it before. This is not the way out of opposition, it is the way we stumbled into it. And just as under John Major, most Tories can see the problems, especially those emanating from the state, but as before, they will lack the courage to say to the public what they are in language the voters will understand. We will ‘free’ schools, rather than privatising them, we will ‘back those who work in the NHS’ rather than pledging to get rid of the very thing which delivers the shoddy healthcare, and we will, most dismally of all, pursue a policy towards the EU which keeps such wretched men as Michael Ancram happy. On such a platform we deserve to lose.
ERO, February 11, 2004 11:54 PM