It’s the ideas, stupid
Mark Steyn says the Tories should follow the Republican lead and make Conservatism romantic — and conservative
New Hampshire
The day after the election, the BBC reported that the Iranian government was interested in buying MG Rover. This was a useful reminder of what one might call the internal contradictions of Blairism. It would be difficult to imagine circumstances in which the mullahs would buy, say, General Motors, yet here was George W. Bush’s alleged poodle presiding over a land where what’s left of the native automobile industry is happy to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Axis of Evil. I’ve no idea what MG Rover makes these days, but no doubt it will soon be changed to MG Axles of Evil and your discerning ayatollah will be driving to the nuclear launch facility in his brand new Morris Mullah.
Last Thursday the Prime Minister was punished for being excessively supportive of American ‘neocon’ foreign policy. But, as the autotollahs’ offer reminds us, Mr Blair is a Texan poodle only in respect of a very, very narrow sliver of US foreign policy — to wit, invading a select list of unsavoury dictatorships and toppling their governments. Iran doesn’t make Blair’s list, nor does Syria. And on everything else — the virtues of Kyoto, the value of the UN, the merits of Tehran’s nuclear programme — Tony the Toady is in fact indistinguishable from Chirac or Schröder, at least when compared with Bush’s true global soulmate, Australia’s John Howard. In so far as the somewhat hysterical shrieks of ‘Liar!’ had any traction last Thursday, they related only to Blair’s alignment with the President’s foreign policy. He can ‘lie’ his heart out about Britain’s diseased hospitals, decrepit schools and thug-playground high streets, and no one gives a hoot.
So, in the absence of any other formal invasions of miscellaneous rogue states, it seems likely that by the next general election, with Bush and Blair both gone, Labour supporters who have temporarily parked their votes elsewhere will return to the fold.
In other words, Tory analysts modestly encouraged by last week’s results are deluding themselves. Come on, they say, the Conservatives got 32 per cent and Labour 35 per cent — it’s a mere smidgeonette of a teensy-weensy uptick that separates yet another electoral humiliation from a stonking great majority. But look at the bigger picture. If 32 per cent voted Conservative, what did the other 68 per cent do? They voted Labour, anti-war Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, SDLP, Sinn Fein, Green, Respect and no doubt a few more I’ve forgotten. The total left-of-centre vote in the 2005 election adds up to about 63.2 per cent. The Right’s vote comes to 36.8 per cent, and that’s only by tossing in Veritas, Ukip, the BNP, the Democratic Unionists and the Ulster Unionists — several of which are ‘right-wing’ only in the media definition of the term (i.e., the side you’re not meant to like). I’ve no very clear idea about Dr Paisley’s general philosophy on income tax or school choice and, whatever it is, it seems unlikely to have had much to do with his whopping success. With the best will in the world, it’s hard to see last Thursday’s results as indicating any serious interest by the British electorate in anything remotely recognisable as ‘conservatism’. Furthermore, if one factors in the other forces at play in British politics — from the EU to the BBC — the soft-left behemoth gets even bigger.
I’ve remarked before on the Canadianisation of British politics. In Canada as in Britain, two of the three national parties are left of centre. So is the principal separatist party, in Quebec as in Scotland. And the token right-of-centre party spends much of its time either lecturing itself or being lectured by the media on its need to move towards the ‘political centre’ in order to make itself barely distinguishable from the other parties. Michael Heseltine was tilling this barren soil the other day, explaining to Radio Five Live’s Brian Hayes why the present method of electing the Tory leader needs to be changed: a lot of these activists were awfully hard-working people, nothing wrong with them and all that, but MPs were by definition better suited to understanding what it took to reach out to the ‘centre ground’ where British elections were won. What an inspiring message to the party’s base: leave it to us chaps to figure out which squishy unprincipled trimmer is best suited to selling you out.
As a general proposition, the Heseltine thesis is doubtful: successful conservatives don’t move towards the ‘political centre’. They move the political centre towards them. That’s what Thatcher and Reagan both did. Whereas if you move towards the political centre, all you do is move the centre. If Labour is at 1 on the scale and the Tories are at 9, and their focus groups tell them to move to 5, they have ensured that henceforth the centre will be 3, and they’ll be fighting entirely on the Left’s terms and the Left’s issues. There’s been quite enough of that already in this last election, with Michael Howard challenging Blair only on the precise degree of ‘additional resources’ we need to lavish on wasteful state activities. It’s hard to see quite what the Tories could do to prostrate themselves more abjectly before the clapped-out ‘centrist’ consensus, except perhaps to replace the white male heterosexuals pledging lavish ‘additional resources’ with fetching young ethnic gays pledging lavish ‘additional resources’. That’s what the calls for ‘modernisation’ seem to boil down to.
One could also make the case that, in an age of declining turnout, the centre ground is the first to collapse. If 75–80 per cent of the electorate vote, it’s not surprising that 15–20 per cent of them don’t know whether they’re Tory, Labour, Veritas or Respect two weeks before polling day: a rising tide lifts all boats, including those floating aimlessly. But on a sinking tide the floaters float away and the 55–60 per cent who bother to go to the polling booth don’t include a lot of lastminute undecideds.
So Lord Heseltine may simply be providing further evidence that he’s yesterday’s man when he drones on about the ‘centre ground’ being where elections are won. In Northern Ireland, it’s where elections are lost; the centre ground is where parties go to die. And, while peculiar local conditions certainly pertain in that corner of the realm, last Thursday’s results have one lesson of more general application: when the political establishment pushes ahead without troubling itself about popular will, the electorate turns elsewhere. ‘Why even a Nobel Peace Prize did not save David Trimble,’ declared BBC News. I love that ‘even’: if only Ulster was full of Scandinavians. Mr Trimble was the equivalent of those British pop groups who are ‘big in Japan’.
No casual student of the political scene could say that the final meltdown of the Ulster Unionists was a surprise. It took a while, but you could see it coming from a long way off. If one were to seek a comparable issue in mainland politics, it might be Europe. There won’t be a dramatic revolt against the EU; there never is. But it seems highly likely that the more the EU becomes the principal political forum for everything that matters, the less that portion of the electorate which loathes all its works will be content to vote for a Conservative party incapable of agreeing its line on the subject. Ukip’s share of the vote — 2.3 per cent sounds small but it doesn’t have to get any bigger to keep the Tories permanently out of power. And anyone minded to congratulate Michael Howard on ‘how far we’ve come in just 18 months’ ought to look at the national swing figures: there was a 3.7 per cent swing to the Liberal Democrats, a 0.8 per cent swing to Ukip, 0.6 per cent to the Tories, 0.5 per cent to the BNP. The Conservative party was, in effect, irrelevant to the dynamic of this election — or, at any rate, barely less irrelevant than the British National Party.
Michael Howard has now snatched further defeat from the jaws of defeat by announcing that he’ll be resigning after the party has come up with a new way to elect his replacement. That ensures that for the rest of the year the media will be talking about process and ‘personalities’ (I use the term loosely): is George Osborne too young? Is William Hague now old enough to be no longer too young? In Putney, Justine Greening is just in but is she too green? Or is she the rising star of the exciting new Conservative party? Or in the six days since anyone ever heard of her, has she been the subject of so many desperate ‘Is she the rising star of the Conservative party?’ profiles that we’re already bored of her? Or should we hire someone cool who had homosexual experiences in his youth? Or should we skip a generation and hire the youth he had homosexual experiences in? Or should we skip back a generation and hire some respected Tory elder statesman like ... er, well, give me a couple more minutes and one’ll come to me. Or should we skip back a further generation and see if Lord Hailsham’s still available? He did the ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ at the party conference 40 years ago and the young people seemed to enjoy it, even though he’s not gay or black.
All rubbish. What the party needs is not a new front man but new ideas worth fronting. Mr Howard and/or Lynton Crosby were hailed for the unprecedented ‘unity’ of the Tory party during this campaign. But what’s the point of unity in service of a big wobbling vanilla blancmange of a nothing manifesto? Crosby-wise, the Tories should have hired Bing, who famously posed the question: week, I was most struck by a phrase in Jim White’s column. Jim must be the most apolitical wallah on the Telegraph comment page, and he was writing, as is his wont, about sport, and the parties’ indifference to it: ‘As crowds rise in our stadiums, amateur clubs are folding by the week; we are becoming a nation of spectators, with all the consequent effect on our collective health.’ Isn’t that the problem with British politics? It’s a spectator sport, not a participatory one. The Tories’ bullet points — ‘more police’, ‘cleaner hospitals’ — implicitly accepted the statist view of the electorate as a nation of spectators: just sit back and watch, leave it to the professionals. That’s not a conservative position. But it’s compounded by banal media coverage which offers politics as soccer team selection — who’s in, who’s out, who’s facing relegation — even though, unlike real sports coverage, nobody’s heard of any of the alleged star players.
Conservatives win when they champion ideas. They win in two ways: sometimes they get elected; but, even if they don’t, their sheer creative energy forces an ever more intellectually bankrupt Left to grab whatever right-wing ideas they figure they can slip past their own base. In essence, that’s how Tony Blair ‘reformed’ the Labour party. But contrast the Tories’ paralysis in the face of Blair with the Republicans’ response to Bill Clinton. Like Mr Blair with New Labour, Mr Clinton sold himself as a New Democrat: he was fiscally responsible and said things like ‘the era of big government is over’. And instead of whining, like the Tories, that oh no, he’s ‘stolen our clothes’, the Republicans moved further right — especially on cultural issues — and kept winning. During the 1990s they had weak candidates — Bob Dole but strong ideas. And it was the strong ideas that won them the House and Senate and state legislatures and governors’ mansions, and that by the end of Clinton’s presidency left the Democrats with a weaker grip on elected office than at any time since the Twenties. The Dems kept destroying the party’s leaders — Newt Gingrich, and the fellow who briefly succeeded him — and it made no difference. Conservative values are the real star. It’s like Cats: sure, it’s a nice plus if you’ve got Elaine Paige or Bonnie Langford, but it’ll still run for 20 years even if no one’s heard of anyone in it.
The Tories have wasted the last eight years. They weren’t kicked out in 1997 because of the economy and the economy alone won’t get them kicked back in. When conservatives don’t champion ideas, they don’t win. And, if they’re already in office, they may cling to their jobs but at the price of long-term damage to their parties — see John Major. It’s hard to make common cause with people who don’t have a cause. And, as a political slogan, ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ works better if you’re first showing signs of doing some thinking.
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