POLITICS
Mr Hague cannot escape from liberal banalities and the cant of caring
BRUCE ANDERSON
On the basis of Tuesday's newspapers, there was an obvious conclusion to be drawn. The Tories were 'playing the race card'; William Hague had decided to rein- vent himself as the new Enoch Powell. Opinion was divided as to whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, but everyone agreed that Mr Hague had delivered an important speech, and a controversial one. . There is only one problem with that interpretation of events. It cannot survive a reading of the speech. The text contains some good knockabout, at Frank Dobson's and Ken Livingstone's expense. But there is no mention of race and immigration. Though asylum is discussed, there is noth- ing in this draft to suggest that Mr Hague has devoted two minutes' thought to the topic. He deals solely in liberal banalities.
Bogus asylum applicants are denounced, but only on grounds to which no liberal Could object: 'genuine refugees . . . are suf- fering most at the hands of a system on the verge of collapse because of the massive influx of bogus asylum seekers'. As for these 'genuine refugees', they 'have always been welcome in Britain — and must always be welcome in Britain. For that is the mark of a civilised, free and open society.'
. That final sentence deserves a high place in an anthology of liberal twaddle. How could anyone who calls himself a Tory touch on such profound questions in such a plati- tudinous fashion? As he skips from civilisa- tion to freedom to openness, Mr Hague would appear to believe that even if these concepts are not synonymous, they are easy to harmonise. He should have read Isaiah Berlin, who, though no Tory, could have told him that the great goods cannot always live together. Above all, he should have read Oakeshott, who would have reminded him that civilisation is only a collective dream; a dream requiring a well-made bed of order. Civilisation depends on restraint, yet free- dom and openness are the enemies of restraint. So freedom must be constrained by law; openness, by the national interest.
But if we took Mr Hague's words literally, and accepted the liabilities which they would place us under, there would be no further Possibility of restraint, whatever the national interest. 'Genuine refugees': that could apply to most of the population of Africa, and much of the population of Asia. A bil- lion-plus Chinese; each one of them would only have to develop a taste for democracy to acquire a well-grounded fear of persecu- tion on political grounds. What if there is a nuclear exchange between India and Pak- istan? That is a real danger, and if it were to occur, the aftermath could see some pretty unpleasant regimes in Delhi or Islamabad — or rather in the new capitals, those cities having been destroyed. That could mean another billion or so who could qualify as genuine refugees. Humankind cannot bear very much reali- ty. For much of the time, most of us are gov- erned not by a sceptical intelligence but by our viscera: those of well-fed, contented ani- mals in good health and comfortable sur- roundings. This induces a complacency which no realistic analysis of current global conditions could possibly sustain. We live in a world which is already dangerous and growing more so, as the Cold War is suc- ceeded by a hot peace. It was always likely that once the Cold War was over, there would be large-scale migrations of previous- ly imprisoned peoples. No one can blame the wretched of the earth for trying to seek a better life; many of them, indeed, are dis- playing heroic courage against hopeless odds. But it is as impossible to succour them as it is to blame them. Given the potential scale of the refugee problem, it is absurd that we are still signed up to conventions which would oblige us to provide all genuine refugees with a refuge. In our own affairs, we can afford the luxury of a liberal political tradition, nurtured by Locke and Mill. But much of the rest of our planet bears an increasing resemblance to Hobbes's state of nature, so we require Hobbesian defences against it, lest it swamp us. Asylum is a 19th- century concept which cannot survive mod- ern communications. It is time to repudiate pledges that we could never honour. This does not mean that we should never grant asylum. In some cases, such as the Zimbabweans of British descent, we have an inescapable moral obligation. But though there is no question of basing asylum policy on the parable of the Good Samaritan, we need not confine our generosity to our kith and kin. The Huguenots, the refugees from the French Revolution, the German Jews in the 1930s, the Hungarians after 1956, the Ugandan Asians: in all those instances, there was no danger of swamping and we were right to respond as we did. In the future there are bound to be similar cases, but each crisis should require its own legislation. These observations might strike some readers as unfeeling, and by the standards of the Good Samaritan or the Sermon on the Mount, so they are. But what relevance has any of that? Unfortunately, however, our current, intellectually decadent, version of Christianity has helped to create a cant of caring. Throughout this country, there are millions of people who will watch the suffer- ings of Ethiopia — or wherever the fashion- able famine happens to be — and decide that the next time they see a collecting tin, they really must contribute some spare change. Having convinced themselves of their truly noble high-mindedness, they then return to the normal preoccupations of get- ting and spending.
We could all smile at the harmless hypocrisies of the average British house- hold, but for one problem. There is no evi- dence that the government's thinking is any more rigorous. With Clare Short at Over- seas Development, as with her predecessor Lynda Chalker, we have a Kleenex and cheque-book approach. Confronted by a tragedy in Africa, the ministers reach for their kleenex with one hand, and the gov- ernment's cheque-book with the other. For- tunately for the nation's accounts, however, the grab for the cheque-book is intercepted by the Treasury, whose tear-ducts have long since run dry, and whose guiding maxim is 'Bah! Humbug'.
Thank God for the Treasury. We are not obliged to try to solve all the planet's prob- lems, still less to import them. Most of the world's suffering people will have to take what consolation they can from the practical Christianity of Thomas Hobbes: 'The poor shall find their reward in the Kingdom of Heaven.' But we can make a strictly limited contribution — so we ought to ensure that it is an effective one. The harder and less sen- timental the thinking that governs the actions, the greater the possibility that they might do some good.
There seems, however, to be little hope of hard thinking, on aid or asylum. Mr Hague intends to return to the asylum question next week, but he will no doubt regard himself as bound by Monday's non- sense: that thoughtless commitment to suc- couring any genuine refugee. There will probably be some more witty knockabout, this time at Jack Straw's expense, but underneath the yah and boo, there will be no policy, only muddle.
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