The press
Danger: ideas at work
Paul Johnson
The Guardian had a good scoop last Thursday, with its publication of con- fidential papers embodying discussions by senior ministers and advisers about possible government policies for the family. I say 'good scoop', although I'm not at all sure that it's in the public interest to divulge notes taken at round-the-table discussions where participants are invited to contribute, kick around, reject or enthuse about ideas. At the highest level it is vital that those in- volved should speak their minds freely and not feel obliged to put in the cosmetic qualifications and PRO jargon necessary for publication. If cabinet discussions were regularly leaked the institution would col- lapse. If the editorial conference of the Guardian were tape-recorded and leaked and extracts published, the quality of the Paper would soon suffer. One should judge the finished product: government policy, when it is finally approved and announced, or the actual issue of the newspaper. All the same, a good scoop.
A depressingly predictable chorus of shock-horror-outrage-this-is-the-end-of- the-world greeted the disclosure that people in the government were actually daring to do some new thinking on such issues. Britain is a very conservative country indeed, and in
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0respect more tenacious of the past than 1.11. ts cherishing of left-wing mythology. It is now forty years since the Beveridge Report was written, and the thinking behind it goes back more than half a cen- tury (indeed its origins lie in Bismarck's Germany). The welfare state has acquired the patina of an antique; it is a charming period piece, rather like those embroidered Victorian banners trade unionists carry when parading in favour of such time- honoured institutions as the closed shop, Contracting out and inflexible rostering. It
is also, like most out-of-date machinery, enormously expensive to operate, grotes- quely inefficient and in danger of total breakdown.
What distinguishes the Thatcher govern- ment from previous Tory (let alone Labour) administrations is that it is not afraid of ideas. Mrs Thatcher actually likes to read big, thick, hard books and enjoys the com- pany of intellectuals. She is thus taking ad- vantage of the fact that most considerable thinkers in Britain now incline to the Right of the political spectrum, the Left in- telligentsia, or what remains of it, being hopelessly trapped in the 19th-century quagmire of Marxism. She takes the view, and ordinary people cannot but agree with her, that the governance of Britain over the past generation or so has been a failure, and that to redeem it we need to open windows to ideas and disperse the old, cosy fug of 1940s assumptions.
The reactionaries of the Left, who really want to get back to the Attlee era, now seen as a Golden Age, cannot abide the cold, fresh air rushing in. They are rather like Miss Havisham and her wedding cake, which crumbled to dust when the shutters were opened. Terrified of the future, or in- deed the present, they set up a childish caterwauling whenever anyone has the im- pertinence to suggest possible new ways of dealing with it. Abuse was rained on the Government's discussion papers not only by Labour spokesmen but by the SDP and the Liberals, who say they are in business to `break the mould' — I always thought that was a joke. It was significant, too, that what they found most offensive was the suggestion that children be encouraged to become 'self-reliant, responsible, capable, enterprising and fulfilled adults'.
That really made the Left see red or, to
be more precise, swastikas. "Blatant, nan- nying, do-gooding social engineering,' bellowed the Guardian. "Back-door dic- tatorship, stocking-footed fascism,' scream- ed Neil Kinnock. I even heard a radio bulletin reporting him as saying it was the end of civilisation. Hyperbole is a com- modity in mercilessly ample supply on the Left. The Guardian complained that en- couraging schools with a religious associa- tion, ranging from local C of E and Catholic primaries to Ampleforth and Eton, was 'ayatollahism'. According to the Guardian's Malcolm Dean, David Howell's suggestions that so-called 'unearned in- come' be taxed at ordinary rates (to en- courage people to save and invest in pro- ductive industry) and that some mothers be given incentives to stay at home (for the sake of their families and the unemployed, I assume) were 'clearly' designed "to increase sexual and income inequalities'. No sensible reader of the Guardian, and there are some, is going to believe that these were Howell's objects. Nor will such sensible readers ac- cept the Guardian leader-writer's castiga- tion of the documents as 'an exercise' in `misbegotten frailty', a 'mishmash of dangerous rubbish' and 'rubbish that is too stupid even to be dangerous', 'sheer, un- bridled, unadulterated barminess'. This sort of shouting should be left to the Denis Skinners.
The truth is, some of the ideas in these papers will have appealed strongly to or- dinary people, who didn't know you were allowed to utter them any more. All good parents have always wanted their children to grow up to be responsible, self-reliant, capable and enterprising, and they are anx- ious to know about any suggestions for assisting the process. What decent parent wants his or her child to see the key to the good life as an aptitude for exploiting the resources of the welfare state? No one with any spirity wants to sink into the welfare culture, see their children grow up in it, breed into it, die in it.
I say `no one'; but of course it is true that certain categories of people benefit greatly from the ramshackle welfare apparatus so ferociously guarded against new ideas. It has never done much for the poor except demoralise them. But it has done a power of good to a large section of the middle class, who administer it, work in it and use it to indulge their taste for bossiness. These people do not want working-class children to grow up to be more self-reliant; other- wise Othello's occupation's gone, and there will be even less demand for social science graduates than at present. They were shaken by what the disclosed documents had to say about the increase in the so-called 'professions' which surge out of the welfare state. When they warn about the threat to civilisation what they really mean is the threat to their jobs, status and power. And many of these middle-class beneficiaries of conservative welfare philosophy are, of course, Labour and SDP activists — and Guardian readers too.
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