Beware power lobbies, entangling the great in their entrails
In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan used to say: ‘The three big interests any prime minister should beware of taking on are the Brigade of Guards, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Roman Catholic Church.’ The maxim was true enough in those days but 50 years later makes little sense. The Brigade still has a certain leverage, I concede, at the War House, more so than Gunners, Sappers, Greenjackets, etc., but is of no consequence outside strictly army affairs. When did you last see a Tory MP or the chairman of a big quoted company wearing a Brigade tie? The power of the NUM was destroyed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and Arthur Scargill, the man who helped her do it by his obstinate stupidity, is forgotten. As for the papists, they have lost all their recent pitched battles under the leadership of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, a splendidlooking man who radiates great charm, but is all painted lath and plaster.
Instead, the three most powerful lobbies in the country, who have taken the place of the old triumvirate, are the homosexuals, the mullahs, and the greens. The homosexuals are the top interest: they are everywhere and particularly numerous, powerful and well co-ordinated among the elites. They are strong among the police, including in their well-disciplined ranks several key chief constables. Hence if a member of the public were foolish enough to report two homosexuals for open misbehaviour in a municipal lavatory, he would soon be under arrest himself, for although homophobia is not yet an offence, ‘conduct likely to lead to a breach of the peace’ is, and is used to deal with such protests. Not so long ago, the homosexuals took on the papists in open battle, and won hands down. Indeed, I can’t think of any body in the country which can beat them, inside or outside Parliament, in business or the media, let alone in their traditional stronghold in the entertainment industry, though there of course their power is now total. If a comedian were to make an unscripted anti-queer joke on the BBC, rather on the lines of one or two which slipped through the net into early James Bond movies, he would never be employed again.
The mullahs and their more militant followers, by their successful threats of violence, have succeeded in turning British Muslims into a legally privileged minority. Where the common or statute law conflicts with their beliefs, it is simply not enforced against them. Local authorities, over planning issues, and the police, over inflammatory language, are most reluctant to act. The greens are more than a lobby since they now dictate the conventional wisdom in many areas, control the Liberal Democrats, and are powerful in both the main parties, which have adopted their programme. They have probably done more positive harm, over the years, than any other lobby in our history, and their latest ‘triumph’, the adoption of bio-energy schemes, financed by the taxpayer, in large parts of the world, is the principal reason why there is now a world shortage of food, with rising prices of basic commodities like rice. The poorest people, of course, are the chief victims, as always happens when a lobby or interest becomes too strong. The poor also suffer most from rising fuel prices, the direct result of green opposition, in the past, to the building of nuclear power stations. Who are the greens? They are invariably middle class, though a few are scions of the plutocracy, and have inherited money which they spend lavishly to promote their dotty theories. I can’t think of one prominent green who has actually worked in commercial agriculture or industry. Their spheres are teaching, the media, bureaucracy. It takes courage to stand up to them, and a certain dogged persistency. Nigel Lawson experienced considerable difficulty in getting published his excellent short book exposing the fraudulence of ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. His book is now high on the bestseller lists but it was turned down by top publishers not so much because they doubted their ability to sell it but for fear of disapproval by ‘right-thinking people’. Censorship is another evil to which the existence of over-mighty interests inevitably leads.
Looking back over our history, it is useful to identify important interests and lobbies, and their rise and fall. When I was reading mediaeval history under Bruce McFarlane at Magdalen, I was intrigued by his identification of the ‘Yorkshire Party’, a loosely organised coalition of prominent landowners, mainly from the North Riding, who put pressure on kings in the 14th and 15th centuries, to get their way. Of course it is normal for a regional interest which feels it is underrepresented in central government to exert itself, but in this case the Wars of the Roses were the result.
Most really powerful interests go largely unrecorded precisely because they successfully get across the view that they represent national or majority opinion. An outstanding case was the ‘Cambridge Interest’ of the mid-16th century, which was Protestant, but not Calvinist, humanist, but still Episcopalian and royalist, and was intelligently led for nearly half a cen tury by William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Its members had to take risks in the last years of Henry VIII, and the shifting fashion of his son, and in Queen Mary’s time they kept their heads down or lived abroad. But once Queen Elizabeth was safely on the throne, they took over, for she, as A.L. Rowse used to say, was ‘a Cambridge girl’. The Church of England was essentially created and installed by this Cambridge faction. It is notable that Cambridge has been notably more successful than Oxford as a lobby or interest, not only in the mid-16th century, but in the early 19th century, under that prince of lobbyists, Charles Simeon of King’s College, and again between the wars, thanks to the Cavendish Laboratory and the clever men who worked there. These were all quiet, even stealthy, operators. It is often good policy for lobby-leaders not to make too much noise. Archbishop Laud, the great Oxonian force in the early 17th century, and Cardinal Newman in the mid-19th century, kicked up a lot of fuss, spoke and wrote too much, and made the welkin ring. Oxford was not the home of lost causes for nothing: there was too much clanging of bells from those dreaming spires.
A highly successful lobby, in terms of statutes passed, was run by the Utilitarians, by Jeremy Bentham, in the early 19th century. He was a hard-headed, practical fellow — no sentiment about him — who was full of ingenious ideas and had a solution for every problem. Ministers turned to him automatically. He was helped by his links to the highly sentimental evangelicals of Clapham Common, led by Wilberforce and his friends, who supplied the heart he lacked. The anti-slave trade movement was the first mass lobby in history — Canning said, ‘They have a foothold in every parish’ — and it took on, and beat, the most powerful commercial interest in the world, the West Indian sugar planters.
Who have been the Big Three in the past? In the mid-19th century, they were certainly the Anti-Corn Laws League, with its financial basis in the Manchester cotton trade, the Evangelicals, and the educational reformers, led by people like Thomas Arnold and, later, Benjamin Jowett. They won all their battles, beginning in the late 1840s. By the end of the century, the Imperialist lobby was all-powerful — Joe Chamberlain, Evelyn Baring, Lord Milner and co. The result was the Boer war, first major stumble in Britain’s fall.
We should all beware of lobbies. They allow pseudo-intellectuals to get their second-rate ideas adopted, and often entangle great men and women in their entrails.
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