Cameron’s battleground against Brown: civil society versus the state
One of the most successful smear campaigns in the modern era concerns Margaret Thatcher. It was alleged that she stood for a narrow, selfish individualism without reference to wider duties and responsibilities. This claim was based in part on a single remark made by the then prime minister to the magazine Woman’s Own in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as Society.’ Her words were ripped out of context and then distorted. Read in their full form, it was clear that Mrs Thatcher was making a profoundly moral point, fully coherent with both the Christian tradition in which she had been reared and the most generous ideals of the Conservative party which she represented. She was saying that our most pressing problems can never be solved by an abstraction such as the state. On the contrary, we are all moral and responsible individuals. Put in concrete terms: if our neighbour is in distress, we go and help personally rather than just wait for social services to arrive.
In short, Mrs Thatcher’s comment contained a profound insight into the nature of the human condition. We are not instruments of other people’s will or creatures of bureaucratic convenience. We should never simply blame others, and must always take a personal and burning accountability for the world we live in.
Yet the smear against Mrs Thatcher stuck. This was partly because there was some truth in the caricature. When she came to power in 1979, the British economy and society was so weighed down with state and trade union power that we were close to collapse. In these desperate circumstances Margaret Thatcher and her Tory party were too prone to try to redress the balance by emphasising the legitimacy of individual aspiration at the expense of wider public duties. For example, no real conservative could ever regard the frenzied materialism of City traders in the 1980s and 1990s with anything but disgust and dismay.
This meant — as David Cameron properly acknowledged in his important speech to the Demos think-tank on Monday — that Tony Blair had an important message in 1997. Blair came to power as the spokesman for a more capacious vision of public life. His early speeches paid tribute to civil society in a way Mrs Thatcher’s too often failed to do. In his first days in office, New Labour even put some aspects of this vision into effect through Scottish devolution and Bank of England independence. The great sadness, not just for Tony Blair but for Britain, is that the Prime Minister swiftly betrayed his rhetoric. For the first eight years — to the despair of sympathisers like Professor David Marquand, Open Democracy’s Anthony Barnett and MPs like Frank Field — Tony Blair’s guiding methodology has been a form of democratic centralism.
New Labour waged war on civil society on behalf of the state. It attacked the independence of the judiciary and the integrity of the professions and universities while unleashing a vendetta against the BBC and the press. Tony Blair weakened local government, politicised the Civil Service and assaulted British institutions. New Labour treated anyone who was not at the heart of its political project with bitterness and distrust.
This yearning for hegemony and intolerance of dissent manifested itself in the micromanagement of schools and hospitals. The Downing Street advisers David Miliband and John Birt were the architects of an insane system of targets and five-year plans (full of Stalinist resonance and perhaps not distasteful to the numerous ex-communists who have populated government since 1997) designed to bring about ‘reform’. The malfunction was made worse by the Prime Minister’s personal obsession with the press, which caused serious, long-term government to be replaced by a series of ‘eye-catching initiatives’, to use Tony Blair’s own phrase, designed to generate headlines.
This naive belief in the power of the state explains the failure of Tony Blair’s most admirable aspiration: to step in where the Conservatives had failed and pursue social justice. Despite a uniquely propitious set of economic and fiscal circumstances, the problems of deprivation, drug dependency and family breakdown have got steadily worse under New Labour. This failure was ordained from the start. It has come about because of New Labour’s belief that state action alone can ultimately address the terrible problems of our inner cities. In the end, finding a future for a semi-literate and abandoned drug addict on a council estate is a matter for the human spirit. More initiatives, more means-testing, more targets and more bureaucrats will make little difference and can make things worse.
In his speech to Demos last Monday, David Cameron was doing something remarkable, important and overdue: returning the Conservative party to the public domain. He was reminding us that there is a rich and dominant Conservative tradition it dates back through Oakeshott and Macmillan to Shaftesbury, Wilberforce, Burke and Coleridge — which argues that it is precisely the role of a Conservative government to enable a strong and compassionate civil society. Followers of this tradition would assert that charities, churches, voluntary groups and other independent organisations offer the solution to the blighted lives in our inner cities in a way that the state never can.
I think that this argument about the competing roles of civil society and the state in securing ‘fairness’ will become the intellectual and moral battleground of British politics over the next three years. With Tony Blair fading into irrelevance, the debate will principally engage David Cameron and Gordon Brown. The Chancellor grappled with the issue in his error-strewn and incoherent Fabian Society address last week and in his rather sharper Hugo Young lecture just before Christmas. The Chancellor’s position is subtler and more complex than Cameron allows. On Monday the new Tory leader quoted the Chancellor as taking the monolithic position that ‘only the state can guarantee fairness’. The Chancellor never said that. He did, however, state, ‘Fairness can be advanced by, but cannot in the end be guaranteed by, charities, however benevolent; by markets, however dynamic; or by individuals, however wellmeaning; but guaranteed only by enabling government.’ It was a great pity that David Cameron should have chosen to alter the Chancellor’s words. Proper public discourse demands that he should do full justice to his opponents’ arguments, not distort them for political gain. Nevertheless, David Cameron has taken a giant step in the right direction this week. It remains to be seen whether he has the courage to follow through.
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