The Trot skyists
of the Right Aidan Rankin says the trouble with the Tories is that many of them are as absolutist, and as blinkered, as Dave and Deirdre Spart
T he euro is back in the news and, if we accept conventional wisdom, that is bad for New Labour and good for the forces of con servatism, The Blair–Brown double-act convinces nobody, the Left and the trade unions are profoundly divided, and the public remain as stubbornly sceptical as ever. This, coupled with Tony Blair's Alice-in-Wonderland approach to the prospective EU constitution — 'it's not a constitutional issue' points towards a blend of comedy and crisis, from which the Conservatives can only benefit.
At last Conservatives can be seen as defenders of political sovereignty against an economic and cultural elite; as champions of continuity and localism against dehumanising, faceless bureaucracies. And so on. But on European and other issues the Tories are still impeded — not by indecision as in the recent past, but by an insidious ideological rigidity, a right-wing variant of political correctness.
Public scepticism about the single currency is matched by the lack of public support for Eurosceptic campaigns. This is because even to sympathetic observers such campaigns appear so often to be bitter and bigoted. Like millenarian sects or Trotskyite groupuscules, they are chronically fissiparous and spend most of the time communicating vituperatively with each other through quaintly titled news-sheets. To such campaigners, being Eurosceptic means being opposed 'on principle' to all things European, not just money and bureaucrats. It enjoins a purity of commitment to which all but a few small cabals fall short, an extremist zeal that drives away the moderate, the convivial and those with a sense of humour. This dogmatic approach is by no means confined to Europe, but pervades conservative politics as issues of doctrine once pervaded socialist discourse.
As a schoolboy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I can recall the jargon-encrusted rants of Dave and Deirdre Spart, Private Eye's chillingly accurate mock-Trotskyites, whose slogans could well have been lifted from the Socialist Worker. Dave once memorably described the Labour front bench as 'Callaghan's Fascist Junta'. Two decades on, we are witnessing a Spartism of the Right, in which reasoned discussion, friendship and good faith give way to chronic back-stabbing, accusations of impurity and treachery, routine political insults and (again echoing the far Left) a 'cause' that overrides all other considerations, whether practical or merely human.
Some of the most splenetic attacks on lain Duncan Smith's leadership, for example, have come from traditionalist Conservatives rather than from the modernising cliques. Such traditionalists believe less in tradition than in permanent reaction, and so they refuse to accept that social changes need to be humanely and subtly accommodated. In a similar spirit, Sir Richard Body's book England for the English was criticised by right-wing readers because, although it opposed socially engineered multiculturalism, it offered a racially and culturally inclusive definition of Englishness.
Permanent reaction and permanent revolution are not opposites, as they might at first glance appear, but two sides of the same coin. Permanent reaction is revolutionary after all, because it is based on ideological struggle rather than on incremental reform, on forcing the clock back instead of changing a little in order to remain the same. In their commitment to ideological struggle, and their belief in purity, some traditionalists have more in common with the libertarians than either side would care to admit. Libertarians, whose influence in conservative circles is growing, are free-market fundamentalists. They claim individual freedom as their starting point, but like Marxists of the most dogmatic kind reduce the individual to homo economicus: the man or woman as a mere unit of production and consumption, without any cultural reference points.
Like the politically correct Left, libertarians believe in open borders and the abolition of immigration controls. Cultural traditions stand in the way of pure economic choice and so should be swept away. In place of reform, libertarians believe in permanent revolution: a process of perpetual market-led change. Libertarians combine economic purism with a naive commitment to counter-cultural values. Libertarian support for the minimal state is accompanied by an extreme moral relativism that takes the slogan 'no such thing as society' to its logical conclusion. At its most extreme, it celebrates family and community breakdown as forms of liberation, or drug dependency as a consumer choice. Where the relativism ends abruptly is in the public sphere. This may be greatly diminished in the libertarian vision, but what remains is a clenched fist of political correctness.
In a recent article attacking the fire-fighters' strike, John Blundell, director of the libertarian-leaning Institute of Economic Affairs, made the classic Spartist swipe at the fire service: it is too 'male'. Most libertarians go much further. They oppose with revolutionary ardour any public money for faithbased institutions, single-sex schools or regiments, or anything not 'open to all', whatever the situation or circumstances. Choice exists only for those who can pay. This philosophy is identical to that of the far-Left activists who gained control of inner-city local authorities in the 1980s, It is the opposite of such conservative principles as flexibility and variety in public services, and operational effectiveness before egalitarian dogma.
With their Spartist obsession with political correctness, libertarians closely overlap with another group of purists, the Tory modernisers. Dave and Deirdre have traded in their denims for power suits and suffered a sea change into David and Deedee. They publish slick monographs on party reform and organise get-togethers at fashionable minimalist eateries, where pinstriped males go gooey-eyed at the thought of all-female shortlists, straight cohabitees wax lyrical about gay marriage, and ethnic diversity means having an African wine-waiter. The modernisers' vision of conservatism is more generous than that of the libertarians or the permanent reactionaries. Where they go dangerously wrong is in regurgitating the 'group rights' agendas of the Left. These do not give dignity to ethnic minorities, gays, or women, but reduce them to nameless, faceless tokens. At a time when the fault lines of identity politics are breaking down, it is a strangely dated approach. True modernisation means appealing to black people who do not want to be Balkanised by the Left; to women who dislike outdated feminism; and to gays who find Pride parades embarrassingly naff.
Instead of being genuinely liberal, the modernisers tend worryingly towards authoritarian zeal. In appealing to new constituencies, they goad traditional supporters. In a recent essay, Marc Glendenning of the Eurosceptic Democracy Movement speaks of the need for a 'bonfire of the Fogies' and 'the stench of burning tweed.. Few modernisers are as eloquent as Glendenning, but he expresses well their instinct towards cultural struggle. To the pinstriped enrages, the past is shameful and fit only to be put to the torch.
Crucially, these factions of modern conservatism share an approach to politics that is revolutionary, indeed Jacobin, despite the fashionable Francophobia of the British Right. They are united by a preference for theory and formulae over experience and intuition, and by a quest for ideological purity. But the search for a pure conservatism is, in itself, unconservative. For conservatism is not an ideology at all but a continuous balancing act between tradition and change, individual and community. As Burke, opposing the Jacobins, put it, 'In what we improve, we are never wholly new: in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.'
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