CENTRE POINT
The centralising instinct of Mr Major and friends rots democracy. Read Tocqueville if you doubt it
SIMON JENKINS
Acolleague of Harold Macmillan told of visiting him late one night to discuss some current crisis. The great man was in an armchair reading, and feigned not to hear anyone come in. 'Oh,' he said on look- ing up, 'I'm sorry. I was deep in Livy. Is there a problem?' The visitor saw that the book was in the original Latin. He reflected that Macmillan could not possibly have been reading Livy. The whole scene was an elaborate set-up.
I like the story for its hint of Macmillan's artless cunning. Nobody reads Livy for pleasure. Virgil, Ovid, Catullus perhaps, and politicians could with profit read Cicero. But Livy is the bore of the Lower Fifth. Besides, Macmillan's leisure reading did not extend much beyond Trollope. As a ploy for conveying nonchalance amid crisis, his choice of author was implausible.
Yet there was style in the aspiration to philosopher-kingship. We do not imagine John Major interrupting a harassed Home Secretary with, 'Sorry, Michael, I was lost in Plato. Socrates never gave his prison offi- cers any trouble. What's your difficulty?' The nearest our leaders come to an image of detachment is a seat in the sun at Lord's.
One feature of the Thatcher era was that it brought political philosophy briefly back to fashion. Sir Keith Joseph ordered his officials at the Department of Industry to plough through a crippling reading list. Margaret Thatcher mimicked Macmillan in sprinkling her policies with the dust of great minds, with Hayek, Friedman, Oak- shott and Popper, whose death occurred last week. I first encountered her as party leader, sitting literally at Friedman's feet on the floor at a philosophy seminar. As prime minister, she once gave a remarkable discourse on the relevance of Bagehot to modern Conservatism — which she wrote in her own hand on the basis of no more than some supplied references. But the Thatcherites never delved into Alexis de Tocqueville. What a deal of trou- ble he might have saved them. If Hayek was the man for the Eighties, Tocqueville will do for the Nineties. Those who have no time to plough through Democracy in America or The Ancien Regime (let alone, as Macmillan would have said, in the origi- nal French) should turn to Larry Sieden- top's new biographical essay in OUP's Past Masters series. Here is the king of pragma- tism brought briskly up to date, a true prophet for our times. Tocqueville, like many ancient (and modern) thinkers, regarded the state as Leviathan. It might be a necessary evil, but it was still evil. Under Europe's past monarchies it had been restrained by geog- raphy and by a semi-autonomous local aris- tocracy. Montesquieu concentrated on the rule of law and the diffusion of power through the local administration of justice. This was not enough for Tocqueville. Revo- lution, democracy and prosperity were all fast eroding these restraints. Lawyers were not democrats. Tocqueville was a public official. He saw, long before Marx, Weber, let alone Thatcher, that states naturally centralise power, and then bureaucratise it under the pretence of efficiency. Rulers disregard local institutions and override the `habit of association' that turns voters into full citizens. The middle classes prefer working for central government to the messy compromises of local autonomy.
Without the 'vitality of diversity' which means localities enjoying a measure of self-rule — the act of citizenship atro- phies. To Tocqueville to be a citizen was to be a true person. Without participating in democracy, we 'atomise' into alienated individuals, constantly vulnerable to dicta- torship. All men are equal, but equal in their weakness.
Tocqueville was spellbound by the Amer- ica of the 1830s, by its 'unprecedented release of energy'. In importing the English tradition of borough and county govern- ment, the American states had found an ideal vehicle for channelling this 'super- abundant energy' and using it as a defence against the tyranny of national majorities. He noted that this tradition — American states are still divided into `boros' and counties — had not led to introversion. The former British colonies had not stagnated, as had the French ones. Quite the reverse. It was France's colonies in Canada, ruled by edict and forced to refer all decisions to Paris, that had proved inert. Visiting them, Tocqueville was appalled to see their lead- ers tied hand and foot by colonial bureau- cracy. It was British federalism that bred `Careful, Pooh, it could be a honey trap.' the spirit of entrepreneurial adventure, that went on to conquer North America.
Tocqueville would have had little truck with Thatcherism. He would have equated it with the Revolutionary Directorate, steadily accreting power to the centre under the guise of enforcing reform and controlling public spending. To him the emasculation of quasi-autonomous institu- tions, such as local councils, university boards or police authorities, would have been a sure sign of incipient autocracy. For Lady Thatcher, subsidiarity was for wimps, except when needed to defend herself against Brussels. This view, ardently adopt- ed by Lord Howe and by the Cambridge kindergarten, suited the can-do politics of the 1980s. The public sector may (tem- porarily) have been reduced in size, but it came under more Treasury sovereignty than ever before. To Tocqueville, pretend- ing this had anything to do with Hayekian liberalism would have been hypocrisy.
John Major's attempt to restore some public sector accountability through the Citizen's Charter would have received an equally scornful laugh. Tocqueville saw market choice as no substitute for 'virile' citizens participating in democratic associa- tions. He saw that the market had its uses, but they did not embrace what David Sel- bourne and others have recently rediscov- ered as democracy's moral aspect. British politicians can wriggle and protest their belief in local autonomy, but there is not a single decentralist in the Cabinet.
I believe the famous search for a post- Thatcher philosophy need look no farther. That restless Frenchman, for whom philos- ophy's sole purpose was to guide policy, had the answer. Guard pluralism. Guard local autonomy. The centralising instinct of Mr Major and his colleagues is not just inefficient. It rots democracy and lays the path open to new forms of dictatorship. Thatcherism and now `Majorism' have put the means in place by which those new Leviathans, corporatism, statism and bureaucracy, can resume their march under a Labour or European government.
Here is an exhilarating prospect, a politi- cal genius drawing back his longbow and firing his arrow straight on the bull's eye. But who reads Tocqueville, when Wisden and Archer are by the bedside? '0 vitae philosophia dux.'
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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