I think the differences between me and Phil (to whom, incidentally congrats) are probably very deep-seated here, and so I don’t hold out much hope for persuading him – but surely the hope of The Sharpener is to enlighten through debate, and maybe some of you on the fringe between us might be moved a bit more in either direction. In what follows, I want to set out what I think Phil’s position is, then why and how I disagree, and then follow up with a couple of points about the bases and implications of Phil’s position as stated in that post.

First, a bad allegory

Imagine the scene: you’re a kid – let’s say you’re 12 years old – and you’re walking to school one morning. You see a boy you sometimes see around the estate walking across the street towards you. You don’t know him, but some of your friends do. You look up to greet this boy – you think his name is Al* – only to see him throw his first punch. You stagger back as he kicks you, and punches you again. You end up on the pavement, bruised and beaten, as he puts away the mobile phone he’s videotaped it all on.

A little later, having recovered your composure enough to do so, you finish that walk to school, and you find your friends in the playground and tell them all about it. You’re very shaken, not to mention very sore. You feel frightened and alone. Your friends, of course, are there for you. They’re angry about what the boy did to you, and comfort you by agreeing how bad it is. You’re a bit disconcerted when one of your friends says that this shouldn’t happen to anyone (er, hang on, you think – it actually happened to you, not anyone), but you figure you’re just a bit sensitive.

Come lunchtime, the bell rings and you go to the dining hall to get your Jamie Oliver-approved school lunch. After this highly nutritional (but potentially quite dull) sustenance, you go out into the playground and see all of your friends gathered around Al. You walk closer and realise that they’re not sorting him out, but talking, laughing, and joking with him. You turn away and decide to keep to yourself for the rest of the break.

After lunch, you talk to one of your friends in class and, more shaken now than ever, what was going on – were they scared of Al? Your friend laughs and tells you “oh no.” So why, you ask, were they his friends, after all the strong words this morning and yet . “Well,” your friend explains, “obviously what Al did to you was awful, and unforgiveable – he shouldn’t have done that to anyone.” That’s better… “But,” – hang on, what but? – “life goes on, doesn’t it?”

This stops you dead in your tracks, but another of your friends leans in and offers his view: “Look, obviously we condemn what he did – but what purpose would it serve to condemn Al and cast him out? After all, he has his own reasons to work out, doesn’t he? While you might take a more partial view given your experience, we weren’t there and so, while we can say people shouldn’t do that, it’s not for us to judge his motives, or what outcome there should be; it’s not for us to take sides. He’s quite clear that he likes doing this happyslapping stuff and that he thinks we’re ripe targets, but that’s his view, and all we can ask is that he doesn’t act as he did this morning.”**

These are your friends.

Phil’s argument (or my interpretation, anyhow)

The position Phil set out in his post is that we should “oppose terror in the name of humanity,” and more specifically, that “opposing terror [is not] the same thing as opposing the terrorists.” “The constituency you rally against terror need only be defined – and should only be defined – by its resistance to terror.” Phil is concerned to contrast his view with that of the Prime Minister, whose

“argument seems to spring from a certain kind of communitarian thinking, which holds that people can only be mobilised by appealing to the values of their communities – and that the bonds and symbols defining those communities are pre-political, if not pre-rational.”

In a comment reply to Jarndyce, Phil goes further:

“I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re saying, but I think I may disagree very strongly. “That community being ‘Britain’ or ‘London’ or ‘Europe’, and the strand being a basic understanding of and agreement with liberal democratic values, on which membership is contingent.” What do you do if you get talking to someone down the pub and you judge that they don’t meet these criteria? Shop them as a suspected terrorist? I would really hope not.”

Further, and rooted in Phil’s commitment to ethical humanism, is the view that:

“[the] appeal to resist terror is a statement about how people should and shouldn’t act – whatever social situation they occupy, however much or little power they wield, whatever cause they espouse. It suspends any consideration of motives and outcomes – any consideration of ways in which the social world should change.”

Phil’s argument, then, is that solidarity against terror should be focused on revulsion against terrorist acts, without regard to either the actors or the motives which drive them. More practically, the argument is that any notion of community outside of a universal humanity, is inherently exclusive and divisive, and is more likely to be part of the problem than any solution. The argument then comes back, because the same faith in universal humanity means that all people can join in that revulsion against terrorist acts, regardless of their agreement with the motives. British liberals can join hands with Afghan Taliban sympathisers, as long as they agree that the means employed on the 7th July are wrong.

No such thing as society?

The heart of the argument is this: the real problem is in our use of exclusive categories that divide people, each assuming their own superiority and attempting to dominate others. If only we would recognise that at the end of the day we’re all human beings, and appeal to the common (ethical humanist) ground we all (or very nearly all) share, then we’d have a whole lot less trouble in the world.

It probably won’t be a shock that I think this is bollocks; and dangerous bollocks (syphilitic, perhaps) at that. One doesn’t have to be a de Maistre to see that, as much as there might be some part of the human experience that is universal, we only understand it through our particular, historical circumstances, living in community with others. Further, these communities are, by their very nature, exclusive, divisive. Attempts to build the universal society hardly inspire confidence that this element of the human condition is easily escapable…

These communities we live in, and to which we declare and live our loyalties, are not simply confluences of people around a common emotion, provoked in a moment but limited to an objection to, or some advancement of, an element of an ethical humanist code. I know my little corner of existence isn’t like that: in it, I have friends with whom I share more than just a feeling over justice, but shared experiences, interests, and practices. My family matters to me too; the welfare of my niece matters more to me than a random five-year-old girl from elsewhere in the world, and will remain so regardless of how little she and I share the same ends – we are bound together. I’m quite sure that your world is very much the same; that the community into which life’s vagaries have thrown you creates connections more valuable than a random, universally human case can ever be.

Now, that means that we are partial to those immediately around us. But it’s worse. Our immediate friends and family spread out into ever-decreasing-circles, to form a much larger community – primarily within an identifiable community, even if with messy borders. A random Englishman will, on the whole, have more in common with me than a random Frenchman. And within these ever-decreasing-circles, the clusters of relationships between people with common experiences, interests, and practices, also shape common norms and values. Because our experiences, interests, and practices differ between our communities (the life of a devout Buddhist in rural Thailand being somewhat different to that of atheists and lite-Christians in urban England), it’s probably not unreasonable to assume some differences in the norms and values so shaped, even through such seemingly harmless activities as the way we talk about the world.

Universal for whom?

There are, it should be said, values common across these traditions, because although the specifics may differ, there are similar elements – we all want for food, for friendship, and so on; we’re all human, after all. This is true, but potentially trivial. The Pareto principle applies here – it’s not the width of our agreement that counts as much as the depth of our disagreement. Yes: we’re all human, but then so too was Pol Pot – we could probably have had a conversation with him on a whole range of subjects and found him to be a very sensible chap, but if we were to chance him on to the subject of spectacle-wearing as a sign of bourgeois corruption and the appropriate response, we might soon sense that he was a (to put it mildly) nasty piece of work. (And, from a distance, massive struggles really can look like covering tiny differences – try this.)

Further, the ethical humanist code hardly seems a minimalist common-ground prospectus. Take the point touched on above: about community as an exclusive, divisive phenomenon, tied into conceptions of friendship and family – most of the world’s religions, and especially the likes of Islam or Hinduism, take that view, against the implied ethical humanist position. Many on the Right might go overboard on the whole world-of-peace / world-of-war division in Islam, but for most Muslims it is an important symbol of the division between those in the faith and those outside (and is hardly unique among religions in differentiating the elect). Another example: Phil’s ethical humanism would, I assume, work on the assumption of human equality; where would that leave the caste system in Hinduism? Is the whole of Hinduism thereby in defiance of the ethical humanist code? How can we then appeal to them to join with us in opposing terror on the basis of a code that condemns them also? Doesn’t this ethical humanism smack of western liberal predilections? Doesn’t that tell us something about the limits of any such universal doctrines?***

Home is where the heart is

But back to the proper response to terror. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling far more revulsion and consequent resolve in response to the 7th July bombings than I would to, say, a news report of a bombing of some villages by M-19 or FARC (take your pick) in Colombia, with civilians killed with the same abandon. Ok, it might be said that that’s a natural psychological response, borne of proximity; but it might also be because they’re people with whom I have a sense of ongoing solidarity in a way that Colombian peasants simply aren’t.

Does that mean I feel nothing for those Colombian peasants? Of course not; as I say, we are all human beings, and to that extent, we can all be sad and angry and revolted. But to say that it matters as much as it does when my own community – let me say it again, my own community – is attacked would be a pretense; it doesn’t. The 7th July bombings were an attack on my people and my country; we were all attacked. For the 7th July terrorists, ultimate success is the end of this community – let me call it by (one of) its name(s), Britain. So should I “suspend any consideration of motives and outcomes – any consideration of ways in which the social world should change” when those motives mean the destruction of my community? This is where the humanity-wide community against terror doesn’t – because there will be some revolted by the means but in agreement with the ends; whereas for most Britons (most westerners, I imagine), the ends themselves are deeply offensive.

It might be said that the allegiance of people such as myself to particular nations is as much the problem here, and that human freedom subsists in allowing people to have their choice over the ends of life, as long as they pursue them through ethical means alone. That might or might not be fine, but at what point are we to stop worrying about others’ freedom and start choosing and pursuing our own ends? There’s a very strong whiff here of that old joke about liberals not being able to take their own side in an argument. But political liberty only survives in the context of a mature, stable, and plural polity, the survival of which should not be taken for granted.

Happily, the current terrorist problem looks likely to be No Big – a flea on an elephant’s back. So we are at liberty to play our way, and quite possibly those like Phil, arguing for a different view, will help us to discover some truths that will help us in future. We can, for example, all smugly nod along with Lord Hoffman’s oft-quoted lines from last December’s Lords judgement, and not force ourselves to wonder how far we would be willing to go without “laws such as these.” But, if the terrorists can’t win, my concern is that we could lose along the way.

To listen to some discussion over the response to terrorism and the current political debate, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are day-by-day Slouching towards Sparta, a land of repressive patriotic militarism; that a Right-wing creep is the real enemy. Yet I don’t think I’m alone in worrying that, beneath the surface activity of more intense policing, this mentality creates an instinctive cringe, a nobly-intended wish to ensure we’re offering forgiveness and the hand of friendship (turn the other cheek, even), that fails to tackle terrorism, while all the time draining our own country of its purpose and solidarity – we don’t stand together against our enemies, but instead seek always to welcome, and include them. But maybe we’ll be so busy trying to include that we’ll lose a sense of who and what we are; much as these terrorists can’t defeat us, in those circumstances, maybe we lose ourselves.

* Nobody ever said I was that subtle.

*** None of this should be taken as my holding a morally relativist position; I don’t. But our access to moral knowledge is always partial, because our position is always historical.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. On 11 July 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army, led by Ratko Mladic, disarmed UN peacekeepers and systematically murdered 8,000 Muslim captives. The atrocity shocked the world and Mladic and his boss Radovan Karadzic are still being hunted for war crimes.

Before we condemn the perpetrators, though, we need to understand the underlying causes of this massacre. For 500 years, the Serbs lived under Muslim rule. The Bosnian Muslims are the descendants either of the Turkish conquerors or of South Slavs who converted to Islam. Their ancestors lorded it over the Serbs, oppressing and enslaving them. When Yugoslavia fell apart, many Serbs feared that Bosnia would again become a Muslim dominated state. Others simply wanted to settle some old scores. Southern Serbia was not liberated from Ottoman rule until the 1900s. It is still just within living memory that Serbs were ruled by Muslims. Many Serbs would have grown up with stories about members of their families being brutally treated by their overlords. While we should not condone the massacre at Srebrenica, we should try to understand the historic resentment of colonial rule that drove the perpetrators to such atrocities.

Somehow it developed into a discussion on Islam and the liberal response, carried out through email between me and Jarndyce. It’s been edited for readability, but otherwise is as the discussion went…

Jarndyce:
Steve’s parody of apologism shoots down one bit of nonsense: Nobody’s saying that Orthodox Christianity is responsible for Srebrenica, are they? Well, Islam isn’t responsible for Madrid, or London either. We need to get down to much more basic definitions of responsibility. Anything else is just apologism, as bad as anti-war types saying the London bombings “wouldn’t have happened but for Iraq”.

Steve agrees that we can’t blame “Muslims” for the London bombs, but suggests something deep within Islam that gives cause for concern. I’m not sure: I don’t let SWPers inform me what it’s like to be on the Left, I don’t let the KKK inform me what it’s like to live in the Deep South, I don’t let Mussolini inform me what it’s like to be Italian, I don’t let Gazza inform me what it’s like to be a footballer, and I don’t let a bunch of homicidal lunatics inform me what it’s like to be a Muslim. Most of my neighbours are Muslim, and I’ll stick to local knowledge. The sorts of people who put bombs on trains are nihilists. Why should our interpretation of Islam be theirs? A proper liberal should never apologise for indiscriminate killing, but nor should s/he cast around for a group to blame. Moral agency is much simpler.

Blimpish:
But who really is truly a liberal, anyway? Not many is my guess. And whose definition of liberalism is the right one? Liberality in its original form, as one of many virtues, meant something very different to what it became for us through Locke, or then Mill, or since then, Rawls.

Turning to Islam, it has the same features – literalism, radical egalitarianism, the direct connection with God – that inspired Protestantism’s eruptions during and after the Reformation. Like Puritanism, Islam extracts a pretty high price from its adherents. Then Islam adds another dangerous element – it is a law-based religion, which doesn’t allow for a clear division of spiritual and temporal powers.

Voegelin‘s conclusion on Islam: “Perhaps, for the masses, this high spiritual clarity is made bearable through a connection with the neither high nor especially spiritual extension of God’s realm by force of arms over the ecumene.” (Said over 40 years ago.)

Now, there are many and widely different flavours of Islam. But if we think Islam is fertile soil for outbreaks such as happened in London last week, then surely this is a legitimate point of concern for us all.

It simply won’t do to hide behind a generalised theophobia – “yes, Islam is false, but so are all religions.” Without even bothering to get into an argument over the arrogant religious assertions contained therein (atheist humanism being a religion much like any other); if the worst Christianity has to offer is Christian Voice, or West Bank settlers for Judaism, while Islam has al-Qa’eda and Hamas… well, the difference speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Jarndyce:
Your main point, I think, is that the Koran is open to literal translation. Not just that, but that Muslims do take it literally. But I don’t accept that’s unchanging or unchangeable, or that nuance implies one single interpretation. Hardly any Muslims want the shariah introduced in Europe. Many of Europe’s Muslims are Turkish origin, and they don’t even accept the primacy of Islamic law at ‘home’.

Plus, why judge a religion by its worst elements? Does Tim McVeigh represent Christianity? Does Baruch Goldstein represent Judaism? Christian Voice and peaceful Israeli settlers are not the worst those two religions have thrown up recently. Now, if you’re saying that empirically speaking, Islam seems to be hijacked by extremists more than other religions, then I agree. But all, it appears, are hijack-able.

Second, there are powerful modernising Muslim strands in Europe arguing for a non-literal approach to the Koran. Saying, in effect, that a European Islam will be different.

For me, you have to go beyond the quoting of scripture and look at the nature of Arab (and other Muslim-populated) states. They have failed, almost every one. Partly we’ve had a hand. We have to accept that – and it makes our mission in places like Iraq even more obligated. But it’s not just us: the obsession, for example, in Gulf states with boys learning the Koran by rote, instead of algebra, English and economics, is producing a generation ill-equipped for the modern world. This isn’t Koranic, but an interpretation put on it by a generation of despots whose only interest is suppression of their people’s wills. Many of their young men are failing in a globalized economy, and are looking for someone to blame. There is no outlet at home. They look abroad, and target their hate accordingly. We insist on our supposedly precious democratic principles differently in, say, Egypt and Iraq, and the crap the local salafist-jihadist is filling their heads with is confirmed: the West is imperialist; the West wants to dominate and subjugate Muslims; the West is hypocritical.

That hate travels over here via radical imams – we’ve left the pastoral care of our communities, remember, to be paid for by foreign countries. Unlike established religion, Islam has to look after itself financially. The rhetoric of failure and hatred spreads: it chimes with British unemployed (Muslim) youth. Some are held back by traditional structures; others denied opportunities because of racism. It’s a cycle.

All you need is for some of this nonsense to hit the wrong sort of personality, and there’s trouble. It’s politics, in the end, the politics of global radical political Islamism.

Blimpish:
No – I think there’s more to it than passing political pressures alone.

I want to be thorough, to avoid any misunderstanding. I don’t think that Islam is evil at all – I think it is one of the great religions with good reason, and I know as well as anyone that most Muslims are good people. You know me – I tend to take it as read that most people are working with good intentions, even if their reading of the facts might be barmy.

What I do think is that Islam possesses certain characteristics as a religion, which makes it especially prone to the Gnostic temptation – that is, the temptation to seek a transformation of the world around a claim of absolute knowledge of ‘reality'; an ideological worldview, as we might call it today. This typically involves some (explicit or implicit) preparation for the end-times – whether through asceticism or the release of all restraints.

The spiritual impulse in man always leaves us open to this temptation, however channelled – the Reformation craze for witch-hunts, Nazism, Soviet Communism – all have done it at some stage. Unfortunately, the spiritual impulse is perhaps the most vital motive for human action – it is what we draw on when reflecting on what makes life living, after all. Harnessing that impulse allows humanity to achieve many, many things. But by the same token, it needs to be kept caged – if unleashed without constraint, the spiritual impulse is the most lethal force we know.

Now, most major religions have had some Gnostic outbreaks, and some are more prone than others – religions emphasising individualist worship with a direct connection to God are especially prone, because there are no traditions, doctrines, or institutions (however fallible) to sublimate spiritual energies. That’s the genius of Orthodoxy (Judaic, Christian, any) – it puts some thickness between the individual and God, to prevent the worshipper mistaking and acting on every event as an apocalyptic symbol. To see this source of the problem within Radical Islam, consider that these ‘conservatives’ often have no truck with local cultural practice – what counts is Koranic interpretation above all, regardless of circumstance, time and place.

Islam’s tendency to Gnosticism is both structurally and historically too difficult to ignore. Structurally, as well as the same features that caused problems in Reformation Protestantism (sola scriptura, private worship, etc), it is law-based and so sees no reason for a distinction between Mosque and State. Within its literalism, part of the problem of Islam is also (as much as I know any of it) an unfortunate tendency to deal in stark concepts like the House of Peace/House of War dualism. You might say some focus unduly on that, but because of the sola scriptura approach, a radical cleric can go on peddling the same line – and by the same sola scriptura token, anybody can become a radical cleric, because there’s no necessary qualification to teach Koranic scripture.

The historic problem is that, whereas similar (if slightly less concerning) structural conditions hold for Evangelical Protestantism, they were burned out through the Reformation and have since been pacified (enervated?) in modern-liberalism. Yet, within parts of the Islamic world, and within some corners of Islamic communities in the West, this is all burning quite hot.

Now, my point is that until Islam on the whole (a) develops suitable institutions or practices to constrain and dissipate the radical temper that can emerge in any religious community; and (b), probably as a consequence of (a), becomes much more effective at disinfecting its own bad elements, it will remain a concern to most, me included.

In terms of the worst of other religions – McVeigh and Goldstein – well, these are single freakoid mentalist types, rather than any large-scale phenomenon. The current problem in Islam, and one that has grown over many decades now, is that of a common ideological movement, across countries and continents. Relatively small in active numbers, but loud in impact, they often remain far too unchallenged in their own backyard. Christianity and Judaism do not, and have not, presently seem to generate such movements. Doubtless, a lot of the other problems of the Middle East haven’t helped, but that’s not the only explanation. Some of the most pious Islamic fundamentalists are drawn from the young, educated professional classes – seeking some escape from existential angst, y’know. (Incidentally, Timothy McVeigh was not a Christian – he was an agnostic.)

Maybe those changes I seek in Islam will come from the European experience. But how well they will catch on remains to be seen, and until they do begin to address some of my concerns, the size and shape of the Muslim world, including that part of it in the UK, seems to me to be a pressing issue for our political debates.

Jarndyce:
Okay, so:
1. Private revelation/a direct route to God;
2. Literalism, especially in the legal field;
3. No church structure to hold back the maniacs.

My central point is this: that could be Stephen Green. As you say, though, Christian Voice aren’t putting bombs on trains. So the problem isn’t the theory, the scripture, but its application, and the weight of numbers going down the wrong path. To me, that’s politics (and some of it internal radical politics).

Crudely, Islam needs to go through a process of change like Protestantism did two-hundred years ago. A separation of the public-political and legal from the spiritual. (Then maybe “war on the unbeliever” will be a duty to debate with him, rather than blow him up?) My argument is that it is already going through this change. European contact is changing Muslims, secularizing or making their devout Islam compatible with (most of) liberalism. Countries like Turkey and Lebanon keep the clerics outside of politics. The daughter of my Turkish neighbour goes out in clothes that make a thirty-something blush.

What isn’t happening is a real confrontation with extreme “Wahhabism” and its source, Saudi Arabia and the madrassas of Pakistan. This is only one strain (I don’t see many Sufi suicide bombers…), but it’s the one that gets most attention from the “kill all Muslims” brigade. The way to tackle these people is not, like some think, to go round selectively quoting scripture and branding Islam as evil. Plenty of Muslims don’t interpret the Koran that way – plenty don’t think a literal interpretation of the Koran is even appropriate. Hardly any think shariah ought to apply in Europe, as I’ve said. These are all facts. What we need is to tackle the problems, not ‘Islam’. And we’re pushing against an open door: any fool can see Wahhabism = failure. And you’re right: Muslims need to tackle the problem, too. To that aim, they ought to be coopted inside the state not left on the outside. Right now the only person on the inside who seems to be speaking for them is Galloway, and his influence isn’t helpful to anyone outside the SWP.

We shouldn’t also forget that the number of people prepared to do this is very small indeed. Okay, you can fire back at me that x,000 have sympathies. But how many anti-globalization protestors are there in this country? How many would sanction the bombing of the Carlyle Group? That’s the difference.

Murderous political Islamism is a cancer and has to be removed. Agreed. But the answer’s integration, not ramping up the Othering.

Blimpish:
On your latter, prescriptive point, I’d agree, but it isn’t enough to say that we must ‘include to integrate’ as the only strategy. We can only affect one small corner of Islam, and hardly a dominant one either. The Islam that inspires in much of the world is strident and vigorous, and has no respect for liberal social and political institutions – in fact, often quite the opposite.

Given the wider context, this is why we should be mindful over the level of Islamic migration and residency here. I don’t see why this is controversial – you’d agree with me that religion is not race, and that’s why the Religious Hatred Bill’s a wrong’un, because religion is about ideas and should be open to criticism. But how can we act on that criticism, if it’s not satisfactorily refuted? As I said, I have a lot of respect for Islam, so there’s no great issue here – but if it were the problems of a popular Satanism we were discussing, I’d have no problem in suggesting direct action, even persecution. Religious tolerance takes place within limits; there are some spiritual claims that are incompatible with a given society – thankfully, Islam as a whole is nowhere near that position, but we shouldn’t forget that there are limits.

The comparison with Stephen Green: on the terms you cite, yes. But there are crucial differences beyond the similarities:

First, Christianity is a teaching- and not a law-based religion – it does not claim to be a complete guide to temporal life. Islam, like Judaism, does. This could be solved by the triumph of some kind of orthodox tradition – like Rabbinic teaching in Judaism – but we’re a long, long way from this happening, and it will be very difficult to achieve because Islam is a globalised religion before it has any central institutions capable of administering such authority.

Second, as you say, Protestantism has evolved from its Reformation origins – there is distance between rhetoric and action now. The difference here is critical – a Christian who murders abortionists is widely reviled, and can find no public traction or support; nor can their advocates. Unfortunately, although only a minority, groups like al-Muhajiroun were allowed to exist and the moderate, mainstream Muslim community has not found the backbone or the methods to ostracise them as they would be in the Christian community. This is, as you imply, a historic problem – it might well change – but there’s a long way to travel yet, and until we get there, caution seems advisable.

Third, and related to Islam’s being a law-based religion, is its insistence on stark notions that encourage “them-and-us” thinking. There’s an underlying idea that goes around that, once you strip out language and theological concepts, all of the traditional religions are pretty much the same. But that’s not true – although the Abrahamic religions share some ground, there are substantive differences between them which cut to the heart of their worldview. To give just one example, they have very different notions of God – in Islam, as far as I am aware, God is a more distant, arbitrary power-that-is.

Again, let me reiterate that these points are not necessarily specific to Islam – but Islam fits the bill now, and is also large enough to be potentially problematic. We can’t get away from the fact that, here and now, most of the terrorist problem-children in the world are Muslim. For whatever reason, Islam is proving some of the richest soil for ideologised hatred right now – and it seems to me that this is not wholly coincidental.

Now, hopefully you’re right that a European Islam is emerging that’s thoroughly pacified by modern liberal society – but that’s got all the makings of being a global/historical aberration – unless the more dominant global strands are challenged (especially, as you say, Wahabbism), it seems to me that global Islam will remain an issue. And I don’t see how it’s going to be solved, and until it is, there are factors to consider. I don’t disagree about the importance of binding British Muslims into the state as much as possible – quite the opposite. But this is not a one-way process, and isn’t helped when many of the leading Muslim groups jump on the racial identity bandwagon, and damn any questioning reference to their faith as Islamophobia. It’s helped even less when, sometimes, while criticising extremism in general they duck out of criticising specific groups and individuals. When we reach the extremes, Muslims have to choose Britain over Islam, and too few of the ‘leaders’ (self-appointed, self-important though they are) seem willing to do so.

Not unproblematically, as Walter Berns once pointed out, the rule of liberal society is “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; render unto God that which Caesar permits.” Evangelical Protestantism has long since accepted this rule; Islam has not, so far.

Jarndyce:
Well, you clearly know more about the scriptural detail than me, and I don’t think we’re that far apart. Maybe I’m just less pessimistic than you. I see this twisted form of Islam losing the battle almost everywhere. No, we shouldn’t be stopped from giving opinions about religions, I agree. But assigning group blame, for anything (not all Christians wanted Jerry Springer: The Opera stopped), has to be discouraged. Muslims themselves, in the end, will have to lance the boil. It’s in their interests, and they have the comparative advantage. We have to help them find the resources to do that in Britain. That means coopting them within the state, helping them train imams within proper educational structures so we don’t have to import Saudis and Pakistanis who don’t understand the British context. The “Muslim = evil” meme has to be challenged wherever it appears, including on blogs. Islamophobia is an ugly word, but it exists. That has to be recognised, even though some may be exploiting and exaggerating its prevalence.

And we can’t calculate what the effects of a moderately secular and successful Iraq would be on the Middle East. Lebanon is already more successful than, say, Egypt. A bigger country succeeding spectacularly may tip the scales. Turkey’s longevity is proof that secular Islam is possible – their ‘Islamist’ government are using the ECHR to defend secularism, as well as trying to get into the EU. Surveys of naturalised ‘European Turks’ (including one on my desk right now – not online) find virtually no support for the primacy of Islamic over secular law. We have a slightly skewed sample in the UK, as the majority of our Muslims are Pakistani-origin. The picture looks different over the water.

Liberalism is the path forward, and it’s working. I like the fact that it is silent on the big questions. It doesn’t mean you can’t have your own answers to those questions. Just that, as long as none are incompatible with liberal society, one doesn’t outlaw or invalidate any. Equal consideration, including for all religions. We’re reached a crucial juncture, sure, but change is already happening. We just need to keep the process moving.

Blimpish:
Yes, you’re right – we’re not too far apart. Both of us see, I think, that there are issues in Islam, but that also we in the West aren’t simply bystanders in the process. That’s takes place internationally – in building a successful Iraq most of all, as you say – but also domestically, in working to bind British Muslims into our national life. You’re also right that I’m more pessimistic than you are. I don’t think this is impossible, but I think it’s a high wall we want to climb, and I question whether we in the West have the will even to play our part in it.

Modern liberalism’s cunning is in its silence on the big questions – but it also makes it ultimately an empty vessel – but agreeing to be indifferent to each others’ deepest belief is hardly a basis for community. That’s why I think liberalism can never be enough on its own, and never has been in any society, either. Unless we have some basic agreement on those big questions, we don’t have the fellow-feeling on which we can build our liberal regime.

I think this is where I do worry about Islam in Britain today. To achieve what we both want – British Muslims who feel British Muslims – we have to be willing to offer them some substance to buy into, some additional motivation to inspire their thoughts and deeds. Liberalism alone cannot offer that; all it does offer them is the chance to be Muslims providing they keep themselves to themselves (some offer!). We have to offer Muslims participation in a genuine community, with a sense of holding some substantive values in common – not just ‘tolerance’ and ‘rights,’ but a sense of order and justice and the good life.

The problem is that this is where the liberal-Left will not be willing to tread – it likes the idea of community, but blanches at any of the steps necessary to achieve it. Communities, after all, are built on particularities – on exclusive loyalties, on personalities, on parochiality. Liberals will always (as liberalism demands) put universal values – choice, freedom, equality – above the particular claims of communities.

I have to wonder if the question of Islam in Britain really might force us to discover whether liberalism can ever alone provide a basis for society. And the more I think about it, the less I think that it can.

Now, this post is only slightly related to the Bill. It’s as much about that much-talked-of thing, Political Correctness. Before you run for the hills, I have no great revelations to impart about green sheep or demanding men wear skirts. Not really my thing. I just want to run through some thoughts about Political Correctness, and our attitudes towards religion, and what they might say about the way we live now. These thoughts are almost certainly wrong and misguided, and (one hopes) maybe even a little Politically Incorrect; but I hope you won’t mind me sharing them with you…

“‘Political correctness’ hints at totalitarian conformity, but a real totalitarian state would not suffer sarcastic complaint… So the accusation of ‘political correctness’ is ipso facto an exaggeration. Yet it is also on its face a reproach to liberal toleration as understood today because it would not have been made by anyone who felt comfortable in the new society of inclusive diversity. The accusation shows that someone thinks he is being excluded and this is a claim that must be credited since, according to the advocates of diversity, the evidence of inclusion is the feeling that you are included… Political correctness, then, is necessarily exaggerated and necessarily true – which is not what either side of the matter wants to hear.” (Harvey C. Mansfield, “Political Correctness,” Ch.16 in Michael Foley and Douglas Kries (eds), Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays on Religion and Political Philosophy in Honor of Ernest L Fortin, AA)

“On one hand, almost no sexual display is forbidden, and the most casual of liaisons is perfectly normal; on the other, university professors dare not be alone in a closed room with a female student for fear of accusations of sexual misdemeanour… Extreme licentiousness thus coexists with a Puritanism that out-Calvins Calvin… One minute we are told that anything goes, and the next that we must carefully censor ourselves for fear of permanently traumatizing anyone who might overhear supposedly salacious remarks. At last, Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance seems to make some sense: We can do what we like so long as we live in fear.” (Theodore Dalrymple, “Looking for Boundaries,” in National Review, June 20, 2005)

Talk of Political Correctness gets the worst of us all. For some, it’s a media-driven Right-wing frenzy, used to tarnish the efforts of people working hard and with good intentions of ensuring greater inclusion for people left on the margins. For others, it’s a modern bureaucratic Inquisition, trampling over our most vital symbols and rituals to impose right-think in the name of some trendy cause or other. Unsurprisingly perhaps, my sympathies lie more to the latter, and for those who think I’m nuts, I’ll point to the rich seam of stories like this or that or the other.

Then again, I do accept, people go overboard worrying about this stuff too. ‘Political correctness gone mad’ has become one of the great clichés of our day. It’s for that reason that I put that first quote at the top – I think it sums up the oddness of Political Correctness, that it (1) exists; (2) isn’t really that bad; but (3) the concept itself demonstrates the failure of Political Correctness as a well-intended strategy of inclusion. What I want to do here is to just explore some of the deeper roots and drives of Political Correctness in the context of proposals to limit speech regarding religion, and to make some reckless judgements about them and their meaning. Throughout, the focus is on Political Correctness as most of us understand it, as something primarily moving from Left to Right – that’s not to say that ‘censorship’ (as it is, with equal exaggeration, sometimes called) doesn’t go the other way, but that Political Correctness is more interesting because it’s a new phenomenon – emphatically not concerned with upholding the established order, but subverting it.

I.

Onto the second opening quote: Political Correctness is odd not just because it’s new but also that it exists now, at a time when we have rarely been freer, and that freedom has rarely been shared so widely. From as early as possible, we want to ensure that there are no limits on individuals expressing themselves and their identity – that’s why there’s such concern about sexual freedom – Dalrymple points out the special confidentality status on contraception or abortion for minors.

Yet on the other hand, puritanism reigns. Not just what we say, but also smoking, drinking, obesity, large-engine motor cars – you name it, we frown on it and crack down on it (in Scotland, 16 and 17 year olds might soon be barred from buying tobacco) – dare I mention straight bananas? Across every part of life, there’s a rising tide of bureaucracy. This isn’t just a government thing – every corporation has its ever-growing Mongol Horde of HR types* eager to restrain, formalise and proceduralise. All for very noble reasons, no doubt, but not exactly a celebration of individual autonomy and the assertion of choice, eh?

So, the message seems to be: be whoever you want, just as long as you do it and say it right, kids. Kinda’ takes the life out of life, really, doesn’t it?

II.

Back to the Religious Hatred Bill. Most of us object to the proposed restrictions because we say that, in a liberal society of the sort we have, one of the achievements is to relegate religious disputes wholly to the private realm. This is probably a good thing, for fairly obvious historic reasons – like large numbers of people being slaughtered over the use of icons or the content of the Lord’s Prayer, say. Much better, most of us think, that everybody’s religious opinion is viewed as being equally suspect, and none are allowed to hold sway over the nation and so dominate our public discourse to the exclusion of those who follow other faiths, or none at all.**

In the US, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia summed up the oddity of this argument well – that we put piety on a par with pornography, as something you are free to exercise, as long as it’s only in private. This is, on its face, absurd – religion is something that we want to express, we want to share, because it’s true. But the piety-as-pornography view is now the conventional wisdom. No position is to be privileged, and all are to be subject to the full force and variety of criticism.

This might be true for those of a more theological disposition, but not everybody with a deep religious faith does so with a clear philosophical make-up. For many religious people, their beliefs are unrivalled claims to Truth, and so having them open to mockery (given their nature, they are ultimately indeterminate and so impossible to defended conclusively), all the way to Chris Ofili’s artwork (or maybe the toilet habits at Gitmo) and beyond, is quite a bit to stomach. So, wanting to avoid conflict we require equal and open criticism of religions, but that does open the door to religious people catching the sharp-end, in ways many of us would find distasteful if it concerned (say) their race.

III.

In this free market in religious truth, all claims are seen to be transient conjectures, open to refutation at any time and from any source, and with whichever intentions. Yet for most people of sincere religious faith, their spiritual beliefs give them their ground for their temporal beliefs, ranging from their moral principles through to their acceptance of the physical world. Leaving everything open to criticism means that there is nothing that can’t be traded away, which can often leave that ground looking shaky, to say the least.

Religious peoples’ moral principles are such because they have divine sanction behind them. Where that divine sanction is certain and unquestioned, these are seen as true and stable, and recognised and enforced as such in society, we derive from them social conventions on how we behave, and arrive at manners and honour, and so on (however imperfectly we may practice them).

From there, we move to a society where those moral principles and, even more, their source, are all open to question. At first, we all stick to the moral principles, because they’re what we’ve been raised with, and seem fair and useful – but at the margins, we are free to question and pick and choose our adherence. If the source is open to question, then so too are the principles. Quite soon, we start to go our separate ways, the moral principles lose their absolute authority, and so shake the foundations of our social – that is, shared – conventions on conduct and decency.

IV.

This fraying of common principles has been going on for some time in western societies. To varying extents, we’ve departed from a single set of principles, differently interpreted, to hold different sets of principles, with common ground found only through interpretation. The collapse of Christian observance and understanding has made it necessary, and the arrival of many non-Christians through immigration accelerated the process (and perhaps made it less confrontational, too). And it has its upside – we are all now at liberty to focus on those principles that mean something to us individually, rather than being left hypocrites by the other parts of a doctrine we can’t buy. But if we no longer have common principles, can our shared conventions, our agreement on what it is to be decent, survive?

Liberal society has its solution. We have one moral principle to which we can all commit, and that is tolerance – the liberal virtue par excellence. Every part of society, every group, and every person, can all commit to the idea of respecting each other’s space. Our fellow man might be stupid, wrong, even malign in our eyes – but, providing that he respects others’ space, that is his business.

But notice: although all of us commit to liberal tolerance (the fascists excepted, but even they talk the talk), this is not always because it is good in itself, but because of its function – it makes peaceful coexistence a possibility. By agreeing to abide by the rules of tolerance, we can get along with the others and – perhaps most important – seek protection from Government if we are the targets of the cardinal sin, intolerance.

Did somebody mention Leviathan? We have never been so free, educated, prosperous – but are we really one society anymore? With times like these (happily) are, we don’t need to worry quite so much. Everybody can get along with their business, and ignore their annoying neighbours – for most of us, life can concentrate on getting laid and getting paid. It wouldn’t, though, be unreasonable to consider how well we might fare in more turbulent times – whether we’d hang separately because we can’t bear to hang together.

V.

Unfortunately, tolerance doesn’t make us happy. Many people on the political Left worry, quite understandably, that giving people space and a route to inclusion doesn’t always mean that they will include themselves. Harvey Mansfield again: “Liberalism pretends to be universal since it means to say that the rights of man are rights of human beings. In fact… its universality is defeated by its formalism … [it] rewards, if it does not require, aggressivity.”

Political Correctness is born: to right the scales and ensure the less aggressive get their crack of the whip. To generalise, Political Correctness shows the limits of the Left’s commitment to liberalism, where it conflicts with other goods (most commitment to liberalism on the Right having long since been similarly exposed). Strict liberalism, of a Locke-Nozick sort, is actually dreadfully boring and procedural – not reason enough for most of us to get interested in politics, or to commit to a liberal society as the best means of achieving the good, or probably even to get out of bed in the morning.***

Rather, people on the Left are driven more by a passion for fairness, for inclusion without compromise for the individual’s identity, than they are by procedural freedom. Certainly, they are in my experience. Many of those I know on the Left don’t fear state control as much as they loathe the injustice of its power being used against those they consider weak or dispossessed. For that purpose, straight liberal tolerance, which often simply reflects the prevailing hierarchy, isn’t enough. Instead, the excluded need to be defended. (And sometimes, it seems, the best defence is to cause offence…)

VI.

To defend the excluded then, some on the Left seek to restrict speech and practice which might affect them – that’s Political Correctness. Whereas liberalism demands others in society keep their subjective sense of virtue to themselves and their lives, the Politically Correct Left can claim the promotion of inclusion as simply a logical extension of tolerance. In the guise of fair and neutral liberalism (to which we subscribe for functional reasons), Political Correctness advances a very specific view of right and wrong.

Just as the religious defend their principles with moral language, so too does the Politically Correct Left. Racism, sexism, homophobia, are damned not simply as stupid, ill-mannered, uncivil, and so on, but as moral evils – bad thoughts, not to be contemplated. Hence the special status assigned to racial speech, and the extremely subjective mode of classifying racism proposed by Lord Macpherson in his Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report (i.e., if a person feels that something was said or done for racist motivations, then it was).

The contrasts can be quite interesting here. On the one hand, Political Correctness means no qualms about labelling unintentionally discriminatory behaviours as the most pernicious evil; on the other, things we might traditionally call wrong are anaesthesised through the use of bland, therapeutic language – Anti-Social Behaviour, anyone?

VII.

This use of moral language, though, undermines the claim of Political Correctness to be simply an application of liberal tolerance – tolerance moves from an obligation to give others their equal space to a right for the oppressed to assert and express their own identity.

At this point, religious people might start to wonder quite what they’re getting out of the liberal settlement these days. Liberalism dethroned the old culture and establishment in the name of neutrality and fairness; but now, it could be suggested, the throne has been assumed by the Left. And similar criticisms might be advanced – the pettifogging of Political Correctness replaces the old repression of Christian doctrine; the establishment’s power, built on exclusion, is replaced by the PC Left’s power, built on inclusion – not all, it seems, are deemed worthy. None of this is wholly true, but it is felt, and so achieving the sunny dream of inclusion might not be quite so simple as was first thought.

Weber’s secularisation hypothesis having dropped from favour, the drive for justice of many on the Left pushes them to act on that perceived exclusion, because religion too can be integral to individual identity. Maybe, the concern goes, the new tolerance needs to extend to them, too. After all, some of the religions have as much claim to inclusion as any other group – they suffer discrimination and exclusion.

Some then suggest clamping down on religious ‘hate speech’. The problem is that we’ve long since declared that all the traditional qualitative distinctions – commitment to certain core principles, for example – are too exclusive, and so can’t be used as a basis to prefer one religion over another. As a result, we can’t think of passing a law that won’t offer protection to pretty much any ‘belief’.

VIII.

There are no limits to the growth of Political Correctness’s sacred realm, and that’s why some of us are concerned (to put it mildly) about where things are going. Because our move to secular society has been led primarily from the Left – with contributions from global capitalism – Political Correctness has often carried on in well-meant, if at times beautifully absurd, attempts to ensure inclusion. It might get on many of our nerves, but it didn’t cause too much direct, obvious damage. Recent trends, like the Religious Hatred Bill, lead some of us to wonder if the future bounds of the Politically Correct are likely to be not just unpredictable but increasingly disagreeable.

With the goal of inclusion and identity always left so vague, there’s no point we can stop this expanding forbidden territory – there always new injustices to fight, always new barriers to individual expression. In any context, there can be oppression, and a duty to stamp it out… and so we end up with the bizarre story of the gay horse in Oxford. The masses become exasperated because there’s no end that they can get used to – they’re continuously being told to change, control, and limit their behaviour for the benefit of those who (and that’s the point, after all) they don’t really know, anyway.

This is why I’m against the Religious Hatred Bill – not because I’m against all limits on expression, but because the creation of a blanket ‘right-not-to-be-offended’, without being confined to a particular doctrine, has no logical limit. At some stage along this path, we are creating the conditions where Political Correctness really can Go Mad, and I think that’s best avoided. The kind of society this Bill envisions will work if its citizens have purely privatised opinions; there would be no discussion except back-slapping confirmation of each others’ prejudices; and social happiness would rest on cold indifference.

We should all be concerned at the possible consequences. Already, the perceived randomness of Political Correctness clouds over the question of what is and is not reasonable to say; we first blur and then lose the lines of decency and manners that we inherit from a more orderly, if dully conformist, culture. Variations on the line “some people might say I’m a bit Politically Incorrect” have already become the stock excuse for bigots across the land – where before, clear lines could be used to damn them as uncivil, Political Correctness creates a grey area, where people give them leeway because they think that they too probably aren’t PC. Bigotry gains in respectability as we go further down this path. That’s not a good thing.

* Some of my best friends are HR people, before anybody accuses me of being HRist.

*** That isn’t to say that individual people on the Left (or the Right) can’t be more liberal than not, and many are – but that’s rarely all they are. Ideological Right-libertarians often are purist Locke-Nozick types. But they aren’t interested in politics.

As you might guess from my oh-so-subtle nom de blog, I’m a conservative. For that reason, this piece is a bit of navel-gazing because we Tories have now a brief opportunity to do that, and an urgent need to do so. In what follows, I’ll make some observations on how it all went for my lot, and then where we go next, before closing with my own reckless suggestions on what that should mean.

To put the rest of this piece in context, I want to start with some shameless self-absorbed autobiographical stuff. I wasn’t born to be a Tory – I’m from what used to be the working classes in the Midlands, with a trade union member father and a mother who is a bit of a pacifist (neither were politically active). At some point, though, I got interested in politics and soon decided I was a conservative. Maybe I was dropped on my head or something, I dunno.

That would have been in 1994, or thereabouts. Good time to become a conservative. First elections I watched were that summer’s European Parliamentary Elections. We got thumped in the face and kicked in the balls – total meltdown. In the years that followed, local elections saw the Tory Party wiped out of whole parts of England, having already reduced to a bare existence outside England.

By 1997, I was a student and a Conservative Student at that. I wasn’t especially active, because I was a bit of a loner really, more interested in reading Hayek and Mises than elections. But cometh the General Election, I figured it was time to do my bit, and I went out with my comrades to campaign for Major. I wasn’t a huge Major fan, and I knew well that Blair wasn’t (in spite of what some of those comrades said) going to bring back the Winter of Discontent – but I thought that, on balance, we’d got a good Government and that Labour would be worse.

Even after the drubbings of the preceding years, we all had a sneaking hope that there was a fight to be had – even if only to get a hung parliament. After all, maybe our voters just hadn’t turned out before; we’d won ’92, so… That said, we weren’t under any illusions that we were likely to lose. It was just the scale that came as a shock – as it did to everybody, I guess. When Gisela Stuart swept Birmingham Edgbaston for Labour, we all felt a horrible sinking feeling…

Some of those comrades at the time rededicated themselves to the cause, to get back next time. They just didn’t work it out – there was no way back from this in one term; we were hated, not simply unpreferred. I returned to being a political spectator, and got on with life – which turned out to be a good choice, I saw in 2001. I still had my opinions, and remained happily and openly on the Right, but I wasn’t going to be a partisan hack when the Government genuinely weren’t that bad.

Incidentally, as I lived life I drifted away from the ideological libertarianism to which I’d subscribed since the age of 19. For a variety of reasons I evolved into a conservative (neo nor paleo, simply that), learning to love the joys of order and community. That started before 11 September 2001, but the events of that day and the years since only served to reinforce this evolution in my politics. One day – I’m not quite sure when – I even finally accepted the label ‘Tory,’ which I’d always resisted.

Reasons to be cheerful

As I hope my blogging shows (I’ll leave it to others to make the final judgement), I’ve resisted descent into hackdom, but I have gradually again become a partisan Tory. I rooted for my party to win a good result on Thursday, and by Wednesday was getting thoroughly depressed about the omens. As it turned out, things weren’t so bad at all.

That’s not to say they’re great, but I’ll come back to that. We gained one seat in 2001. In 1997, we lost around half our seats. In 1992, we lost nigh on 40 seats. Even in 1987, we lost over 20 seats. To win 33 seats in 2005 – to make progress, however limited, is good.

There are other good points. We showed some genuine, if only moderate, success in London, taking seats like Hammersmith and Fulham, Putney, and Enfield Southgate. Best of all, when head-to-head with the Liberal Democrats – who were the only party making real national gains in electoral support – we didn’t buckle, and we took more of their seats back than we lost to them. That’s a massive difference from ’97 and ’01 – a mainstream party not compromised with power was unable to hurt us simply through posing as the Anti-Tory. It seems, perhaps, that the generalised and passionate loathing of ‘the Tories,’ so damaging in ’97 and ’01, is now very much a minority pursuit.

The Party also showed itself much better at campaign presentation and party discipline. We managed to stay off the Europe stuff through the campaign, and there weren’t the damaging and public divisions. Howard Flight’s sacking served its purpose. Through these steps, we made it a much fairer fight. Still room for improvement, yes: but we’re not the enthusiastic amateurs we had seemed in comparison to Labour.

Gradually, too, the freakshow factor is being diminished. Although a Tory, I am actually a human being (no, really) and I do cringe at the sight of many of our frontbenchers. Many of them just aren’t fit for television, I admit. Every party has its share (Lib Dem Norman Baker is one of my favourites), but somehow we seemed by 1997 to end up with far too many in leading positions. This seems to be subsiding, and from what I’ve seen, the 2005 intake seems to be mostly human.

Not waving but drowning…?

So yea for the Tories, that’s the good news.

The bad news? Well, we’re still a long, long way from power. And power is what counts.

The first point on this, already repeated many times but still too true, is that we barely moved in the share-of-vote stakes. Yes, that’s on a slightly improved turnout, so we did gain some voters, but ultimately all we did was get out our base and win over a few people at the margins. That’s all fine in showing that our base is now safe and sure, but it’s not enough to take us anywhere near power.

The second point, made here by my fellow contributor Andrew, is one I think especially critical – that the only clear boost we got was in our traditional heartlands in London and the South, but without making any major inroads in the Midlands and North. For reasons I’ll come back to, I think this is an absolutely critical point for the Party, and failure to address it will mean failure to return to Government except for a lucky strike on a small majority.

The third point, mentioned in the same comment by Andrew and more widely commented on the Right, is that UKIP voters cost the Tories a significant number of marginal seats (Harlow, today, for example). On the national vote, their 2.3% vote share would’ve gotten us close to Labour’s share, too. This is a bit of a downer, but is more an irritation than a major issue.

The death of the old party order

The fate of the party cannot be seen in isolation from the changing political context. Comparisons with the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s are mistaken, because electoral politics in Britain has now changed radically. For the same reason, comparing the Tory situation to Labour’s journey back to power have always been mistaken.

Politics in the twentieth century started in 1922 and ended in 1994. They revolved around the economic policy debate between ‘free’ capitalism under the old economic class structure and the challenge from socialism and reformist social democracy. The breakthrough moment in that period came with the Attlee Government, and the end began with the election of Thatcher in 1979. The defeat of even a timid social democratic offer in 1992 led in time to Blair and an acceptance of the same ‘Thatcherite’ consensus as Major – sound money, broadly liberal markets, incremental social policy intervention.

Think of the Blair Government’s major changes and achievements in the traditionally-priority policy areas and ask yourself just how many were so unthinkable under a re-elected Major Government. Independent Bank of England? More police? Foundation hospitals? NHS Direct? Tuition fees? Free TV licences for over-75s? Cutting class sizes? The increases in public services spending aren’t so unthinkable – they received major boosts in ’91 and ’92, and were only constrained greatly thereafter because of deficit-cutting. Yes, there are things that would have been unlikely, like SureStart or the scale of tax credits or the extent of increasing Child Benefit, but few would be unthinkable (the Minimum Wage being one exception).

The advantage the Blair Government had was that they could do all this without being the bastard-Tories who’d been proven (mostly) right in all their lecturing the country about markets and efficiency and all that. Many voters had come to loathe the Tories for their hectoring pursuit of Permanent Revolution and really could no longer bear the sight of them. At the end of this particular History, they wanted management and not ideology – there was a job to be done, but it didn’t have to be so zealously pursued.

Government is not however reducible to sound management, because not every problem can be managed away – Government involves choices, and choices that involve painful, emphatically political trade-offs. This has been the cause of Labour’s steep decline, with Iraq as only one instance of a wider problem of political issues galvanising different groups of voters against them. In 1994, the Tory Party became an anachronism, and the Labour Party was the vehicle to bury it. In office, the Labour Party is now facing the same decline and death of support. This is why the Liberal Democrats did so well on Thursday – untainted by office, their managerial offer, packaged with some ‘goodies’ (free social care, free universities, no council tax) is all shiny and new. Woe betide them if they were ever to get into office – they’ll be caught in the same bind.

This isn’t a suggestion of historical inevitability, but that we are in the chaos of realignment: it is a recognition that the parties are stuck fighting an ideological conflict that (a) has already been ‘solved’ – and so there’s nothing really significant to fight over, making the election a particularly pathetic spectacle; and (b) is failing to connect to the higher priority concerns of a growing number of voters. As pointed out here, in the current climate you ‘win’ by being better at getting the votes of median voters, yet the number of median voters is falling all the time, leaving a growing number of disenfranchised voters on either side of the middle ground.

In this environment, the challenge for the parties is finally, genuinely to Get Over Maggie, to offer these disenfranchised voters a coherent vision of government and society that is not simply concerned with implementing the priorities set by Margaret Thatcher in 1987. Not that those priorities were or are all wrong – only that as much as they were right, they are now uncontroversial, and that there are other problems we want to address.

On Not Getting Over Maggie

It is for this reason that the debate within the Tory Party has so often proven uninspiring and futile. They are ideological fixations, within the Thatcher frame. Ideological fixation, by the way, is a very unconservative thing – conservatism is supposed to be about dealing with the world as we find it, and not how we wish it to be. Let me just point to the three ideological proposals that have been floating about, sometimes in combinations, and explain why they fail:

The Liberty Option – big on the blogosphere, of course, is the idea that the Tory Party will win by an appeal to a purer blend of economic liberalism, by becoming a full-blooded libertarian party – tax cuts, tax cuts, deregulation, and opposition to all government intrusion. The ideological hang-up here needs no description, but the problem with it is that outside of educated twentysomethings, mostly male, and mostly living in the South East, people aren’t that interested, and quite sensibly too – most people value other goods alongside freedom, and see libertarianism for the ideology (and therefore anti-political creed) it is. I’ve heard some libertarians suggest that my argument is wrong, and that people don’t choose it because they’ve yet to be offered it. A brief look at the political history of the 20th century suggests otherwise.

England, My England – this one basically died out at the 2001 election, and carries on perhaps in part through UKIP – it’s the wish for a Thatcher economic programme to be married to immediate commitment to withdrawal from the EU and an appeal to the ‘good old days’. Basically, it’s an appeal to keep society on hold while continuing the economic change, as if the Thatcher era would’ve happened if it weren’t for the individualist flowering of the 1960s, which can now apparently be put into reverse gear. Puh-lease. I’m a social conservative (and I confess that I’m also a bit of a perv – though I don’t live in the ‘burbs) and will happily explain the corrosive consequences of the 1960s – but the challenge is to find a way forward that will seek to repair the damage done without compromising what were also gains made for many people along the way.

Blue Labour – this is today the most dominant strain, with one of its leading figures (David Cameron) allegedly the favourite of Michael Howard to be leader. Blue Labour hold to the view that the Tories need to be ‘modernised,’ to show they’ve ‘changed,’ and find their way back to the ‘centre ground.’ The appeal is pure managerialism – the ideological fixation is that the policy consensus is now perfected, that there are no further choices, and that the political challenge is to show the right combination of virtues to be elected. Policy differences are to erased unless they play well for marketing to the median voter, so a bit of social liberalism is apparently needed to make sure the party looks ‘nicer,’ and of course we’ve already dumped any commitment to changing the scope of government.

These are not ways of Getting Over Maggie. They are each the pet fascination of different parts of the Tory Party, each one fighting a battle long since won and lost. Libertarianism or family values might’ve had their moments in the early 1990s, and Blue Labour managerialism in 1997; both those moments are gone. The most that any of them could do is provide an excuse to rally round if the Government’s popularity collapses. That isn’t to say that we should be against economic liberalism, or against family values, or against competence (though sometimes in recent years, it looked like we were trying to do so anyway…), only that focusing on any one as the route back to power is missing the point.

The vision thang and why we need it…

It is for this reason that, while I entirely agree with those (like here) who say that a problem with the Tories 2005 campaign was a lack of a positive vision to sell, I’m sceptical that this will be so rapidly resolved. The Party’s leading figures are all trapped in some combination of those ideological frames above – my guess is that too many of them will start to hammer one of them in the hope that it’ll get them victory, using the same old slogans to achieve the goal.

But about the lack of positive vision… On one level, if you think you can’t win, shoring up the base is no bad strategy, and it seems to have worked. The issue for me is that I think that that base is small and shrinking and hasn’t got a Blair-loving fringe that will return to the fold at some unspecified date. 1997 marked the shattering of the Thatcher-Major electoral coalition. Voters had left the Tory Party, many of them with no intention of ever returning. For one thing, many voted for Thatcher and/or Major because they liked Tory economics even if they disliked Tory messages on social and cultural issues – the arrival of Blair removed their reason for voting Tory ever again.

My perception is that this is probably especially true in the southern part of England, where Thatcher and Major had built their electoral coalitions. Prosperous post-sixties metropolitans simply don’t like the Tory Party – and though there’s probably a small number who would be won back by a commitment to full-blooded libertarianism, most are happy enough with the economic policy they can get from Labour or the Liberal Democrats. It is for this reason that I think that if the Tories are to rebuild a governing majority (by which I really mean, plurality) it is in the Midlands and the north.

This will be a long, hard slog, but is not impossible. There are two groups in particular that offer the Tories some potential. First, thanks to Mr. Prescott (opposed by the Tories, funnily enough), new commuter villages are being developed in a wide belt around London and some of the other major cities. These will be full of bourgeois voters who move there to get away from the hustle’n’bustle of the big cities, often with new families and bought into economic freedom alongside a certain type of social conservatism (law and order and immigration – not to say that there’s some ‘white flight’ involved in people moving out to such new developments, but… but…). The move of these voters to these new villages and towns represent a move of many Tory voters into more concentrated areas, which is a benefit if they can be properly cultivated – but if they’re not, then the Tories need to realise that the constituencies they move from will be lost anyway.

Second, and at once much more difficult but much more rewarding if achieved, are working-class Labour voters, often very Right-wing on social and national issues (for which, read: don’t like foreigners or criminals), but presently very Left-wing on economics. The challenge is to convert their disillusion with Labour on economics into placing a higher priority on those social and national themes where they fit better with the Tories. And that, of course, was what Crosby attempted to do with his dog whistles – and it didn’t really work; they detached them from Labour, but didn’t link them to the Tories.

It’s here that the positive vision is needed, then. To be fair to Howard, I didn’t think he did too bad at avoiding getting into an ideological dead-end of the types I outlined above. His problem was that in foregoing them, he didn’t have an alternative coherent narrative (except perhaps “vote for me, it’s my only chance of ever being Prime Minister”). Without a coherent narrative, an articulable theory of where the country is and what Government right now is for (and I do mean for), the Tories were unable to find a language that could inspire the electorate they couldn’t already, for the most part, rely on. Instead, they just had a ragbag of themes, mostly expressed in defensive terms (we’ll cut taxes a tiny bit but otherwise be the same; we’ll run the hospitals just as well, but a bit cleaner; we’ll keep immigration, but just make it controlled), and ended up focusing on the only one (immigration) that seemed to resonate.

Wanted: Coherent Narrative, Tory

Any Tories reading this, if you know the words say them with me: the liberals may dream their dreams; the socialists can scheme their schemes; we have work to do.

I am tired of being smacked in the face at every election, even if this time it was a little more playful than is normal. I hate being in Opposition, – being on the Right means you’re pretty much happy with the basic order of your society, and so complaining about it all the while is just bloody unbecoming. I don’t hate the Government, and I think they’ve done many good things. But I think my lot can do better, if we can convince people we’re worth a try. But it’s up to us to convince them.

To do this, we need to think again about what it means to be Tory today. Toryism is about reinvention; on that point, the Blue Labour crowd are correct. But reinvention doesn’t have to mean accomodating the present conventional wisdom; sometimes it means recognising and responding to the unmet priorities of the people, and sometimes (shock, horror) offering leadership to the country. Reinvention doesn’t have to mean aping a successful opponent; sometimes it means spotting where they simply aren’t able to respond. Reinvention doesn’t always have to mean lurching Leftwards.. Much better if we can still be ourselves, after all.

The first problem we have to address is the problem of being the Stupid Party, suspicious of too much thinking. In fact, it’s worse than that: we’re now the Stupid Party with an entrenched doctrine (‘Thatcherism’). Well, we need to drop the doctrine. Not to say that it’s all wrong, because it isn’t: it’s just not relevant as a package deal. Margaret Thatcher was (I’m speaking as a Tory here, not seeking a fight with people on the Left over this point) the best post-war Prime Minister, but she left office in 1990 and is about as relevant to the challenges of British politcs today as Andrew Bonar-Law is.

Without that doctrine, where next? Well, I don’t know. It’s not my job, guv. I do, though, have some thoughts on the matter, as you might expect. The critical point throughout should be that we need to get away from thinking in terms of ‘occupying the centre’ or ‘leading from the Right’ – neither is relevant or useful to the current situation. What we want is that coherent narrative, through which we can frame a new political centre ground and build a coalition to govern for at least two terms, and hopefully three (learning from last time, it might be best to lose gracefully at that point). If we can get that right, then everything else is sales, and we can get ad agencies to do that. So, in terms of forming that coherent narrative, some initial suggestions on do’s and don’ts from me:

1. Contend with modernity, instead of pretending to be comfortable with it. Just to wind up the stupidest elements of the Stupidest Party, I thought I’d start with this one. To me, to be a conservative is to be against modernity, but modernity has won its war with the ancient world, and there is no point pretending it didn’t. Conservatives should not hanker after the Reformation era, or some Victorian or postwar midpoint, or wherever, but seek to learn from modernity – first to absorb it and then move on from it. Modernity has destroyed many of our traditional social and political forms, and in so doing has begun to endanger some of its own achievements; but we can’t just recreate them as if nothing has changed (often for the better, too). Instead, we need to seek out new forms and build new institutions to embed them. This sounds all very esoteric and uninteresting to the voters, but it isn’t. Many people are extremely alienated by the consequences of modernity, but very few want to go backwards – to reach them, we need to offer them the hint of another, better future.

2. Quit with the museum curator act. If we’re to be genuinely postmodern conservatives in that way, then we need to put an end to the farce of ‘Traditionalism.’ All conservatives should revere tradition, the status quo, the tried and tested – but ‘Traditionalism’ is an embrace of the obviously outdated simply because it continues to exist. As Allan Bloom put it: “as soon as tradition has come to be recognised as tradition, it is dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the kids.” (p.36, The Closing of the American Mind) This isn’t a call for a Tory sans-culottism, but instead simply to realise that we shouldn’t be afraid to get rid of baggage. To give one example, why do we venerate the unwritten constitution after the damage that has been done to it over the past hundred years – if we want to protect sovereignty from further give-aways, if we want to protect our procedural freedoms, if we want to have better lawmaking, then constitutional reform seems pretty essential. On the other hand, where there are traditions we want to keep, we need to be willing to live them – how could we defend the hereditary peerage when we’d stopped awarding hereditary peerages four decades ago (except for making three Viscounts in the 1980s, as I recall – typically childless, too).

3. Being a republican doesn’t mean you hate the Queen, y’know. David Marquand wrote an essay in 1993, ‘The twilight of the British state,’ where he talked of the death of British political traditions, of Whig imperialism, authoritarian individualism, and democratic collectivism, and ventured the suggestion that Britain had never developed a true democratic “culture of self-government… of the civic or republican virtues.” He talked of it as a future for the British Left, and there have been vague references to it in the rhetoric of Blair and his acolytes, but nothing really noticeable. But political republicanism doesn’t need to be of the Left – we on the Right have just as much if not more to gain from a vision of self-governing citizens: economically independent, taking responsibility for the common good, and a part of their country’s political life. A considered conservative republicanism can offer a positive vision of nationalism and limited government against the Left’s charges that we appeal to xenophobia and greed.

4. What is Government for? The battle against state socialism has been won. The reds are no longer under the bed. Tony Benn is a living museum piece, of no risk to British business. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t still be advocating limited government – we should, especially if we’re working for a republican vision, because citizens need their space to run their own lives. But a republican vision means a positive vision of the State and its role – that it isn’t simply there as an unfortunate necessity until we’re ready to give the anarcho-capitalist Utopia a go, but that it performs certain functions that are valuable to community, and that we’re committed to doing well. What these functions are, we can debate – and then debate how we do them well, too. And then we work out how much we need to spend, rather than obsessively chasing arbitrary GDP percentages.

5. For politics and against bureauracy. Politics is the way people in a real community work out how best to live together, through compromise and trade-off and acceptance of imperfection. Only those believe in the possibility of rationally ordered societies who should dream of the end of politics – conservatives should know better. For this reason, for Tories to talk about devolving power ‘to the individual’ and yet rejecting decentralisation of political power is missing the point – the opportunity for citizens to participate in politics is as crucial to their taking responsibility for themselves as is sorting out their child’s schooling. It was this approach under Thatcher, continued since under Blair and Major, that has created a massive and unaccountable bureaucratic state – surely better to allow some chaos and diversity, and allow greater democratic participation and accountability in Government?

That’s yer lot for now, and yes – they are all general principles, and for good reason too. If we’re to develop that coherent narrative, we have to get the principles clear first. Follow those principles through, though, and you start to arrive at policy implications. For example, if we’re serious about creating a society of economically independent citizens, then we can say that our tax and benefits system should change radically, to favour people on low incomes – but less through tax credits than letting them keep their own money. It also changes how we view state welfare institutions – offering an alternative, of supporting independence and actively addressing unnecessary hardship, to the decayed egalitarianism that we simply let decline for lack of an alternative when we were in power before. Another example, much more far-reaching: if we’re serious about devolving power, and also want to develop that culture of self-government, why not develop a powerful level of devolved regional government, with powers over its own finances and its own public service delivery.

None of this means abandoning being conservative, or moving Leftwards. The kind of Toryism I’m trying (with whatever success…) to advocate here would still be very much on the Right. I’d say that it would probably be in favour of tight controls on immigration and locking up criminals in current circumstances, by the way. One area that I think might change is on foreign policy – the approach here lends itself to a constitutional (rather than nuns cycling to work and jumpers for goalposts) nationalism, grounded in who we are today rather than any inflated sense of global obligation or craving for ‘influence.’

Doubtless, many on the Left would still find this conservative nasty, but it would be a positive message around which we can begin to rally those new voters beyond our current core. Just as important, it has the potential to offer a coherent, reasoned, vision of government – and once we get that, we become credible for victory, and UKIP will no longer be an issue for us.

Well, anyway – that’s it from me. On election day I described my political creed thus, so what would I know?