I'm embarrassed to be a Tory
To me, as someone on the political right, the election campaign has felt oddly unreal, like a bad dream. As in a nightmare, there has been a certain perverse logic, but there have been bizarre incidents, and a persistent feeling of disorientation, as if people were talking about the wrong things, avoiding things, and offering explanations that don't quite make sense.
I'm talking about the Conservative campaign, though the same has been true of Labour's. It is not the prospect of a Conservative defeat that has seemed so nightmarish. It is the spectacle the party has been making of itself.
Some of what's wrong has been style. Unfortunately, style is more important than substance in electioneering, and that makes it more damaging, not less. There's the most obvious question of William Hague's voice. A voice ought not to matter so much, but it does, as anyone in telesales will tell you; politicians with any political nous should have recognised that long ago, and done something about it. To be so naive about public relations is in itself a sign of unfitness for office in this age of vulgar spin.
For all his eloquence, intelligence and courage, Hague's weirdly unreal inflection makes him sound as though he doesn't take anything seriously; from there it's only a single flat vowel to seeming not to care about anything. And being thought not to care is the Achilles heel of the Conservative party.
Even a man with the voice, looks and hair of Jude Law himself, however, could not have seduced the public out of their contempt for the Conservatives' insistence on asylum and the euro. That was a serious, perverse, embarrassing error. All senior Conservatives ought to accept responsibility for it, instead of preparing to duck it. They were warned against it, repeatedly. But they persisted, and they have made supporters like me look like xenophobic, bigoted, ignorant Little Englanders, and maybe even like racists too.
The arguments don't matter, good or bad. What anyone actually said doesn't matter. It was the emphasis, the deliberate choice of emphasis, that did the damage.
It was made much worse by the related lack of emphasis on what people most care about, and what it's been made to seem (quite wrongly) that Conservatives don't care about - schools, hospitals and social services. Why not put the record straight about the mythical Tory "cuts" of the past? Why not go in, all guns blazing, to attack Labour's lamentable record?
Instead, our attention was arrested by the bizarre story of the MP Oliver Letwin hiding away in the valleys of West Dorset, after a leak about tax cuts, hunted down by journalists, all too reminiscently of Keith Vaz. The Tories should have let him come out and say something openly, unashamedly about their views on tax. But they were, apparently, too timid to be truthful.
They don't appear to have a clear, coherent, radical Conservative policy on tax and benefits reform. And they don't appear to know, any more than Labour, how they will finance bigger spending on public services. So there were embarrassed disclaimers instead, and Labour was unnecessarily handed one of the best anti-Tory chants of its campaign - "pounds 20bn of cuts".
Meanwhile, there was that oddly unsophisticated, histrionic party political broadcast about roving rapists and feral schoolchildren. The message was ill-judged; the medium was laughable.
Then we had the dream-like sequence of Margaret Thatcher, swooping down (as she suggested herself in an ill-chosen joke) like a mummified corpse, to do untold damage to the Conservative campaign with her off-message cry of "Never to the euro". She managed both to show up and to bring down Tory prevarications. Europe has divided both major parties, and most people across all parties. The only electable position to take on the euro, whatever one's gut instincts, as both John Major and Tony Blair have understood, is on the fence, waiting uncomfortably upon events.
In any case, given Labour's promise of a referendum, Hague's warning of "only five days to save the pound" is almost as silly as Blair's shameful 1997 battle cry of "only 24 hours to save the NHS". Can these people be real?
There ought to have been a very important public conversation during this election about public services, and the Conservative view of how best to deliver them. There ought to have been a major debate about the limits of the state, and of bureaucracy and regulation. There could have been a relentless battery of triumphant attacks over the foot and mouth crisis, parliamentary reform, doctors' fury, teachers' fury, hospital patients' misery, Labour media manipulation, lies and sleaze. All this has been a gift to the Conservatives. Yet, if the polls are to be believed at all, they haven't even been able to make a dent in Labour's popularity.
This is the party I have always supported. I'd like to support it now. I am a convinced small c conservative. At the beginning of the campaign I thought it was hard to be a Tory; now it's beginning to be embarrassing. Reportedly the Conservatives think they've been running a good campaign; perhaps they are the ones who are dreaming.
Tuesday, June 05, 2001 | Comments (0)
Bogus friends of asylum seekers
The subject of race, like sex, makes people lose their heads. It makes them emotional and irrational; for that reason it is surrounded with taboos and myths, which make everyone yet more emotional and irrational.
The same applies to political asylum, which has become (for all the wrong reasons) a subset of the subject of race in this country. So we get rage and resentment on all sides, and some rather sanctimonious assumptions. This has made political debate on asylum seekers nasty enough even to arouse people from their election apathy.
I am convinced that the left has been much nastier than the right. The accusations of racism constantly heaped on the right are truly unforgivable. The assumption that, in addressing asylum seeking, William Hague is playing the redneck race card, is libellous. He may be wrong in his policies and he has been embarrassed by a couple of his supporters. But he is no racist, nor is racism any part of Conservatism, institutional or otherwise. I've come to suspect that the explanation for this undue nastiness is that the left feels much more guilt and confusion about asylum than the right.
Whether or not that's so, there is a great deal of confusion around. Take the idea of the genuine asylum seeker. There are endless arguments about who might be bogus, or whether the word should be breathed at all. But most people seem to agree that all genuine asylum seekers ought to be granted a safe haven here. That at least, in all the political muddle, is not problematic - all genuine asylum seekers have the right to stay.
Unfortunately it is nonsense. It would be quite impossible. The world is awash with people in desperate need of political asylum; there are millions of people who suffer prison, torture, violation and civil war, and millions in mortal fear of them. All they lack is transport; if they had it, they would be here on our doorstep and unmistakably genuine.
And if we really wanted asylum seekers, we know where to find them; we could go for a start to the vast refugee camps and gather them up in hundreds of thousands. Of course we don't, partly because we couldn't take them all, and partly - surely - because we don't want them.
There is nothing new about this. We tell ourselves, and in particular the left is given to saying, that this country has a proud tradition of accepting asylum seekers. Well, up to a point. We may have taken a few Kosovans, after a lot of soul searching, but Britain's doors were closed to the Hong Kong Chinese, just as they were to some of the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in all this, and I think it is a hypocrisy which troubles the internationalist left much more than the nationalist right - I mean the genuine left, as opposed to the bogus New Labour left.
Traditionally the left has felt responsible for the wretched of the Earth, at least in theory. In practice there is no big idea, no sense of what to do, no coherent policy. Those on the left ought to feel angry with New Labour, but seem to find it easier to rant at the Tories.
What we have, meanwhile, is an asylum system which is without any doubt badly abused and badly run. Fewer than one in five of the people who claim asylum here are found to be genuine. The rest can, and do, appeal through the courts for years, at huge public expense, but without success, even though British judges have the loosest definition in Europe of "fear of persecution".
In practice they stay anyway. Very few of those denied asylum are ever deported, and many of them - about 300,000 - have disappeared into the shadowy world of the illegals, discrediting the others. It is a waste and a shame.
Economic migrants are in need too, I admit. They are fleeing misery and deprivation too and, according to Refugee Council figures, published in the Guardian on Monday, many of them are highly employable and highly qualified - rather embarrassingly more so than the British; perhaps that's why they're so good at figuring out the system. And who can really blame them for trying to beat it? But it is grossly unfair to others in much more urgent need. Why should it be so disgraceful and racist to say so?
There is a lot of angry confusion about detention centres too. The Conservatives' new election proposal to build lots more may be un workably expensive, but denunciations about locking up women and children are silly. There's nothing punitive about it; it would protect the genuine applicants.
No genuine asylum seeker would object to it. If you were fleeing from execution or prison or torture, a safe centre, with food, medicine, legal aid and the company of fellow sufferers and perhaps your family, would without a doubt be acceptable, if acceptably run.
It would actually be preferable to being shipped out to a lonely tower block in a grey Midlands town. In fact the willingness to spend a period in a detention centre (and even gratefully) seems to me to be an obvious marker for a genuine political refugee.
Tuesday, May 22, 2001 | Comments (0)
The public sector swamp
Struggling up as best he can from the mire of sleaze around him, the prime minister protests that he, and New Labour with him, must be judged by whether he can deliver. That means delivering on what really matters - on schools and hospitals and social services and crime. The simple answer is that he can't. It isn't that he doesn't want to, or doesn't really mean to. It is simply that he can't. The reason is that he hasn't been able and won't be able to stand up to the public-sector mentality.
Tony Blair may have been able to root old socialist orthodoxies out of the Labour party, up to a point, but they remain powerfully embedded in all the public services that matter. The persistence - the astonishing resilience - of the old, discredited socialist mindset in those services is why they are now at the point of collapse, why our schools and hospitals are an international disgrace, why there's more crime in London than in New York and why the police have just announced that they cannot cope.
Tony Blair did, I believe, at one time think he could stand up to this orthodoxy. What he got were scars on his back, as he complained in an unguarded moment last year; however, so powerful is the state-sector orthodoxy that he had to apologise almost immediately.
After all, a huge number of Labour voters work in the Augean stables that is the state sector, and if they don't want any stuck-up Hercules-come-lately telling them what to do, then he'd better stop. They, in fact, are the real forces of conservatism which hold back the public services, which stifle any criticism and undermine all reform; it is their mentality which is the enemy of the people.
Any mentality must be hard to sum up, obviously enough, but I think that this one was very strikingly personified, about this time last year, by a nameless employee of a Walsall jobcentre. He emerged briefly from obscurity to give a glimpse into the insane, Kafkaesque inefficiency of this mentality.
According to news reports, he told a publisher who wanted to advertise for a trainee in the jobcentre that he must not use the words "enthusiastic and hardworking" in his advertisement, because they might be discriminatory under the Disability Discrimination Act. The jobcentre later said the word "reliable" was also unacceptable, for the same reason.
Where does one begin? That is how NOT to deliver jobs. That is how NOT to deliver employees to employers. That is how, abandoning all common sense, to lose sight of the important priority in hand - getting jobs for people - in pursuit of an entirely different agenda; with the best of all possible intentions, and precisely because of those intentions, that is how to fail completely. And that is how the entire state sector works, or rather doesn't work.
In the name of equal opportunities, or ethnic outreach, or gender grievances, or job protection, or union guidelines or promoting social change, well-meaning people lose sight of what they're really supposed to be doing - tending the sick and old, or catching criminals, say. Instead they must learn the language of "empower ment", only to be deeply confused by it, as in Walsall. Instead their time is taken up with ever-increasing mountains of paper work, which, with the inertia of bureaucracy, diverts yet more time and money and people away from the bedside or the blackboard.
Then ever more money and ever more workers become necessary, to deliver ever more assessments of best practice and quality assurance and training in - yes - equal opportunities, ethnic outreach, job protection, anger management and the whole shemozzle. That, of course, is part of the point; the orthodoxy seeks to entrench and perpetuate itself. And those who don't go along with the orthodoxy often feel shamed and silenced by it; there is a strong element of bullying about it, in my experience.
Pursuing something other than your top priority is doomed to failure. In the private sector it could not happen. That's not to say that the private sector, any more than the public sector, ought to be able to get away with unfair discrimination, against the disabled or anybody else. Nor does it. There is plenty of legislation - arguably too much - to prevent it.
But any private-sector employment agency which behaved so counter-productively as the one in Walsall would go bust immediately; it would have no public subsidies to disguise its uselessness. That is largely why private schools and private
medicine are so astonishingly much better, as anyone with any direct knowledge must admit.
I did for a short time think that the appearance of New Labour might mean the end of this mentality. Not so. Ministers propose, but the state sector only disposes if it feels like it; try changing something in social services, and despair. The idea that public services can only be provided by the public sector refuses to die.
Like the Conservatives, Blair has been unable to drive a stake through its bad old undead heart. It is quite the other way round; the state sector, and the state-sector mentality, will drive a stake through his, and probably before very long. He will be judged by this.
Tuesday, May 15, 2001 | Comments (0)
It's painful to be a Tory
Sometimes it's hard to be a Tory. Now that the election is due, gallant Conservative activists are rushing about trying to line up the cavalry against the cannon with all the resolution of despair, but we all know there is very likely going to be a massacre. This may be a very amusing spectacle for Guardian readers, but anyone with Conservative sympathies like me must prepare to bite the bullet.
I don't actually belong to the Conservative party, and never have. I am, none the less, a conservative, with a small c if not necessarily a large one, and I have been writing as a libertarian fellow traveller for the Telegraph papers for more than 10 years. A Labour victory will depress me just as much as the most tireless canvasser in the shires.
It will also astonish me. I simply cannot understand why the electorate has not yet seen through the People's Prime Minister, with his adjustable accent, his adjustable features and his adjustable biography. I cannot see why Labour supporters are not now miserably ashamed of him. I cannot imagine why nothing seems to touch Labour's truly astonishing lead. What would it take? The Conservatives at their worst produced nothing to compare with Robinson, Vaz, Ecclestone, Irvine, the Hindujas, Falconer, Mandelson, the Dome, a House of Lords packed (in the name of democratic reform) with Tony's cronies, and the astonishingly cynical rescue of Phoenix the calf, who rose up ludicrously from the dying ashes of Labour government incompetence and of Labour party morality. And this in only four years.
Perhaps voters don't care. Perhaps they assume all politicians are determined to get their trotters into the top trough, and better our politicians than theirs. This is the Clinton effect: pork and porkies don't matter so long as there is plenty of prosperity.
But even so, there have been all kinds of disasters and promises broken that ought by themselves to have slashed the Labour lead. The NHS is a disgrace. So are most schools and most public transport. Most people with any money pay their way out of public services; continental Europeans can hardly believe how bad they are.
Yet taxes have gone up hugely under Labour, along with government intervention and red tape. This has hit the poorest hardest; the gap between rich and poor is now much greater than when Blair and Brown came to power, productivity is down and savings have collapsed.
Why should all this lead to a Labour landslide? The answer is deeply humiliating. It is not that the voters love Labour - Blair is actually more unpopular than Neil Kinnock and Blair's so-called landslide of 1997 got fewer votes than Major's win in 1992. It isn't even that Hague is so desperately unpopular. It must be that people truly loathe the Conservatives. What's more, quite a lot of Conservatives rather loathe themselves or each other; the Left was never right, we feel, but the Right, though right, has often been rather Repulsive, as in 1066 and All That.
This doesn't matter much in itself, I suppose; we can't all expect to like each other, and life seems to be irredeemably tribal. But I think it matters for this country. Conservatism has saved Britain from ruin. Conservatism gave it the prosperity it now enjoys. Even New Labour saw that and tried to steal its clothes, but has unfortunately not known how to wear them, or keep them on. It would be a great pity if an unthinking loathing for Conservatives, based on old-fashioned stereotypes of hatchet-faced bigots from the shires, and heartless tax avoiders in City suits, were to blind people to the real virtues of Conservatism.
Just as most people have been misled by Mr Blair's bogus charm, most people have been misled by Conservatives' bogus beastliness. It's true we do have some people saying very hard things about standing on your own feet, or getting on your own bike, and a few others saying quite unspeakable things about race. And I find it deeply embarrassing to say I support a party in which Ann Widdecombe is such a star, and in my view so deeply un-Conservative. Conservatism all too often manages to be wearing its most unacceptable face, with a perversity that perhaps explains its reputation as the stupid people's party.
In fact, real Conservatism is for the intelligent. It doesn't offer the easy-to-follow feel-good promises of socialism or of New Labour, as in oxymoronic slogans like Excellence For All. It rests on a complex collection of ideas which are not in themselves very inspiring - realism, compromise, scepticism and the pragmatic pursuit of the least worst in government, with as little government intrusion as possible. It stands for freedom, for its own sake and as a defence against the evils of statism. That is Conservatism.Voters may not want it, but it hardly deserves the astonishing humiliation it is receiving.
Tuesday, May 08, 2001 | Comments (0)
