Clarke’s Constitutional Fix: Make Scottish MPs more like me

I’ve just realised what’s so funny about Ken Clarke’s surprisingly modest proposals to resolve the West Lothian problem. The changes he recommends are supposed to protect English people from colonial rule by technicality (the deliciously hyperbolic “Scottish Raj”) and Parliament from the criticism that it is illegitimate. But what they do instead is protect Scottish MPs from boring, humbrum Committee work.

The proposals preserve the right of Scottish MPs to vote on the Second and Third readings of Bills – the decisive votes on the broad principle of a piece of legislation. Clarke has designed a system in which Scottish MPs would still be privileged with the right to design the laws, but without actually having to go through the tedious process of making them clause by clause in the Parliamentary workshop. Clarke’s Parliament sans West Lothian punishes the Scottish MPs for the Holyrood Parliament by leaving all their important powers in place, whilst divesting their jobs of a great deal of ponderousness. Defying everything that we have learnt from superhero didacticism, he wants to allow these MPs to keep their great power, whilst disencumbering them of their great (but wearisome) responsibility.

This becomes funnier still when you think that this is exactly the sort of role that Ken Clarke has been playing in the Conservative Party for the last ten years. Since he left government in 1997 Clarke has remained one of the most respected Conservatives in the country and one of the most influential members of his own party, in spite of his reluctance to bestir himself from his corpulent Bagpuss-slumber to take on frontbench responsibilities.

Is it possible that Clarke has been tasked with solving this great constitutional problem by his leader, one which could at some point seriously delegitimise parliament, and that all he’s done is to decide that they should invent a new category of politician – the idling-Scotsmen – who ought to have the privilege of voting on matters of principle, whilst detachedly surveying the scene from a magisterial height like a hawk, swaying hearts and minds through sheer weight of presence in the tea rooms, swaggering through the lobbies on the way to the divisions on Second and Third readings – but without having to condescend to furrow their brows over the syntactical quagmire of lawyer-begotten legislation, draft unintelligible, irrelevant amendments, ask questions of expert witnesses to which no one wants to hear the answer, and sweat ignominiously through never-ending never-to-be-replaced afternoons in fetid Committee rooms like greenhorn MPs who are delighted when just anyone at all at Westminster remembers their name?

Well… is it?

I like the idea. If Cameron does accept Clarke’s plan – and apparently he thinks it ‘elegant’ (an ironic gibe aimed at Clarke’s dishevelled chic?) – then we might just get the two classes of politician that make the constitutional lawyers so nauseous. There will be the English mules, ridden to death across the ever-proliferating Andes of Criminal Justice Bills, and the idling-Scotsmen – a species of puttering, flaneur politicians ripe with the bonhomie that comes from knowing that whilst the mules can do things that they can’t, they don’t want to do them anyway. Not when they could have a nice nap, then a languid cup-of-tea, followed by a complacent tete-a-tete with an indulgent lobby journalist who finds their style of laid-back, raconteur politician altogether more appealing than that of their legislatively-addled colleagues in unhappy Albion.

60 Years on Labour is no longer the party of the NHS

If the results of a YouGov poll published in the Daily Telegraph this morning are anything to go by, Labour is no longer the party of the NHS. Only 1 in 5 respondents to the poll – commissioned to coincide with the publication of the Darzi Report – believed that Labour would improve the health service over the next ten years. Even more tellingly, 31% of voters now think that the Conservatives would do the best job of running the NHS, with only 23% nominating Labour.

These figures seem to reflect an underlying shift in the standard people are judging the parties against on the NHS. In the past people favoured Labour on the NHS because they needed someone who could be “trusted.” After eighteen years of Conservative neglect, people thought that Labour would run the NHS better because it had the political will to do whatever was necessary to “save the NHS” from middle-class flight and chronic under-investment. This faith came from the understanding that in some way a National Health Service free at the point of use was considered constitutive of the Labour Party; the two were so closely intertwined that one could hardly exist without the other.

Fast-forward ten years and that sense that the NHS is in mortal danger is gone. The challenges facing the health service are suddenly much more prosaic. Value, efficiency and quality are what people are looking to government for. 44% of poll respondents think “a great deal” of money is being wasted on the NHS; 38% more think that “a fair amount” is being wasted. 78% think that the NHS has too many managers. People don’t seem to want the party with the strongest emotional attachment to the NHS anymore. The NHS doesn’t need to be “saved,” it needs to be run more efficiently and less bureaucratically. After the Credit Crunch, Northern Rock and its bungled tax reforms, the voters no longer trust Labour to run things well. Labour has become the party of mismanagement. Instead when managerial efficiency is the country’s desideratum, people are increasingly turning to the Conservatives.

The government has implicitly recognised this change from a politics of emotion, to one based on cost-benefit analysis through its endorsement of Lord Darzai’s report. The report’s recommendations all aim squarely at delivering improved quality. Hospitals and GPs will be given incentives for good treatment; patient feedback will be published; choice will become a legislative right. The government’s focus is to be placed relentlessly on improved outcomes: an NHS that moves more quickly on approving drugs, that tailors its care to the individual needs of the patient, that minimises the danger of hospital-acquired infection. It all sounds very business-like, very efficient. One imagines that a management consultant would approve. Undoubtedly this is the smart approach politically, but – as an unavoidable corollary of the strengths of this approach – it resists neat media-friendly portrayal and could easily leave people in the weeks ahead without any clear sense of what it will involve. Johnson has memorably talked about this as ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity,’ but I’m worried that there is too much disconnect between such rhetoric and the unglamorous substance of the report.

Nation of self-haters desperately seeks scapegoat with power, privilege and GSOH

I’m not angry about Wendy Alexander’s resignation, I’m saddened by it. Sometimes things that happen in the political world disclose us to ourselves in our full hideous transparency – and this is one of those times. I’m ashamed to be a part of that politics today. A people which treats its politicians in this way deserves to be unequivocally condemned. Wendy Alexander didn’t resign because she technically, but insignificantly, breached the rules – she resigned because ours is a political culture in which a politician cannot expect to be disinterestedly appraised and fairly treated. The unscrupulous media and its mean-spirited, malicious constituency have combined to create an invidious political culture of suspicion, in which the worst is thought of everyone who contaminates themselves by coming into contact with politics.

In this skewed, dystopian vision of our politics politicians are greedy, lazy, corrupt, mendacious and self-interested. Crucially, they are not like you and I. Don’t think for a moment that they are a disparate collection of people brought up in all sorts of different backgrounds, with their varying aptitudes, conflicting views and heterogeneous motives; some of them good people, some of them bad; some hacks and bunglers, others people of indisputable talent. No, they are part of a completely different category of person, homogenous in their crucial characteristics, and different in kind from the ordinary people of this country. As a body of men and women they cannot be trusted. Unless we subject them to the tightest controls, and the most demeaning scrutiny, then they will lie to us and steal from us.

Britain hates its politicians. As a class of people we hold them in complete contempt and that’s what I want to try and explain. The British don’t really hate their politicians, they hate themselves. All of the blanket accusations and the cynical statements represent a projected self-hatred. The British people don’t know their politicians well enough to hate them; hate is something intimate and particular, full of insistent details and claustrophobic knowledge. Our politicians are distant figures, an army of abstractions glimpsed in the media, the great majority of their behaviour unseen and their actual motives impenetrable. When we growl at the Question Time panellists or write a bilious email to a newspaper editor about MPs and their scandalous expenses, we aren’t engaging with a fully manifest reality. We’re creating fictional characters, ciphers on whom we hang characteristics. How the hell we would we know? We don’t. We assume. We create the type of the corrupt politician because it serves our purposes and then we extrapolate back from that to characterise the behaviour of MPs.

Just look at the way that the things that we accuse our politicians of: greed, corruption, self-interest, mendacity: Our politicians are composite figures of all of the worst things that we think about ourselves, all the thing that we are secretly concerned that we might be. Britain is worried that it has sold out, that it will do anything for money. It is tortured by the sense that morality has been dissolved by egoism and hedonism. In a godless world, leached of ideology, saturated with irony, beguiled by relativism, when we try to think what we should do, everything seems permissible. The calculating, greedy, lying man without fixed principles or scruples is the pathological personality of the age – the person that each of us is terrified of becoming.

All the loathing that we feel for this type is concentrated therapeutically on our political leaders: the first men and women of the country, the most obvious bearers for its self-accusation. Politicians are apt for the role because they are figures of unquestioned privilege and power. Through Parliament politicians wield the supreme power in the land – remarkably untrammelled power in this land of the imaginary constitution – and we resent them as every slave resents his master, as every subaltern resents his superaltern. Except that in Britain this resentment is swollen by a venerable tradition of suspicion directed against government, a jealousy felt towards those in power. When we want to celebrate this trait we say that we are great lovers of liberty. One could just as well say that we have a touchy over-sensitiveness that makes it difficult to look up to anyone.

And so we have sacrificed Wendy Alexander to the anxiety we feel about our own corruption. In doing so we have revealed ourselves as a nation of self-haters desperately seeking scapegoats, ever-ready to lash-out at the privileged, feeling relief only when we can humiliate someone and glut ourselves on schadenfreude.

I wonder, though, why we’ve looked past that other obvious target for our displaced hatred: the bankers, the hedge fund managers, the City Men. We know even less about these Square-Milers than we do about the bubble-dwellers of Westminster, but don’t we know enough? They are inexhaustibly, improbably rich (rich enough to pay for the importation of the luxury German-made prefix uber). They are about as powerful as anyone else in the world gets to be. And in recent years they have used their riches and their powers so irresponsibly that they have prompted a global financial cataclysm from which we are all now suffering. They seem to fit the profile perfectly to me. If our self-hatred has to be directed somewhere, and we can’t stand the force of it ourselves, perhaps we should start hating the financiers instead? That way we could salve our neurotic egos without destroying our politics.

Could social mobility destroy Britain as we know it?

There is probably no political goal more widely subscribed to in British politics than that of social mobility. Everyone professes to believe fervently in the creation of a “meritocratic” society of “equal opportunities” in which the life chances of every individual are independent of social class, race, religion and background. This isn’t a recent development in British politics. Politicians have paid homage to social mobility since the aristocratic Britain of orders and deference, in which everyone knew their right and proper place, was eclipsed. But it is a long-frustrated goal, something that government has not been able to realise in spite of decades of cross-party consensus and consistent public support.

Politicians and public haven’t just advocated this societal destination for decades, they have always assumed that it was compatible with a free, open, liberal society of broadly the sort that we have now. And that it could be achieved in a liberal society built on the ruins of institutions (public schools, the House of Lords, Oxbridge, the civil service) and traditions (noblesse oblige, deference, pervasive class awareness) belonging to a very different sort of society. Achieving social mobility was just a question of refinement, of finessing anomalies and redressing obvious abuses. A radical overhaul of our social and economic institutions wouldn’t be necessary, and our ways of thinking and doing things could be left largely intact. Britain could institute equality of opportunity, whilst remaining faithful to its liberal capitalistic ethos and whilst continuing to enjoy the indolent benevolence of its non-intrusive state. There would be no need to trample upon the world-famous tradition of English (sic) liberty in which people are left to themselves if they’re not hurting anyone.

But what if they are hurting someone? What if just by going about their own business and looking out for the welfare of their own, the are scuppering any chance that we might have of realising that universally subscribed ideal of social mobility? What if this twentieth-century value cannot be made to agree with revered nineteenth-century Millian values?

There is an intellectual slackness and shallowness to most popular thinking about social mobility. At first glance the commonly accepted paradigm seems so eminently right and to run in such clear parallel to our ways of going about things, as to require no deeper reflection. But it is important to try and get behind the calcified terms in which the debate is carried on to grasp the true radicalism of this goal that has become so obscured by repetition. Equality of opportunity means that whatever it is that does not belong to the individual but which impacts differentially on their life chances has to be equalized. The whole social matrix of determinants in which the individual is embedded needs to be reconfigured so that there are no longer individuals who are given more exposure to the enabling factors and less to the disabling ones. You would have to find some way of engineering the early lives of every individual so as to protect them from the all the varied, alien social influences that stamp us with our peculiarities of background.

Just try to think for a moment about all of the things which you would have to neutralise. Everything that comes from parents and family background, first of all. That means the social background of the parents, their educational histories, their income, their language skills, their emotional intelligence, how conscientiousness they are, how ambitious they are, the nature of their relationship (assuming that they are still together and indeed living), the household diet – and everything which parents might do to privilege their children. It means education as well, both primary and secondary. It encompasses peer-group determinants too: whether at school, in churches, via parental networks, in local neighbourhoods or extracurricular settings. Genuine equality of opportunity would involve the neutralisation – probably the standardisation – of every aspect of our early lives which wasn’t entirely attributable to the individual themselves. And it is impossible even to inventory all of these things; the impact of the social on us is so pervasive and ineliminable, we are so inextricably caught up in fabric of the social world, that we can’t even hope to get a grasp of it

When it is elaborated in such a way, I don’t know that I can sustain belief in the goal of equality of opportunity. Certainly even if I continue to will the end, I cannot consent to will the means. An inheritance tax of 100% would have to be instituted. Private schools would have to be abolished. Grammar schools would have to go in favour of total comprehensivization and standardisation. The government would have to radically escalate early years education. We’d practically be forced to throw our children into the Spartan agoge – and even then the children would probably be taken away from the parents too late. Unless children belong to the state and unless their treatment is radically and undesirably homogenised then I don’t see how we can hope to do more than approximate slightly better the ideal of social mobility, whilst monitoring vigilantly the damage which it does to the sort of liberal society that we want to live in.

The privileging of this goal of a completely fluid social system also has to be questioned because of the values that it enshrines. I find it hard to conceive of equality of opportunity as being anything other than an economistic goal. Does social mobility mean anything more than amassing a greater quanitity of money than your parents (adjusted for growth in the intervening period)? Is equality of opportunity anything more than the opportunity to sit upon a bigger pile of gold, like some idolatrous dragon? Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps the the ideal represents some sort of transcendence of particular, parochial backgrounds. Maybe it is about emancipation from the fetters of circumstance that have in the past denied people the right to live lives of their own choosing and to construct identities that are peculiarly their own. But I’m stretching here. At the heart of this goal is the idea that poor children do not deserve to be excluded from the capitalistic bonanza; they too should have the chance to make a worldly success of themselves and become rich.

The popular understanding of social mobility is also tainted by another obtuseness. It is very easy to endorse upward social mobility. The idea of children from disadvantaged backgrounds making good is an edifying one – and one which somehow seems to reflect positively back upon the society that propounds it as an aim. The same cannot be said for downward social mobility. Downward social mobility is the evil twin of upward social mobility, locked in the basement of this discussion. Politicians and mainstream commentators consistently make the mistake of conflating social mobility with upward social mobility, talking about the family as if it had only one son and heir. What they are arguing for – and what we are actually attached to – is the sort of structural upward mobility that Britain saw between the 1950’s and 1970’s when a massive increase in the number of white collar jobs presented Britain’s working-class with a one-time opportunity to achieve social advancement without displacing parts of the middle-class. Social mobility in twenty-first century Britain would have to be a reciprocal process, a zero-sum game: for working-class children to advance socially, we would have to be willing to accept the corollary of middle-class children coming down in the world.

That brings me to my final critique of the way that social mobility is dealt with in Britain today. I am worried that the current paradigm for social mobility has become so corrupted that it has been transformed into a vehicle for ensuring the evermore effective reproduction of the current social structure. That is, its practical effect may well have come to be the opposite of its stated intentions.

The great panacea of most mainstream politicians is education. The key, they say, to greater social mobility is to widen access to University. University education must be open to everyone; it is the silver bullet that will kill the werewolf of privilege. The problem with this is that the pro-University propaganda is so strong, and student numbers so high, that employers are starting to make a fetish of qualifications. Increasingly it is becoming impossible to break into the golden circles of the more favoured professions without visa-like qualifications; there is no longer any place for the virtuoso interviewee or the plucky upstart in this culture of pedantic exclusivity.

This is supposed to favour anyone with merit, but the people it actually favours are the children of the middle-class who – for material and cultural, as well as educational reasons – are more likely to go to University. Cultural expectations (both at home and at school), fear of debt, and differences in the strength of relationship between schools and universities combine to keep down the number of people from working-class backgrounds who make it to good universities. And after graduation, if anything, the system comes to favour children of privilege still more strongly. An increasing number of careers require one either to obtain postgraduate qualifications or to endure the rites-of-passage of unpaid internships. Forget about being a journalist, a social worker or a teacher without postgraduate qualifications. Want to work in publishing? Or for an MP? You’d better hope that you have parents who can afford to support you whilst you intern. It is just possible that this ostensibly progressive focus of education and qualifications has perversely become the great bulwark of the existing class structure. It might just be that an apparently open, “meritocratic” system is the best way for the middle-classes to inure their own against the dangers of downward social mobility.

Britain needs to think with greater rigour about its concept of social mobility, to consider clear-headedly what the realisation of such an ideal would require us to sacrifice and then to decide exactly what to do. The vagueness and half-heartedness of the present cannot be allowed to continue.

A by-election is an over-sized poll with one crucial difference: the politicians can cheat

The electors of Henley have for the last couple of weeks been suffering under the collective affliction of a by-election, an affliction which is going to reach fever pitch in the next 72-hours as they go to the polls and the media strain their blood-shot eyes to try and see right into the very depths of their souls. I always feel sorry for people who are forced to endure a by-election. They must feel ever so slightly like a field of corn set upon by a swarm of locusts or a cultured continental city swamped by the bacchanalian philistinism of travelling bands of football followers. All of a sudden their part of the world – at least what was their part of the world – is taken over by carpet-bagging politicians-cum-activists who have come to make them do as they’re told and the Panopticon-media come to watch the people who have come to make them do as they’re told. It is a strange, slightly unreal Russian doll scenario.

And what’s more they have to relinquish any preposterous notion they might have to the effect that they are the voters of Henley – particular people with specific concerns like vandalism on Edwards Street or the over-subscription of St. Barnabus’ specialist school – and submit to their new role of symbolic representatives of the nation. In by-elections people cease to be individuals; instead they have to form a new understanding of themselves as types, exemplars and weathervanes. Henley – no matter how bad the fit, no matter now risible the notion – becomes the paradigm of the nation. They can’t expect to be treated in their own terms or allowed to go about the drab, but important, business of choosing their parliamentary representative; they have to resign themselves to be exploited, fought over and (although it is counterintuitive) ignored. Henley, like Vietnam, isn’t important in itself. It is a piece of inhospitable jungle in South-Eastern Asia full of rice and people with a yellowed complexion; no one would ever want to go there. It matters because the wider world is watching. And defeat in Henley (whatever that might mean) could cause all of the neighbouring dominoes to fall as well as vividly demonstrating the vulnerability of the loser.

This seems to me ample reason to feel sorry for by-electors, but in this instance there are additional reasons to be sympathetic. After all, this is the by-election to replace Boris Johnson. Just read back that previous sentence; it scarcely even makes sense. How could anyone replace Boris Johnson? Johnson is sui generis; he has an appeal to voters rooted in his aristo-ironic bonhomie that no one else presenting themselves for election is going to be able to reproduce. And so this is the ultimate hangover by-election for them; a dreary Groundhog Day Monday in which they are forced to choose between nondescript and banal politicians, haunted as if through a nostalgic haze by ethereal glimpses of Johnson. The sense of disappointment that attends their choice will be made more pointed still by the fact that they cannot console themselves with the thought that Johnson is incapacitated, incarcerated, mad or dead. Johnson is fine. In fact, he’s better than fine: he’s the nation’s most powerful Tory; the capital’s most feted man; the politician with the second biggest direct political mandate in Europe after that pesky President of Portugal. Johnson left because he became too big and too important for Henley. He needed a more exciting stomping group, a more historic backdrop for his political tomfoolery. The people of Henley were betrayed; Johnson would condescend no longer to be their mere MP.

By-elections seem to bore ordinary people: people in the constituency being polled and people elsewhere. Presumably it’s because they know that nothing real is at stake. Most people have no direct contact with their MP and are sceptical about what they can achieve as a local lobbyist, so they only care about their election when it feels like a contribution towards the election of the government. Political elites and their camp-followers feel differently. For politicians, media-types, think-tankers, party agents, volunteer activists and their ilk by-elections are festival occasions. By-elections are political carnivals – and the political elites are carnies and carnival-goers all wrapped up in one.

Everyone likes to get out on the road; everyone likes to go toe-to-toe with their hated opposite numbers, but those aren’t the fundamental reasons why the people who live for politics love to by-electioneer. Political types love by-elections because they are institutionally-sponsored, taxpayer-funded, prestige-added polls. With one crucial difference: the politicians can cheat.

You might hear politicians telling you on the radio or television that ‘They don’t read the polls.’ But what they mean when they say that is: they do read the polls. Everyone involved in politics reads the polls. In fact, they read them obsessively, think about, talk about and pray to them obsessively. The polls are their Gods; they worship them as if they (not the voters) were the source of supreme power in the political universe. The power of the polls is not deific, though; it is the power of astrological calendars and runes. That is, they can tell the future. There is even a slight suspicion that they don’t so much forecast the electoral future as determine it. The people will support who the polls tell them they support…

But no matter how important they are to you, you cannot rig the polls. ICM, Ipsos Mori and Populus look after their own. So you can’t discover who the randomly-selected, hallowed ten-thousand are and find out ways venal, devious or violent to help them along the path to political enlightenment. They are untouchable. All you can do is perform better: govern better, oppose better, soundbite better, lie better, insult your opponents better, trick the electorate better. There is no direct way to coerce the polls; politicians are compelled to rely entirely on that motley collection of indirect and unreliable methods.

By-elections are different. Magnificently, deliciously different. The normal rules of polling do not apply. You know who the sample is and that means you can cheat. Outrageously. Like a mob boss on trial you have the chance to tamper with the jury. You can unleash a horde of button-men on the town, train a cadres of Question Time-profile politicians on the electorate, overwhelm the populace with a flood of rosette-wearing sycophants. Armed with the finest ideas of the party’s wonkiest eggheads, the filthy lucre of its most disreputable financiers, and the honeyed words of its suavest propagandists you and your army can go to work on the electorate. You can charm them, indoctrinate them, bore them, suffocate them, appal them, threaten them, out-fox them, hoodwink them, pulverize them – anything to make them promise to vote the right way. Nothing is forbidden, everything is permissible so long as it produces the desired result. Get the vote out if that’s going to help; if it isn’t, keep them at home – lock them in their homes, tell them that the election has been cancelled, turn the arrow pointing to the polling station round Wacky Races-style.

Can you see the dirty, saturnine beauty of it now? The beguiling genius of the by-election? You don’t have to be more popular than your opponent, you don’t have to be better. You can simply fight the more adept, artful, brutal campaign. The Liberal Democrats have been doing it for years…

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe: Why politicians still lie when everyone has ceased to believe

I don’t really know what to say about Zimbabwe. Words seem paltry before so much human suffering; my authority to publicly extemporise, which I would never normally question, seems hollow. That’s why this post has been so long delayed, in spite of the injury even at considerable cost to the blogger’s monomaniacal obsession with traffic. There is an unreality to what is going on in Zimbabwe for me. There is no way in which I can make such violence and oppression real – they are so far from my common experience that I can only assimilate them to fiction. Perhaps that’s why it’s the representation of this whole affair that I want to address.

A great deal of politics is marked by an insidious gulf between what is said and what is really going on. In British politics the 10p tax controversy and the circus surrounding 42-day pre-charge detention had little to do with the substance of what was ostensibly being discussed. In Zimbabwe this incongruity, which can give an uncanny air to politics, is grotesquely exaggerated. In the media presentation of his own country, Mugabe is the great revolutionary leader, the national liberator who freed black Zimbabwe from the colonial exploitation of cruel, white Britain. He is a friend to the people of Zimbabwe, a father to them, weary from a life of struggle and self-sacrifice, encircled by hostile neo-imperialists, but courageously unbowed. He is a great reformer, patriot and democrat. Zimbabwe is a persecuted nation and God (the Marxist God, presumably) will not release him from his vocation until she has been vindicated.

Mugabe has a story, a narrative of considerable force and emotional resonance in his country, to mask his egoistic motives and to justify his politics of violence. From what I hear, this siege narrative of black self-assertion sounds ever-more hollow to the people of Zimbabwe. They no longer believe in their government’s self-representations. But Zanu-PF continues to tell this discredited story. I think that there’s something very telling in that. No matter how empty and formalistic these positive self-representations are they have to keep making them. Even when the point is reached where they have almost completely lost their efficacy as implicit appeals for support, they still have a powerful symbolic value for their disseminators. There are non-instrumental reasons why power-fiends, megalomaniacs and egoists will not explicitly admit that this is what they are.

In considerable part this is a banal phenomenon: some of these men will not want to surrender their narrative of heroic resistance to colonialism because long association with anything breeds attachment; others will be living in a sort of twoness of self-denial, not fully aware – yet not fully unaware – that they are living on a lie. What interests me is those members of the regime who have ceased to believe the Mugabe panegyric, who despair of it as a tool of proselytism and yet continue to use it.

Partly it is a social psychological phenomenon. This nostalgia for the lies is a function of the way that our view of ourselves, our pronouncements and our behaviour interrelate. The explicit accounts that we give of ourselves before others matter. In explicitly admitting that we make mistakes, tell lies, love power for its own sake and perpetrate acts of violence, we confront ourselves with an alienated self-image; and, in so doing, we discover that we are the sort of person who does these things. Somehow that explicit statement of low motives and disreputable behaviour forces us to acknowledge ownership of our actions. We accept that the things we have done are a part of us, that they are somehow integral to who we are. This confrontation between our sense of our selves and the things that we have done, challenges our prior sense of identity; it undermines our favourably self-conception. And so we sanitise these accounts. We allow ourselves the indulgence of inexplicitness; we unreliably narrate our own lives to ourselves and to anyone who might overhear. This sort of identity trap, the need to defend a certain socially-consituted idea of ourselves, is what some of Mugabe’s myrmidons are caught in.

Perhaps just as important is the magic quality to this scenario. By that I mean not just the pervasive sense of unreality, but the way in which both parties to the deception lose the ability to disentangle themselves; they are in thrall, enchanted. Almost unbelievably, in a situation where lies are told which are universally recognised as lies – their power over people persists; in fact, it may even increase. There is no simple relation between the power of a public utterance and the extent of its truth. In this sort of encounter the ritual telling and listening that makes up public discourse persists, but its character is totally transformed. The normal communicative mode – the explicit dissemination of information from one party to another; the assessment of the truth-content of that information – is no longer operating. In its place you have a ritual exchange of empty words which somehow gains its coercive force because of the implicit contrast with what it has replaced. Instead of a substantive mode of communication, communication comes to take on a purely ritual form in which it is nothing but a chilling enactment of power relations. Both parties stand eyeball-to-eyeball in full knowledge of the reality of the situation – the leaders know they’re lying, the public knows they are being lied to, the leaders know that the public knows – but the sham discourse of the public realm is continued. It continues as an exemplary proof of the instrumentalities of power. The regime, as if to demonstrate the arbitrariness of its power, enacts that power through the rehearsal of a great charade of empty discourse in which everyone is forced to participate. What could be more menacing than the grim maintenance of this eminently gratuitous discourse?

It is a minor point alongside the other two, but I wonder also whether knowing and inefficacious lies aren’t told because our world is so completely constituted by the media. The thought struck me the other day when I heard John Humphries interviewing a Zimbabwean official on The Today Programme. I find it hard to understand why anyone would ever choose to be interviewed by Humphries, but that a representative of Zimbabwe’s government was doing it absolutely bewildered me. What hope could any Zanu-PF stooge have of successfully presenting a positive image of his party and its conduct on the BBC? It makes me think that perhaps coping with the media, and the sorts of behaviours which that coping evolves, is so embedded in politics all over the world that it continues to condition political action even in instances like this where Zanu-PF has long since lost any hope of positively influencing media coverage. It is as if a sort of instrumental conditioning is functioning. Governments have suffered pain for so long at the hands of the media, that they have been conditioned to respond to that stimulus with certain strategies of self-preservation. They will never admit to having made mistakes, told lies or acted on unworthy motives – and they will continue to operate on this logic even when is clear that such strategies will be hopelessly overmastered by the strength of the media hostility.

I don’t know what to do about Zimbabwe’s problems. Whether we ought to intervene militarily or strengthen sanctions, or leave things to Africa and to the internal decay of the regime, isn’t clear to me. It is one of those subjects that can easily lead one to despair of human beings and of political agency. Perhaps I will come back to it in a future post. My final reflection is simply that the Zimbabwe can act as a sort of political parable for us. It presents itself to us as a grotesquely exaggerated example of the dangers to the public weal of the distance between public pronouncements and underlying realities. As well as eliciting our compassion, it exhorts us all to vigilance and responsible scepticism.

Lives of quiet surrender, muted despair and limp conformity

Modern man has domesticated himself in bourgeois society and it is a poor fit. Imposing such tight controls, such a sedentary fixed existence, such powerful all-pervasive norms represents a sort of self-mutilation. Bourgeois life generates certain needs that it cannot fulfil; or certain needs predate bourgeois society which it has to adapt to satisfy. Ennui and stagnant safety, a sense of disempowerment before bureaucracy and aggressive anonymisation are the noxious byproducts of bourgeois living and to reabsorb them unproblematically it has to contort itself in bizarre ways.

Fear is a crucial means of recovering a sense of a life of action, excitement, danger, precariousness. We use it to kill excessive comfort and boredom and self-questioning consciousness. Bourgeois fear comes to fulfil the role of a sort of emotional release, a channel into which we can safely release the hysteria which is a sort of sublimated reaction to excessive control, regulation, routine – to doing the same thing again and again, in predictable and uncontroversial sequence, until we die. Just look at the quasi-apocalyptic fear that one sees now vis-à-vis the credit crunch, the global financial crisis, the banking meltdown; and look at the environmentalist scare which we flagellate ourselves with (wastefulness, energy gluttony, cheap chicken as the new sin).

This all grows so naturally out of a sense of the individual’s powerlessness before leviathan-like bureaucracies. Our problems are alienated: our fear expresses the difficulty that we have in dealing with the absence of villains, of the lack of someone to be vindictive towards, of an enemy to execrate. Comfort is discomforting, so we need to construe our lives as threatened, our resistance as heroic, our achievements as precarious: hence fear, with the threat from the environment, the economy, the (violent) criminals, terrorists, immigrants, chavs, corrupt politicians. All of these enemies or forces would destroy our well-appointed, rational bourgeois world with its hardworking families and its human rights and its sense of fair play and its popular culture. They render the banal beleaguered; they make our lives of quiet surrender, muted despair and limp conformity a sort of stance. We have our ‘others’ to tell us who we are and to remind us of the achievement of making order out of chaos, civilization out of barbarism. There is value in such a perspective. And it satisfies our need to feel ourselves better, more powerful than others; but also to torture ourselves with the bad conscience that comes from acting as the authors of our own problems (our profligacy destroys the environment; our rapacious foreign policy and quasi-imperialist cultural arrogance provoke the terrorists; our complicity in poverty and our inebriated consumerism evokes the resentment and envy that breeds criminality).

That’s not enough, though. Bourgeois society needs another prop; it has another ugly underside. We need to live vicariously through publicly-constructed paradigm figures: we need to feed upon celebrities; to make them the foci of our ugly, antisocial drives. As our lives have become increasingly privatized, our circles increasingly restricted, we have gone to the media in search of a sense of proximity to human types that we can’t find anywhere else. In the celebrity (the singer, the sportsman, the Royal: it matters little, the celebrity is constituted by what/how we see, not what they are) the media has created a sort of public good, a freely available emotional utility, a heavily fictionalised individual whom we can collectively appropriate, come to know and exploit. There may be some symbiosis here, but the celebrity’s essential role is to be exploited, penetrated, abused, condemned, exalted in whatever way is needed to anaesthetise our emotional wounds.

In the slave-minds of our twisted collective consciousness they are put to diverse uses: they are our heroes, our ideals, our anti-heroes (and many species thereof). Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse satisfy our need to be close to the darkness, to sin, to bacchanalian excess, to all the violent extravagances of the tyrannical id. They are expressions of libidinous excess, of self-destruction, of self-cruelty, of the complete repudiation of the routines and mores of bourgeois life. Each of them lives the life of the tortured romantic artist, the artist who lives in anguish between the competing, complimentary pulls of genius and madness. Doherty and Winehouse fascinate because they have paradigm lives for vicarious living. They are famous because our lives are lacking. Their unevenness, their lack of balance, the repressions that they demand of us, necessitate such objects of fascination. In a society as individualised as ours, as media beplagued, we get celebrities, these Frankenstein-monsters of the media: not Doherty, not Winehouse – not as they exist in the world, undistorted and unspun: media representations using the raw materials of their lives. Each has a public persona contended over by the magazines and the papers and the TV shows. That persona is what emerges from the battle of representations, the skein of competing stories and narratives and images: whatever is best evolved to satisfy our lust for a supplement to our bourgeois unsatisfactoriness.

Celebrities can fulfil such powerful needs because they are like us, but not us. They are the expressivists par excellence, hedonists par excellence, extreme libidinous, libertinous examples of ourselves; but they exist in the same culture as us, emerge from the same society, occupy the same social classes. They are recognisably us: who we might have been, who we might be, our potentialities, ourselves under different impulsions.

Our fascination with murders and child abductors is part of the same thing. We are morbidly fascinated by them, they are taboo and intriguingly so. They frighten us, lend our lives the excitement of the siege; give us paradigm figures for cruelty; give us individuals upon whom we can focus our anger, sadism, vengeful feelings as a community; and give us an insider-outsider standard so that we can see who is within, and who outwith, the community. They are doing so much work, bearing so much of the weight of the submerged psychic life of the nation. We hate them, we fear them, we define our identities against them, we want to kill them in a collective right of self-assertion and community-building; but at the same time we long to be them, to taste their exquisite lawlessness, to get drunk on the feelings of power and virility and cruelty that animate them.

They are the absolute, perfect instantiation of the anti-social, the misanthropic: in our minds they become our darkest selves, the bearers of drives and urges that we cannot even in our most private, candid moments admit to ourselves. Our fascination with them is the fascination that only evil can command, that only taboo can summon: the fascination with violating a child, with inflicting pain because of the narcosis it gives us, with taking life because it transfigures us into gods. I don’t know whether the semi-latent, half-articulated desire to kill these murderers is stronger, or the never spoken urge to become them.

Then there is Prince Harry: a compelling example of the way in which our self-understanding operates. Harry is the warrior Prince; young, brave, patriotic, self-sacrificing, masculine. And he is that most attractive of types: the extraordinary man who longs only be ordinary. He is the great affirmer of our lives of quiet, uncelebrated banality. He is the living vindication of our obscurity. He is not like us, but he wants to be like us. This makes him the type of the reluctant hero: a man (he has to be a man) motivated not by glory or any private, unseemly motives, but by the desire to serve virtue – to die for virtue – anonymously. Through him we finally came to understand what war was for the ‘ordinary’ soldier; what sacrifice meant; what it was like to live daily in fear of death and yet to fulfil one’s duty to a revered nation and an oppressed third world people.

Clearly, in a remarkable atavism, we still want our Royalty to be warriors, and we want them to sacrifice their very legitimate preferences to be just like everyone else, but that isn’t the most remarkable thing. More remarkable still is that for us to come to any sort of collective understanding of what war involved for British soldiers, we needed a celebrity to go to war. Until we had an individual story, a paradigm account that we could fit into the narrative of a public figure’s life, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t real to us. They were obscure, vaguely conceived tragedies, impinging rarely on our consciousnesses when radio newscasters read the names of dead soldiers elevated momentarily from the ranks of unknown abstractions.

Any attempt to understand British culture and society has to engage with fears, media-manufactured celebrities, and the dramatis personae of child murders (not just the presumptive murderer, but the child and the parents). Concentrated in those three areas are ugly, subterranean truths that we don’t want to admit to ourselves and which insipid liberal analyses are never going to be bold or deep enough to find.

In his history of Britain, Andrew Marr sings a paean to the present

I’ve just watched the last episode of Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain on the BBC’s miraculous i-Player and I’ve been trying to work out what story Marr has been telling. Marr has a nice eye for detail, deftly points out novelty and – as one would expect in a series like this – does the ad hominem stuff well, even if his decision to speak certain quotations in character robs him of some of his dignity. But I think that too often the totality – the story of modern Britain – was hidden by the hurly-burly of political events that so clearly fascinate Marr. He wants to tell lots of disconnected stories – about the austerity of the late 1940’s, the Winter of Discontent, the fall of Thatcher – but too often he fails to see past, or beyond, these stories. He was unable to put them properly in context or to draw out their significance.

That said, I think that there was a sort of thematic unity to Marr’s history. He has, consciously or not, taken up a stance towards British history. Marr is a Whig historian. Not the old-fashioned kind of Whig historian who chauvinistically celebrates the triumph of British Protestanism, Parliamentary institutions and liberty over Stuart despotism and Popish reaction, but a new kind with a shorter memory and a different historical focus.

Marr started in 1945 because that’s the most convenient starting-point for the telling of this narrative. Like all Whig history, it is our story, the story of the present – the narrative of how we came to be. It comes complete with challenges (always overcome), enemies (invariably vanquished) and heroes (unfailingly prescient figures who have divined the overall direction of history). The New Whig history is one in which Britain emerges from World War Two a much-changed nation in a much-changed world. Exhausted from the struggle, staggering under the weight of its Empire, its will worn away almost to nothing it confronts the nuclear age, the Cold War, powerful anti-imperialist movements and a pack of furiously developing economic competitors. Britain is adrift in the world, no longer at home, lost, broken. It has lost faith in itself. The story of the next sixty years is the story of Britain’s struggle to redefine itself in a post-imperial world of diminished power and to rediscover the lost economic dynamism of its Victorian heyday.

After the material struggles of the immediate post-war years Britain seemed to enter a period of decline from the late 1950’s onward. There was talk of the ‘stagnant society,’ there were numerous currency crises. Britain suffered traumatic ‘stagflation’ and industrial unrest made Britain at times seem ungovernable. She was the ‘sick man of Europe’ living on IMF handouts, internationally irrelevant. Enter Thatcher. In the Whiggish narrative a combination of Thatcherite economic shock therapy and Falklands jingoism restored British economic strength and self-belief. In those years Britain, at the price of terrible suffering, modernized its economy and broke the political power of the unions at home, and signaled in the South Atlantic that it had both the power and the will to play a role on the world stage. Britain was not played out; its best days were not behind it. As Blair said a decade later, it was ‘a young country.’

Britain had met her economic challenges; she had re-established her international influence by augmenting the Special Relationship and entering the European Union; but she had also outgrown an older, constricting identity. Britain was no longer staid, conformist and prim; people no longer knew their place. Instead – here with a nod to the heroic liberalizing Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins – Britain was a country comfortable with itself, a tolerant, open, liberal society. From guilty imperium Britain had transformed itself into a multiracial, multicultural society in which toleration meant that all ways of life were able to flourish. The Empire had come home, in some neatly parabolic reconciliation.

I poke fun at it because the need which it fulfils to celebrate the present and the liberal values on which it is parasitic are so poorly hidden, but you can’t write a history that doesn’t clandestinely or openly serve a purpose. In Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ It strikes me, though, that this sort of paradigm for understanding British history is best looked at alongside another. The narrative of loss, the nostalgician’s history, can perhaps be told just as compellingly. Britain has undoubtedly become richer and more dynamic than ever before, but the underside of that success is dissolution, fragmentation and fear.

In 1945 Britain knew itself. It was a solid, stable society of given identities with families, churches and local communities acting as powerful socialising influences. People were more trusting of their politicians and of each other. Restlessness, dissatisfaction and the lust for new experience weren’t yet culturally embedded.

Today Britain is fragmented, a society of shards in which the lack of shared experience and values means that there is an absence of mutuality. The old centres of authority have been dethroned. People no longer trust their politicians; the Church has become attenuated; the standing of teachers is no longer what it was; family breakdown sees half of all marriages end in divorce. In a society as non-prescriptive as ours people no longer have a clear sense of what is expected of them or of what it means to be British.

When this cultural dissolution is combined with economic developments like globalisation, hyper-consumerism and mass in-migration you get a society that is lacking in something integral. Britain today is frightened, anxious. Its young people are knife-wielding islanders straight out of Lord of the Flies; its immigrant populations are potential terrorists; its underclass threatens to poison the rest of the social organism. The only consolations that seem to be offered us are consumer products and a banalized, celebrity-obsessed cultural world.

This story is just as partial and politically compromised as the Whig history and I’m not sure that it is any more valuable to us, but it has just as much claim to be the British story as Marr’s does. Perhaps it also avoids one of the ironies of Marr’s story. The liberal Whig story is a narrative of national celebration that ultimately aims at the transcendence of a national story. Its celebration of globalisation, European integration and multilateralism in foreign policy is the celebration of convergence – of the creation of a homogenous liberal democratic West. The new challenges that the Whig story faces are not challenges specific to any one nation. Terrorism, global financial crises, energy shortages and climate change are all collective challenges: either we will succeed in meeting them together, or we will fail together. Marr’s Whig national history seems self-dissolving.

One final point. Marr’s is an external narrative, a history of British behaviour, not of Britain. One of the things that a history of Britain should do – perhaps the crucial thing that it should do – is to penetrate the British national consciousness. The true student of national history craves interiority, depth – an understanding of what it is to live in a place at a particular time from within. One wants to know what the historical subjects value, how they see themselves, what things like democracy and friendship mean to them. The national historian has to have a keen eye and a penetrating intelligence, only then will they have chance to notice these submerged changes that are so easily seen without being recognised.

Our politics is a hodgepodge of self-contradiction

British politics rests on the foundation of a series of platitudes that almost everyone holds to be true. Britain should have a universal health service free at the point of use. Britain shouldn’t go to war without the acquiescence of the United Nations. British sovereignty should not be surrendered to the European Union. Criminals should be punished for their crimes.

All of these platitudes, these should-shouldn’t statements, are considered self-evident. They are their own argument. If you state your belief in the platitude and are then asked ‘Why?’ you will have no non-circular response. And it is this sort of belief that drives the party political battle, the media coverage and, ultimately, voter preferences. The party that succeeds is the party that does the best job of convincing the electorate that it is identifiable with these statements. If a party is associated with these things in the popular mind and it is not utterly contaminated by the impression of incompetence or corruption, then it will win elections.

That describes the mechanism of our politics; we also have to ask whether such a politics is flawed or not. The answer is: not necessarily. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this way of doing politics, but it does represent a threat to political coherence. People treat these platitudes, these should-shouldn’t statements, very much in isolation. Seeing as we either agree with these simple formulations or disagree, the tendency is to allow ourselves to be governed by our immediate impulse. The difficult job of trying to plot these different platitudes against each other, to identify cross-linkages and potential conflicts, to see the political life of the country as a complex, organic whole is not often performed.

The politics of platitudes is a politics of isolated and frequently contradictory beliefs. Now, it isn’t necessarily a problem if a voter’s political beliefs lack coherence, unless politicians acquiesce in that incoherence by lapsing into a cynical populism. The contradictory beliefs of the voter are supposed to be filtered out and allowed for by the political resistance of the politicians, but if politicians are unwilling to perform this mediating function then at best you will have an incoherent political discourse, and at worse an incoherent government policy.

And we can see both of those things happening at the moment. Let’s set two widely held platitudes alongside each other:

1. The power to run hospitals and schools should be in the hands of doctors, nurses and teaches, not those of politicians and civil servants.
2. If there is a media story about something that has gone wrong in the provision of our public services then the Prime Minister and the Cabinet should take decisive action to solve the problem.

Voters of all different political persuasions if prompted to talk about politics will often express these views and politicians of all parties can be heard intoning these things constantly on radio and television programmes. Devolution of power to our devoted doctors and nurses has become one of the clichés of our times – always good for a loud cheer on Question Time. We should leave them to get on with their jobs, to carry out their training, and to deliver world-class care to patients rather than allowing the ignorant, know-it-all man at Whitehall to tie them up in knots as if he knew better how to do their job than they did. But then you hear of a scandal with hospital cleanliness and infection in a hospital in Kent and every politician – every member of the public too – wants decisive central action from the government to ensure that this sort of thing can never happen again.

The obvious inconsistency goes unreported and apparently unnoticed. The fact that devolving power to public service professionals is incompatible with this sort of knee-jerk executive response to failure seems to be the ungraspable fact of politics. Because the voters believe these two different things it becomes politically impossible to discard the rhetoric of decentralisation and empowerment of public service professionals; and impossible to stand austerely still and quiet whilst the media recycles endless stories about incompetence. Incoherence is sacrificed to the exigency of satisfying competing imperatives.

Two possible solutions present themselves. A better educated, more nuanced, more holistic public who are better able to understand the frequent incompatibility of political beliefs is one. The other is a franker, more sophisticated, braver political class which is unafraid to frustrate the media or to explain to the public that political contradictions mean that they cannot always gain immediate satisfaction on all fronts.

I hold out little hope for either. It seems much more likely that we will have to continue to put up with people cheering for both sides and the politicians cheerleading for both.

The Politics of Value: a loaded shotgun in the hands of the Conservatives

I had breakfast once with one of Blair’s biographers, Dr. Anthony Seldon, after he gave a talk at my college. It was at the time that Seldon was correcting the proofs for the second edition of Blair. He acknowledged that there were a lot of positive things that could be attributed to the collective action of the government, but he couldn’t come up with anything of real significance which was personally attributable to Blair except the election victories. He challenged me to do so. After thinking for a while, abortively starting and stopping, frowning and pensively eating a few more mouthfuls of cornflakes, this is what I said: Blair is responsible for giving a new paradigm to British politics – a way of thinking and talking about fiscal policy that is now inescapable. That fiscal paradigm says that spending (“investment”) is good and that increased spending is the primary motor of public service improvement. When you talk about increased spending people no longer say, ‘Where are the tax increases coming?’ And when you talk about tax cuts, they will invariably ask, ‘Where are the spending cuts coming?’ This was a shift in political culture and public discourse and Blair, the government’s great communicator, was the man responsible for it.

For the last ten years New Labour has broken the Conservative Party on the wheel of this paradigm. They have celebrated their own spending with Five-Year Plan-type recitations of statistics and they have savaged modest Conservative proposals to reduce taxation by talking about “swingeing cuts to essential services.” I think that this New Labour gospel on public services and taxation – in which, paradoxically, profligacy has become a virtue – is ready to fall. The sleeper issue of British politics – value – is about to wake.

The conditions in which this paradigm was created and in which it has flourished no longer apply. It was born as a paradigm of renewal, a response to the neglect-induced decay of the Thatcher years. The renewal of the public services was parallel to, and constitutive, of the renewal of the Labour Party. It was a forward-looking paradigm, a ‘new dawn’ paradigm. That historical moment has now passed. The Thatcher and Major years have fallen beyond the frontiers of popular memory; events more distant than 1997 have lost the resonance that the recent past retains. Labour now has to accept full responsibility for the state of the public services and the public finances; to accept responsibility for the imperfection of their renewal. And New Labour has grown old in office; it has become tired and tarnished. It can no longer live on the politics of freshness and expectation. Instead there is a day-after feel to the government, as if ‘death has forgotten it’ (Conrad).

The Blairite paradigm also presumed a period of sustained prosperity. And for fifteen years that presumption was answered by uninterrupted growth, low inflation and low interest rates. Britain’s GDP per head even overtook countries like France, Germany and Japan which had outstripped Britain decades earlier. These were golden years of rising house prices and ubiquitous credit. New Labour built its paradigm on the capricious foundation of an economy which was able to sustain rising personal incomes and a growing state. And for ten years, through fortune and assurance, ours was an economy in which the desire for rising personal living standards was easily reconcilable with the considerable demands of public services etiolated by years of Thatcherite malnourishment.

Much of the appeal of this public spending paradigm rested on the return which it offered to a politics of conscience at a time when materialism and self-interest had displaced morality altogether from mainstream political life. It seemed to offer us a chance to feel that we were turning away from the blandishments of a brashly enriching materialism, that we were frustrating our greed by deferring to a guarantee of collective social justice. And it seemed to offer voters a chance to feel proud of their vote, to wipe out the guilt they felt over their political do-nothingism. Self-denial is the political, collective virtue of choice in a greedy individualistic society. Foregoing what we most want allows us to demonstrate that we are the sort of people who have the interests of others at heart.

The conditions which gave this paradigm so much purchase no longer pertain. The New Labour project is no longer prospective, looking hopefully into the distance; one can no longer hear the plaintive cries of the public sector suffering from eighteen years of wilful Thatcherite neglect; the government itself is no longer a symbol of hope and incorruptibility. After a decade of overwhelming spending the widespread (and considerably wrongheaded) perception is that the public sector resembles nothing so much as a more expensive version of its 1980’s incarnation. A great windfall has been squandered, it is said. It would be very easy for the perception to develop, because of a wider narrative of government betrayal, that New Labour has broken a compact with the electorate. Labour told them that spending more money on services would translate plainly and unambiguously into better services, and it may well seem to many now that this was a deception for which they fell. Voters could very easily be convinced that their good faith was taken advantage of.

The economic ground has also been cut from beneath Labour’s feet. The Credit Crunch and the commodities bubble have signalled the end of economic benignancy, and the effect on people’s attitude to the public realm and taxation could be transformative. A civic-minded attitude to taxation and an indulgent atittude towards government spending can be reconciled with the eye that none of us can avoid keeping on our personal standard of living when money is plentiful and things get cheaper. The zero-sum game relationship between taxation and disposable income is obscured by robust growth. When that veil falls in periods of economic difficulty people are forced to confront competing imperatives: the spending on social services necessitated by a concern for social justice and the avidity for consumption are revealed in their true antagonistic relation. People start to calculate the personal advantage which they draw from public services; the wealthy start to baulk at the idea of subsidising social weakness and failure. People start making exceptions for themselves. It is in this environment that countries can come to suffer from that Galbraithian disease: private affluence, public squalor.

The sense of staunchly supporting the welfare state which this paradigm gives is still adapted to satisfy the demands of conscience, but it now has a competitor which threatens to undercut it. The self-denial of environmentalism, which seeks to keep the world safe for unimpeachably blameless future generations, is able to offer a parallel sense of other-directedness, but it has the twin advantages of novelity and relative cheapness.

Danny Finkelstein wrote a characteristically insightful piece for The Times this week in which he argued that distinctiveness is not the best way to appeal to a wide coalition of voters. And under most circumstances I would agree with him and with his advice to the Conservative Party. Don’t look to differentiate yourself. You will drown in the clear blue water. Take your core supporters for granted and reach out, try and neutralise your negatives and mimic the most popular attributes of your opponents. But it seems to me that with things as they are now, the determined prosecution of the politics of value could blow the bloody doors off British politics. The public is ready to admit the failure of New Labour’s paradigm on tax-and-spend. They are ready to acknowledge that the politics of big spending is flawed; that it is not spending in itself which is a government achievement, but value for money; that this government has spent wastefully and inefficiently; and that to want tax cuts represents forgivable selfishness when it involves the denial of a spendthrift government.

I don’t want to mutate into the sort of commentator who writes articles telling the Conservatives how they can succeed, I just want to present an analysis of the current political landscape. But it seems to me that British politics is ripe for the sort of more-for-less politics that the Conservatives have experimented with fitfully in the past. A grey focus-group centrism, and the pusillanimous aping of the opposing party, has been for more than a decade the most successful mode of operation in British politics, but under these conditions it seems that resounding success for the Conservatives can only be achieved by acting decisively and resolutely. Cameron would be well advised to state emphatically and repeatedly that the bidding war on spending is over. High public spending is not an achievement and the breakneck increases in spending in the last decade have been fatally undermined by waste. The focus in British politics should no longer be on how much we spend, but on how well we spend it. The key political question needs to become one of value, the primary measure of success one of achieving more-for-less. From this it follows that government should spend less and that it will be able to tax less.

If Cameron were to say that unambiguously and sedulously, I think that the government’s refrain of “Tory cuts” would sound pitifully hollow. I write this analysis with a profound sense of unease. I think that Labour’s fiscal paradigm needs to be amended, but I want desperately for the Labour Party to be the ones to do it. That way the relentless pursuit of value will be reconciled with the social universalism of the public services. But I think that this approach is scarcely even available to the government; their record to date binds their hands. I am deeply equivocal about the idea of the Conservatives using it because I think it will be so successful. It calls nothing to mind so much as a loaded shotgun which the Conservatives have to hand, ready to shoot the lame dog of Brown’s government, if they can just realise its use.