Politics in the mire

I know that Craig Murray is disappointed that he didn’t do better in the Norwich North by-election, but to scoop up almost 1,000 votes and come ahead of the BNP after only three weeks of campaigning on a skewed playing field is surely cause for congratulation.

We are at a turning point in British politics. The Blair-Brown New Labour project has lost its magic and many people who voted for it repeatedly since 1997 no longer believe in its empty promises. Its failure to effectively correct most of what has gone wrong during the past year in our economy and our political culture is damningly obvious. Clearly a majority of voters want fundamental changes to the way we are governed, but the lack of any clear lead from the two biggest parties despite the massive display of public anger caused the voters to stay at home in large numbers on this occasion.

Because of this abstention factor the Conservatives won the seat comfortably but they also dropped some 2000 votes on their 2005 general election score, so they have no cause to feel cock-a-hoop. They have still to convince a vital segment of the electorate that they are worth turning to at the impending general election. Given our unjust first-past-the-post system (which needless to say they support) they will probably win a majority of seats but not of votes. Those of us who want proportional representation may wish – as we always do – for a hung parliament which will give the Liberal Democrats leverage, but such slender hopes of a fluke outcome are not the proper road to giving the electorate what it is entitled to – a fair voting system. The opposition of the two large parties, and their record of broken promises on the issue, speaks volumes about their unfitness to govern.

But far more than electoral reform and a clean-up of MPs’ expenses is needed to restore public confidence in the political system, now at its lowest ebb that I can recall in 60 years of observing politics. We are living in extraordinary times; the danger is that for many younger people who have known little else and whose memories don’t stretch back beyond the 1990s the current low and dishonest state of politics will become the norm.

The euphoria of New Labour’s victory in 1997 already seems a world away. The prospect we were offered by the beaming Tony Blair amidst chants of “things can only get better” of more openness and honesty in politics turned out to be a mirage. In almost no time Mr Squeaky-Clean was in front of the TV cameras glibly assuring us that he was “a pretty straight kind of guy” after allegations of advertising rule- bending in favour of a large Labour Party donor had emerged. His performance had eerie echoes of President Nixon’s tear-jerking Watergate TV appearance cuddling the family pooch.

This was merely a banal prelude to the post-9/11 nightmare: Blair’s spineless cosying up to the most right-wing bellicose US administration since the Second World War; his insouciant brushing aside of at least a million marchers against British participation in the illegal invasion of Iraq; sexed up dodgy dossiers; the outing and consequent suicide of a decent and loyal public servant, Dr David Kelly; sofa government that largely by-passed a docile cabinet; endless intrigue and media spin by the Mephistophelian Alastair Campbell…..Even worse, the trashing of many of our centuries-old hard won civil liberties which used to be the proud boast of our democracy but which didn’t weigh in the balance against a largely spurious ‘war on terror’. And the torrent of unnecessarily restrictive legislation and petty rules and regulations imposed upon us by this government and its local minions would make the most hardened Stalinist apparatchik green with envy.

All this alienated many, though not all, of New Labour’s supporters, many of whom heaved a sigh of relief when the egregious Blair was at last displaced by the glowering, Heathcliffian Brown who promised to bring his much-vaunted moral compass to bear upon the nation’s discontents. After all the blunders and misjudgements of the past year, it is amazing that this tin-eared man still affects to believe that the nation needs him. It does – like a hole in the head.

But the only likely alternative doesn’t look all that much more convincing. Cameron, Osborne and co. are a lacklustre lot, and the only experienced ex-cabinet minister among them, Kenneth Clarke, is at odds with the party policy over Europe.

So it’s no wonder that far from having switched off from politics more and more people are too angry to participate while the current rotten system prevails. Thousands of independent-minded people are deeply concerned about this country’s future and are looking for a new deal. How that is to materialise, and whether the varied bunch of dissenters who want to trigger it off can combine convincingly enough to rally significant voter support, remains to be seen. But the darkest night comes before the dawn, and the first rustlings of significant change are audibly in the air. Now is the time for all good folk to come to the aid, not of the party, but of the country.

Conservative Cavalcade - 1

The Conservative party has played such a major part in public affairs during my lifetime that I need more than one post to have my say about them.

When I was little, there was a National Government, and its prime minister was Ramsay MacDonald. I didn’t understand, then, that this ‘national’ government was really an overwhelmingly Conservative one – or, indeed, that there was such a thing as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Insofar as I became aware of political things, I just took ‘the government’ for granted.

I suppose the first incident that aroused my still childish interest was the abdication of King Edward VIII which, indeed, riveted the entire country. Royalty was still widely revered in those days, and the notion that our King should want to marry a common American woman, and a divorced one at that, shocked Britain to the core. By then, Stanley Baldwin was prime minister, widely regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’, and temperamentally a social healer who was sometimes over-complacent. His skilful navigation of the switchover from the erring Edward to the model family monarch George VI won the plaudits of almost everyone except Winston Churchill and a handful of romantic ‘King’s men’.

The next big political event to invade my budding consciousness of the wider world beyond our family life was the Munich crisis. Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain, a prim, narrow-minded but basically decent man, dramatically flew for the first time in his life, not once but twice, to Germany in the space of a few days plead with Hitler to avert a European war. The dictator didn’t think much of this Victorian throwback, and is supposed to have said "If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers". Nonetheless, Chamberlain emerged from the lion’s den with what he optimistically announced was Hitler’s pledge of “peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." But he must surely have known, as well as nearly everyone else did, that this was a hollow hope.

Nowadays, ‘appeasement’ has a bad name and Baldwin and Chamberlain are both execrated for their foolish complacency. But there was much support for their policies at the time; the senseless bloodbath of the 1914-18 trench warfare was only a few years behind, with its tragic loss of almost a whole generation of youth, and most British people were appalled at the thought of another war. Fortunately, though, Winston Churchill was sounding the alarm throughout the 1930s. But he and his small band of supporters were in a minority although I am glad to say my family believed - however reluctantly - that he was right.

Apart from renegade kings and upstart dictators, the National Government of the pre-war decade was a far better one in many respects than it has since been given credit for. When it came into office, the country was almost bankrupt and in the grip of a severe economic depression. This was partly the result of post-war exhaustion, and more immediately a consequence of the great 1929 Wall street crash which resulted from reckless speculation on the American stock market. While accelerating, though still inadequate, rearmament in the last years of peace helped, the National government had been laying the groundwork for economic recovery even earlier, with the abandonment of free trade and the introduction of tariff protection for Britain’s basic industries which, without this, would have been even worse equipped to fight the 1939-45 war. Unemployment was also a nagging problem about which more should and could have been done. But in retrospect, and for all their sins of omission, the ‘men of Munich’ have had an excessive amount of blame heaped upon them by political opponents and historians. Popularity plummets all too swiftly, and Baldwin – who had been hailed as a national saviour after the abdication – became even more unpopular than Chamberlain when the war erupted in earnest in the summer of 1940. He was reviled for not having warned the nation of its peril, and many rejoiced in mean fashion when his beautiful wrought iron ornamental gates at Bewdley [he was an ironmaster] were seized for scrap. His old age was lonely, and I felt pity for him when, as an undergraduate, I saw him glumly hobbling around the Senate House courtyard in procession as Chancellor of Cambridge University.

My own political consciousness only blossomed [if that is the right word!] during the war, when I was a schoolboy with a fascination for history and a keen awareness of the increasingly bitter global struggle. Winston Churchill’s government was a coalition of the three main political parties, and more genuinely ‘national’ than its predecessor had been, though the majority of MPs were still Conservative. During his long political career Churchill himself had been by turns a Conservative, a Liberal, and then a Conservative again. Because of his presumed ‘disloyalty’ during the 1930s, he was disliked and mistrusted by many Conservatives, both in and outside parliament, and only became prime minister on the insistence of the Labour Party, who refused to serve under his rival Lord Halifax.

Churchill’s heroic stance as the implacable British bulldog snarling at the Nazi foe and as the prime architect of Allied victory won the bulk of his party over so that many regarded him as their main asset. When he was unexpectedly defeated in the 1945 landslide general election which swept Labour not only into office but, for the first time, into power he was solidly supported by most Conservatives in his new and unfamiliar role as leader of the opposition. [Indeed, the stalwartly Tory mother of a college friend of mine refused to recognise this unpalatable turn of affairs, and made a point of always referring to Mr Churchill as “the prime minister” throughout the six years that he wasn’t!] During my university days and for some time afterwards I was a pretty strong Churchillian Conservative, because I believed that the Tories, more than Labour, stood for the freedom of the individual to live their personal lives as they chose – something I was perhaps wrong about.

I remained a Conservative until the Suez crisis of 1956, when it became painfully apparent that Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, had not only secretly colluded with France and Israel in attacking Egypt and attempting to seize the Suez Canal, but also had told a whole pack of lies to parliament and the country about the fiasco. At which point I ceased to be a Conservative [writing a pompous letter of resignation to my local MP], and have ever since had no particularly strong party allegiance, though inclining towards the Liberals [now LibDems] primarily because of their stance on civil liberty issues and voting reform.

Soft Centre

British politics in this dismal decade resemble a failed sponge cake – brittle and bitter at the edges, and soggy and inert at the centre where the meaningful action should be taking place but isn’t. As W. B. Yeats so eloquently put it in “The Second Coming”,

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.’

Anyone concerned about the political health of our democracy ought to be worried about this malaise; and a ‘liberal conspiracy’ should be seeking to rectify it.

Today’s public debate is dumbed down in most respects, yet at the same time often snarly and ill-tempered. An interesting perspective is provided by Frank Furedi in Politics of Fear and Invitation to Terrorism. His thesis is that we – the West – have lost our bearings and are confused about our identity and purpose. The public is frightened by the shadowy threats of terrorism and mounting global violence which are hyped up by our elected leaders who, though they mouth platitudes about ‘freedom’ and ‘democratic values’, are bewildered by the nature of others’ hostility to our way of life and respond by encroaching on our own cherished traditional freedoms under the guise of ‘protecting’ us.

So far as Britain is concerned, it is undoubtedly true that over the last couple of decades we have moved into a ‘dependency society’ where more and more groups of people are identified as ‘vulnerable’ and therefore in need of an army of State nannies and supervisors to run their lives. Although we tend to think of our existence in sharply contrasting ‘before and after 9/11’ terms, this trend has been going on far longer than just since 2001, though it has accelerated sharply since then. After a decade of New Labour, we are approaching the point of no return: it is no longer inconceivable that within our lifetimes British citizens will be chipped, tagged, and spied upon by hidden cameras and eavesdropping devices from the cradle to the grave. All in our own best interests, of course. George Orwell’s worst nightmares are coming true.

As a democratic liberal who believes that the State exists for the benefit of the individual, and not the other way round, I find these trends dismaying though not altogether surprising, and certainly not so daunting that I feel constrained from protesting vigorously against them. I do believe, however, that time is getting short; and that the mobilisation of an active Centre majority which will fight every inch of the way for the recovery of our liberties is a highly urgent task for democrats.

By an active Centre, I don’t mean a return to the stale old consensus politics where the Labour and Conservative parties jostle with each other for the middle ground and the difference between them grows less and less. The Tories pulled off this trick in the post-WW2 years so successfully that it ultimately resulted in social and economic stagnation which was only broken by Mrs Thatcher’s plucky but misguided radicalism and ‘dash for freedom’. This has now morphed into New Labour’s embrace of neo-liberal economics, which is the perverse flip-side of its over-nannyish social policies. With this un-Labourlike and unSocialist scenario compounded by Blair’s headlong rush to be Bush’s poodle, it is no wonder that so many on the Left are angry and disgruntled, and feel bitterly betrayed.

This, surely, is where a promising opportunity lies for those of us who seek pragmatic rather than doctrinaire solutions to set out our stall before an increasingly bothered and bemused public. As Furedi rightly points out, the old labels ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are obsolete, and the meaningful divide is between those of us who believe that real national security and social progress will be achieved through trusting the maturity and common sense of the public and those who – wherever on the political compass they envisage themselves to be – seek to control and hobble others because they are frightened that they are losing control.

The spectrum of politics is not semi-circular; it is a full circle where the two extremes of undemocratic Left and Right are near neighbours so indistinguishable that their labels don’t really matter. At present, their strident, angry voices are far too dominant. Impelled by fear, they strive to compel all the rest of us to conform with their political, social, and religious dogmas. The open, tolerant, pluralist Centre is still, I believe, the political preference of the majority of level-headed, shrewd British people who are increasingly depressed and derailed by the raucous voices shouting over their heads and attempting to impose unwanted curbs on how they think and behave.

After a decade in office, Labour is obviously tired and stumbling. It’s worst mistake has been a growing tendency to invade, in Nannyish fashion, the citizen’s right to privacy and integrity. We need a government elected at Westminster that is far more sensitive than the present one to the inalienable values of liberty and what that actually means in terms of policies.

It is time for the commonsense Centre to bestir itself. We should listen less to the feverish chatter from the fringes, and restore a more balanced political discourse to our affairs.