The view from Hadrian's Wall - holding off the intolerants

This post first appeared on the Radix blog...

I am currently walking along Hadrian’s Wall with my family, and very exhausting it is (in a good way), where once an early version of the European Union patrolled its northern border.

I feel like I have learned a huge amount also about England and its poor governing system – more on that another day. But I have also been chatting more than normally to my fourteen-year-old – and he asked me this: if I had the opportunity to start a new political party, what would it say?

Now fourteen-year-olds, in my experience, don’t ask questions like that very often. And, when they do, they don’t usually hang around for a considered answer – which is probably very sensible. I’m also on holiday, so this is a barely considered answer, but it will stand for now.

First of all, I would wind up the party and re-organise it as a well-funded Distributist faction inside the Lib Dems. The Distributists formed a Liberal heresy in 1912/13 and left the party, led by Belloc and Chesterton, and rejoined sometime in the mid-1950s. That badly needs an articulate updating.

So here are my top three or four policies:

• A major investment in rent-to-own housing so that everyone who wants one can aspire to own their own home.
• A major investment of time in anti-trust, working with the EU competition authorities, to break up the big corporates, public and private, which are sucking the life out of our regions.
• A right to flexible service delivery, along the lines set out in my review on barriers to choice, to humanise our public services.
• A ban on the foreign ownership of land and property, to bring down house prices and to prevent our nation being purchased by Chinese tyrants.

And while I have the power, I would also cancel the expensive Hinkley Point nuclear contract and the Heathrow third runway. Yet the moment you start re-imagining a political position from the ground up, two other truths become horribly clear.

First, there may be more important issues for the future of the nation than Brexit or otherwise, and – it seems to me at least – that people long to hear them.

Second, following along from that: what people desperately want, it seems to me again, is a government that is prepared to act on their behalf. Not to fudge or to conjure up data or to come up with symbolic gestures, but to do something effective. The lack of that – for whatever reason – over the past generation has led to the flirtation with populist phonies.

Let me put it another way. If I had the power or money to start a new political force, I would see off the intolerant newcomers by demonstrating that the era when politicians showed their own seriousness by their studied acceptance of the status quo is now over.

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Boris and the new politically-correct liberalism

This post was first published on the Radix blog...

Heaven knows, I am no supporter of Boris Johnson, but I wonder whether there may be issues – perhaps of less symbolic value – but of more importance than what he meant, or didn’t mean, about burkas.

This is not actually a post about either of them. It is about the widening gulf between what is symbolic in politics and what is genuinely important because it will affect people’s lives.

The political left has always revelled in the importance of symbol. That is because they regard themselves as outsiders.

The political right, thanks to the Thatcher government, learned from them – perhaps any powerful ideology does – and began to substitute policy gestures which symbolise action on an issue for policy that might actually make a difference. This in turn taught the Blair government some of its dark arts.

As for liberalism, it has a long history, and a ubiquitous influence, but it is not what you might call a strong ideology. It gets easily deflected as it assimilates anything which is more raucous and more trendy. It did so a century ago when the New Liberalism assimilated the Fabian ideology of centralised state action. Now it is busily assimilating the symbolic gesture, the apotheosis of gesture over real action. It has put political correctness centre stage.

Genuine liberalism certainly ought to concern itself with the rights of minorities, and women – though there are also some issues for young men that need addressing too, like their propensity to suicide.

But there is no point in doing so unless you are demanding action that will have a major effect. And liberalism at its weakest has no understanding of economics – which is why this new new liberalism is I think a Liberal ideology.

Let me be clear, before anyone puts me in the same box as Boris. It isn’t the purpose of the new new liberalism that I object to – it is their puritanical preference for gesture over action.

Yes, of course, I am not so naive that I can’t see how language shapes the world. All I would say is that economics shapes it a good deal more effectively, and I would prefer to do something that genuinely makes a difference to the lives of women and other excluded groups – and anyone else – before I get so obsessed with postmodern relativism that I forget how to act on the world.

There are three problems with this new new liberalism:

1. It over-emphasises what is offensive and under-emphasises what is effective. It prefers the divisive symbolism of removing statues to acting on the economy to make a difference.
2. It colludes in the idea that the economy is an unchangeable given, invented by God some time during the creation of the world. It sells the pass on the human creation of economics and it doesn’t need to.
3. It has no respect for history except seen through their own very modern ideology. Hence the recent call for the demolition of Nelson’s column. As if anyone is going to be better off after that.

The new new liberalism is, in short, a bastard child of neoliberalism and postmodernism, that sees no further than the horror of giving offence, at least to the designated identities one must not offend. It is a puritanical creation, shaped by a nihilistic refusal to believe in political or economic change. But that isn’t the worst of it.

It also makes the devolution of power – the central strand in genuine Liberalism – a dangerous and difficult thing to do, because it risks handing responsibility to people untrained in the language of the new elite.

That is if anyone untrained in the nuances of the new public language dares to play any role in public, for fear of offending the new puritans. That is what makes me crossest – the sheer exclusivity of the politically correct. The way it excludes women and men who have not been through the training grounds of student political playpens.

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The degradation of UK public services

A version of this blog first appeared on the New Weather blog:

Yes, it is hot. The heat has also added a layer of what I can only describe as degradation to our public services.

But before I describe it, I don't want to be pigeon-holed as someone who believes that all services should be managed by ministers, as they were before - say - the start of privatisation in 1984. I am not an advocate of re-nationalisation, because I don't believe it is a solution to the fundamental problems - which are that they are organised into units that are inhumanly and unfeasibly big and that they are far too close to Treasury control. A bit like handing services over to 37-year-old paint-by-numbers specialists (in my experience, everyone at the Treasury is 37).

The problem with privatisation was that it has failed spectacularly to inject the kind of flexibility and responsiveness into the management of our services, as it promised to. Nor - as it also promised, though less explicitly - has it been able to provide either staff or users with any kind of ownership stake.

Which brings me to my journey to Salisbury a couple of weeks ago. As regular readers will know (if there are any), I am a critic of Southern Rail, and their part of the journey to Southampton was bad enough - broken air conditioning, unexplained delays, you know the kind of thing.

But really, I have to say, that the GWR part of the journey was far worse. Again late, again no air conditioning and no adequate ventilation, but the few carriages were so packed - I think they had cancelled a previous train - that I saw five fellow passengers managed to find some space to stand rigidly upright in the toilet. they finally deposited us half an hour late, without any explanation or apology.

One poor foreign tourist asked me if this was normal. It obviously is. You can read more about what that is the case on Southern in my short book Cancelled!

It might be possible to dismiss this as the slow collapse of the railways, which is well-documented. Were it not for somebody sending me the following description of the court system by a barrister last week (thanks, Nick):



I was fascinated to read this and begin to understand from these experiences what a degrading experience it can be now to deal with some public services, because of the absolute contempt with which the establishment regards service users of any kind. Not perhaps because they are snobbish or useless - though some of them may be both - but because they are technocrats blinded by target data.

They peer myopically at the figures that show the basic numbers and feel reassured. The passengers arrived, didn't they? The case was settled, wasn't it? What is all the fuss about, they may think to themselves.

Perhaps it is all of these mixed up together among the current monopolists and nomenklatura who manage and regulate our services - a sort of disdain which has grown up around Whitehall and the

City for decades now, and a sad belief that the numbers that pour out of our services refer to something real.

All I can say by way of conclusion is that this situation is getting worse and it certainly isn't sustainable.

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