Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics. Philip Collins
The economic might that was once imperial has been translated into political and diplomatic power. Britain has always been an active participant in world affairs, on rare occasions alone but more usually as a signatory to and presence in international alliances. Through the economic institutions of the Bretton Woods settlement (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), NATO, the Security Council of the United Nations and, until recently, the EU, Britain has sat at the top table when the decisions that shaped the post-war world were made. The fear is that this era is coming to a close.
The combination of a more isolationist America and Britain’s departure from the EU might conceivably be a disastrous one for a small island just off the European mainland. Already the pressure for the structure of international government to be a better reflection of the shift of economic power to India and China is raising the question of whether Britain’s status might be an anomaly. The standard retort has been that Britain translates into European for the Americans and mediates with America for the Europeans. Both sides of that formula are now in jeopardy and Britain is left to contemplate a more modest future. There is, of course, a case for modesty. Britain could decide to retreat to the second rank of nations, attendant princes to the main events. The appetite for British involvement in the troubling problems of the world has receded since the intervention in Iraq. Quietude, masquerading as realpolitik, is a tempting option.
It is a temptation that should be resisted. It is part of remaining open to the world that Britain should in no way retreat. Today’s worldwide threats to democracy are severe enough without one of the established democracies voluntarily ceding a position of authority. The case needs to be made to the British people for why it benefits them, as part of a world of pervasive connections, if Britain acts as a moral force for good in world affairs. Of the many things that make Britain the fine nation it is, that concern about the world beyond its own borders is something that we should take pride in.
The Poverty of Philosophy
These ten questions define the condition of Britain today and by the very fact of their having to be asked they arraign the political class for having no viable answers. Though most of the British public do not follow politics in all its intricate detail, the inadequacy of the answers offered has clearly got through. The 2017 general election was a contest that nobody deserved to win, which is why nobody did win. Mrs May asked for a large majority and was rebuffed. Mr Corbyn sought a victory and was denied. It was a stalemate and it holds a lesson that goes beyond a single general election. The old political parties are moribund, perhaps even defunct. The solid social collectives that gave them life have fragmented and dispersed. The axis of politics has tilted; where once parties had firm class foundations, now they do not speak for coherent blocs. Political allegiance is more fluid and volatile but, trapped in their old structures and tribal modes of thought, the main political traditions do not know how to match the times. Silent on the future, the Conservative party and the Labour party are staging a contest to see which of them can most efficiently turn back the clock. The Conservative party is lost in thrall to a fantasy of the utopia before 1973, the mythic year in which Britain lost its identity in the alien embrace of the European project. The Labour party has returned to 1983’s attempt to recreate 1974. Beneath these attempts to turn back time lies philosophical poverty. The poor leadership of the two main parties is not a cause of their troubles; it is a consequence, because neither old-time Conservatism nor revivalist Socialism have any answers to the condition of Britain questions.
The political Conservative is hampered by a characteristic lack of ambition. When dramatic change is required, as it is now, it is not wise to look their way in search of it. Indeed, it is not always obvious that a Conservative wants anything much from office beyond the holding of it. Excessive risk-aversion is coupled, in a conservative cast of mind, with a complacent acceptance of the status quo. This amounts, at its worst, to a colossal failure of imagination, the inability to conceive of the world beyond a narrow horizon. Austerity’s justification was drily economic; its damage was sadly human. The Conservative understands the fiscal discipline but is less able to widen the enchanted circle to include those affected. The very existence of the doctrine of ‘compassionate’ Conservatism draws our attention to the fact that compassion is not intrinsic to the creed. It is not true that the Conservative does not care. It is sometimes true that the Conservative does not care enough. Instead, the contemporary Conservative has cared excessively about an idea of the nation which bears no relation to the reality of modern sovereignty.
The Labour paradox is that it is a party that talks about a radical future but which is captured by its own past. Labour won its place in British politics after the First World War and its place in British history after the Second. War is a crucible in which endeavour is collective and sacrifices shared. Harold Wilson recorded in his diary that Labour lost the 1951 general election at least in part because the people sniffed that they actually liked rationing. Curtailing consumption was the short road to equality. In The Future of Socialism Tony Crosland upbraided his party for its joylessness, its hair-shirt tendency. There is a finger-wagging bossiness to Labour politics which knows what is good for you. It is no coincidence that it was Douglas Jay, a Labour economist and politician, who declared that, in matters of food, the man in Whitehall really does know best.
The left is prone to the hunting down of heresies and to doctrinal fighting because it is a textual religion. There is no pantheon of traitors on the political right to match the persistent Labour myth of treachery. Ramsay Macdonald was the first of the type, of which Tony Blair is the most recent, especially in his adventures in foreign policy which have enticed the left into a comfortable fool’s position in which all conflict is ultimately traceable to the guilty west. This is the stance of a pressure group rather than a political party which is a serious candidate for office. The Labour party is always more comfortable within its own vintage history than it is in adapting to events. A decade after the 2008 financial crash, Labour still cannot describe how it is possible to conduct social democracy at low cost. Instead, it simply wishes extra money into being for the pleasure of spending it badly.
The modern Tory and the contemporary socialist are both species of conservative and neither can help the nation with its current predicament. Britain faces a battery of pressing questions and the frustrating thing is that answers are at hand. The archive of British political history contains ideas about work, desert, contribution and enterprise that, in modern forms, can guide us through the thicket. Unfortunately neither of the two main parties is drawing on this heritage. Philosophically bereft, they have nothing to say. It is a rare event when both parties turn to face their own dead past at once. The barometer of British politics usually ensures that at least one of the two is able to keep its cool. That is not so today. The chapters that follow point the way to a new destination that we might reach if we summoned the courage to start again.
2
The Fiscal Philosophers
Limehouse in the old London docks is one of the crucibles of British political life. It was there that, on 30 July 1909, David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressed 4,000 people at the Edinburgh Castle, the former music hall and gin palace that Thomas Barnardo had turned into a coffee house and People’s Mission. Lloyd George electrified the crowd with a furious defence of his ‘People’s Budget’, which had introduced taxation on wealth on the grounds that income earned was superior to income unearned. Earned income included wages, salaries and tips. Unearned income in this context referred to capital gains, interest income, passive income generated from rental real estate, stock dividends, and bond interest.
The 1909 budget increased income tax from 1 shilling to 2 shillings in the pound and introduced a ‘super-tax’ by which anyone who earned over £5,000 a year paid 6d for every pound that their income exceeded £3,000. It also proposed unprecedented taxes on the lands and the unearned incomes of the wealthy. Lloyd George’s express intention was to wage a war on squalor and wretched poverty to make it ‘as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests’. The most controversial measure