Be not afraid!

Charles Moore says that we live in an age of anxiety, in which politicians — notably Tories — are too frightened to choose freedom It is only natural that those with a political career constantly ask themselves the question, ‘How can we win the next election?’ I don’t blame politicians for doing so, but I must start by pointing out that it is a question of less than no interest to people who are not politicians. To air it in public is to display self-obsession and insensitivity. It is as if a doctor were to say to his patients, ‘How can I be made a consultant?’ rather than, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ But when asking the British people, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ all modern politicians, and particularly Conservative ones, suffer from a grave disability. Unlike with doctors, most of the people politicians talk to doubt their ability to diagnose, let alone to cure. Sometimes they doubt their right even to ask the question in the first place. Politicians are thought of as quacks, or at least as people whose skills are irrelevant to current needs.

The trouble with modern Britain is less easy to diagnose in a political sense than it was in the 1970s. The problem at that time was a crisis — much more of a crisis than that which the country faces today — but it was one well within the known sphere of politics. The question was whether the state could run the economy. The answer, of course, was ‘no’, although a naturally fearful public needed some persuading to reverse a process which had been in full swing since 1940. The Winter of Discontent finally did the persuading, and Margaret Thatcher knew what to do next.

There is no exact equivalent today. The British state is probably not embarked on a course which will lead to certain breakdown. True, the weakening of the United Kingdom and its constitutional arrangements is dangerous. True, everything, not least our public services, is overcentralised. True, the project of European integration threatens our independence. True, the economic situation is getting worse. There are many ills. But we are a prosperous and semi-free society, a bit better off than our neighbours, well placed in the markets of the world. Tony Blair would never have understood how to bring about the eco nomic freedom which we enjoy today if he had come to power in 1979, but, having seen the transformation, he has been clever enough not to throw it all away.

And yet there is something unhappy about living in Britain today. I might express it by asking the question, ‘If everything is really so good, why does everything feel so bad?’ On the whole, we are not short of money, but we are short of trust, hope, liberty, security and affection for our fellow citizens. To crawl back to the medical metaphor again, we are not suffering from life-threatening cancer, but from rather non-specific ailments and neuroses, from migraines, allergies and depressions.

The things which you thought of as real achievements seem to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. You struggle to buy a house, and its value rises gratifyingly, but the pension you hoped to build up to enable you to enjoy it turns out to be worth very little, and the youths shouting and chucking beer cans around in the street outside make it a much less pleasant place to live than you expected. Your child has got lots of A grades at GCSE and you feel very proud, but then it turns out that these successes don’t tell admissions tutors what they need to know to select her for a good university.

Or again, suppose you are in your early twenties and have just graduated, the first from your family ever to do so, but it turns out that no employer thinks your degree is worth much. Or you are in your forties, and can easily afford to take a decent foreign holiday, but when you come back from it you find that your elderly parent has fallen downstairs and been negligently treated in hospital. You have unprecedented access to information on the internet, and yet unprecedentedly debased mass media. Your city is designated European City of Culture and spends money on arts centres and concert halls, but in the schools there are no music teachers, and a quarter of the pupils have difficulty reading and writing. It is a society in which expectations are pitched very high — and then, all too often, disappointed.

Much of this unease reaches into areas which go far beyond politics. There are questions of psychology, spirituality, morality. The late Pope John Paul II learnt from his experience of Poland under Nazi and then Communist rule to give primacy to the culture — the capacity of a people to derive their deepest resources from shared understandings, customs and beliefs which totalitarianism had failed to destroy. In the Western world, so much less oppressively governed than the East under communism, that culture is alarmingly weak. John Paul’s most famous message was ‘Be not afraid!’ It was, of course, explicitly Christian, but it was also a message about the place and dignity of each human person in society. It is much harder for a political leader to have the necessary authority to give such a message, but I nevertheless believe that it should be the underlying political message of liberal conservatism. I shall argue that there is much too much fear in Britain today, and that politics can do something, though by no means everything, to help people lift that fear from their lives.

The first problem is a lack of liberty. This is expressed in the authoritarianism which this government often displays. It is wrong, for example, to undermine trial by jury, in all but the most exceptional cases, because the jury system links justice with citizenship as only a free society can. It is wrong, except in dire emergency, to put British citizens under house arrest when they have not been convicted of anything. The Conservative party took a false turn when it came out in favour of the government’s plan for identity cards last year. By doing so, it symbolically abandoned a justified suspicion of the state knowing too much about us, and aligned itself with one of the most untrue mantras of modern times: ‘The innocent have nothing to fear.’ The innocent in this country probably feel more fear than anyone else.

The lack of liberty is also expressed in the lack of choice about many of the things which are most important in our lives. We all know that when we want food, without which we cannot live, we can choose quite easily between rival shops — Tesco, Sainsbury’s, the basic corner shop or the more fancy delicatessen. Yet when we want medical care, equally important for life, we can make no such choice unless we are rich. We would not dream of agreeing to live under a government-run National Food Service, and yet we are surprised when the same thing in health doesn’t work very well. We got rid of food ration books in the early 1950s, but we submit to the same crazy principle in health more than half a century later. We are afraid, with justification, that we cannot get the medical care that we want at the time we want it for ourselves and the people we care most about, and this fear is one of the worst aspects of nationalised medicine. Yet we also fear the leap into the unknown of healthcare which is not arranged by the state. We fail to note that aspects of healthcare have passed very happily out of government control — who now, for example, would bring back the opticians’ monopoly which existed until the 1980s? We are too frightened to think.

With schools, we live under a system which compels us by law to educate our children, constantly states the overriding importance of education, and yet gives us very little practical opportunity to go where standards are high or to remove our custom where standards are low. Why do we accept a society in which you have to earn about three times the average wage before you are able to make a genuine choice of school for your child by paying with your own money? Is it really impossible to find a way of spreading that choice to the great majority? Recently there was justified excitement about Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve school meals, but what was so depressing about the debate was that everyone who took part in it seemed to believe that only government could produce the answer — by spending more, by imposing higher nutritional standards, etc. Couldn’t anyone see that if parents could choose schools, and schools could control their own affairs, between them they could choose better menus?

It is fashionable but it is right for Conservatives to say that they must show their support for the public services. But this should not mean endorsing the way schools and hospitals are being run. It means getting on the side of the people who try to use them. Anyone who truly does that will see how vastly they need to change. I believe that the National Health Service in its present form cannot and should not exist in 20 years’ time. No political party dares say this, but whichever is the first to devise a way of taking government out of the management of health while guaranteeing the protection of the poor will do a huge favour to our country, and reap a great political reward.

Like our centrally controlled public services, our tax system sucks power away from us. Not only is tax far too high, it is far too little related to the places from which it is collected. The British tax system is like the British railway network — if you want to go anywhere, you find you have to pass through London en route.

Look at any local paper in Britain and you will see news of endless campaigns to ‘save’ something — save our water meadows, save our hospital, save our school or, alternatively, to ‘stop’ something — stop the bypass, stop the windfarm, stop the incinerator. In almost all of these the key player, either directly through the power of decision, or indirectly through the supply of money, is central government. Even someone who sounds local, such as the chief constable, ultimately gets his cash and his promotion from Whitehall, so it is to Whitehall’s demands that he bows. If local decisions became genuinely local, their difficulty would not disappear, but the people making them would have to become truly responsible and the communities affected would have a much greater voice. And now this particularly British problem is being replicated and complicated on a Continental scale. Often it turns out that what we thought was a Westminster diktat is actually a Brussels one, or, even more confusingly, Brussels and Westminster blame each other for the unreasonable regulation and we find that we have to obey it all the same. The one merit of overcentralisation is that it is clear where the order comes from. With ever greater European integration, even that advantage trickles away.

The lack of liberty I am talking about here is not so much that of the individual, but of a whole town, county or community. It has a tremendously depressive effect on initiative and pride, and it makes it much harder for society to come up with interesting innovations in social policy. Whenever I go to the United States I am always impressed by the fact that someone, somewhere, is addressing such problems in an original way. Whether it is electronic tagging, building prisons, school vouchers, childcare, ‘broken windows’ policing, planning rules, recycling, drug rehabilitation, if most states are getting it wrong, one or two, somewhere or other, will probably be getting it right. Here in Britain we find our local development arrested because of central control. Is it any wonder that, in relation to central government, we become like bolshy teenagers, complaining incessantly, demanding more, but never able to exercise real responsibility? I wish that Conservatives over here, whatever they think of George W. Bush’s particular policies, would pay close and humble attention to Republican electoral success. Republican culture derives its intellectual vigour and its strong communal roots from this endless local innovation. I hate to say it, but almost the only important recent British example of a successful localist experiment according to the good conservative principle of paying directly for what you use is Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge.

So far, I have discussed themes of freedom of choice which, though often problematic in practice, should be common ground among conservative-minded people. But what distresses me about so much political debate in this country at present, and about many doorstep reactions, is that there is a real fear of freedom. This has been observed by some thoughtful Conservatives, and it is leading them to the false conclusion that the cause of freedom must be abandoned.

It is noticeable that the fear of freedom is more marked the fewer your advantages in life. If you are old or poor or ill, you tend to regard freedom as a menace. What you crave — and feel you lack — is security and respect. In such circumstances, freedom is increasingly regarded as the right of nasty people to get away with their nastiness, frequently at the public expense. Freedom gets lumped into the now much disliked language of ‘human rights’ in which, say, someone who threatens thugs with a gun goes to prison and the thugs go unpunished; or a failed asylumseeker is allowed to remain in this country; or a pregnant single teenager jumps the housing queue. It is widely believed that the police have little sanction against children who commit crimes. As the embittered law-abiding population sees it, those children in their hoods and baseball hats, with their foul mouths, drugs, graffiti, shoplifting and violence, have freedom, and the public would support almost anything which took that freedom away Those who are better educated and better off, in good health and good housing, with their children in good schools and safe streets, should beware of ignoring the cries of those who are less lucky. Liberal generous-mindedness must extend to those who find generosity harder to afford. Because in the end our project for the restoration of liberty in our country will always fail if it is constructed top-down as a paradise for libertarians and human rights lawyers. There will always be a fear of freedom in this country until we have freedom from fear.

The great public complaint is that the structure of our society and politics does not reward the good and punish the bad. It is that, in the public space, which is so very much more important to those who can afford very little private space, decent cul tural values are not upheld. When people say that they are frightened to go outside at night or that they will not go to the front door when their bell rings, they are not commenting on mere inconveniences but on profound affronts to their understanding of what citizenship means. When they complain that unruly pupils in schools claim ‘rights’ which mean they cannot be effectively punished and therefore have the power to ruin classes for everyone else, they are protesting not solely at the educational damage done but at a wrong order of things, an immoral failure to ensure that the good may prevail. In most cases, the existence of graffiti in your street will not do practical harm, but in all cases it will degrade your sense of pride and safety in that street. When people protest that illegal immigrants are getting benefit, or that the deliberately unemployed are getting better housing than those who work hard to earn it, or that old people who have saved for their retirement get a worse deal from the state than those who have not, they mind not so much the money wasted as the bad values displayed. When people sense that anti-British Islamist extremists are being privileged in the name of diversity, rather than encouraged to be full British citizens, they feel that their own culture is disrespected.

New Labour, of course, is aware of all these anxieties, and people like David Blunkett express them constantly. Tony Blair grabbed them immediately after the election to set the tone for his third term. Respect should not go the way of deference, he says. But apart from lending his rhetorical support to Bluewater Shopping Centre in its order to youths to remove baseball caps and hoodies, and giving parents the disappointing news that he can’t bring up their children for them, the Prime Minister’s response is, as always, statist. He wants a law to clamp down still further on knives and replica guns, and he wants to bring back his identity cards Bill.

This tendency has been visible in every major New Labour initiative in the social field — everything depends on a new law, a new command, a new power which come down from the top. Make more laws, they say, and, at the same time, sweep away the careful parliamentary processes by which those laws are drafted, scrutinised and amended. If there’s an environmental ill, compel people to put it right rather than find economic incentives for them to do so. Even thought itself — witness the fashion for more and more hate-crime legislation — is to be subject to government control.

Conservatives have been astonishingly weak on this ground. Sometimes they bellow for more laws themselves, sometimes they take against a particularly outrageous New Labour diktat and declare that it ‘won’t work’, but they have not developed a consistent approach. They have not seen that the breakdown of social disciplines and manners is often the result of politics and law advancing into family and community life. That is what is meant by welfare dependency — the most vulnerable become addicted to the state, and therefore demoralised. And so it can only be made worse by yet more of the same. Having failed to nationalise industry, governments now try to nationalise people. Freedom, seen in a conservative way, does not mean the chance to put your own pleasure first — fun though that obviously is. It means the opportunity to own the life you lead, to have the dignity of making your own decisions, both individually and in community, and being ready to live with their consequences. That is what Conservatives need to explain and apply if the paralysing fear of freedom is to vanish.

So if, for example, your neighbourhood is being rendered miserable by crime, you need to be free to address it by making police forces answerable, perhaps with an element of direct election, to you, not to Tony Blair. And if the teenagers committing that crime are coming uneducated out of the local school, local parents need to be free to close that school down by choosing a better one, or improving it by the threat to do so. And if some pupils in that school continue to cause trouble for everyone else, the teachers should be empowered by the confidence of parental support and the backing of law to punish and exclude them.

Some of these messages about freedom are rather stern: they require effort and energy and firmness. But in essence they are optimistic: they depend upon the belief that if only more people could have more control over their own lives and the communities in which they live, they will, broadly speaking, be happier, kinder and more fulfilled. Their opportunities will grow; so will their security, so will their pride. The task of the lovers of freedom is to cast off fear. It feels terrible, they tell me, when you are sitting in an aeroplane waiting with your parachute; but it feels wonderful when you have jumped.