TORIES: DON'T BE SLAVES TO THE FREE MARKET

Politics has been replaced by marketing, says Andrew Gimson;

and the Tories need something much more conservative than capitalism if they are to win votes back from New Labour

AS Pope Pius XI once remarked, capital- ism and communism are united in their satanic optimism. For a Tory like myself, it is profoundly dispiriting to find the British Conservative party gripped by the same disease. The Tory tradition has been sup- planted by a liberal economic doctrine preached by young men so arrogant they do not even suspect how wrong-headed they are. This callow gang of management consultants have the folly to mistake the free market for a political philosophy. How many general elections will these satanic optimists have to lose before they are disabused of the illu- sion that they have the answer to just about everything, and it is called the market?

Twenty years ago, during the decline and fall of state social- ism, to proclaim the virtues of the market was a practical, per- haps even a necessary, form of politics. There were giants on the earth, men such as Arthur Scargill, and Margaret Thatcher slew them. But New Labour is invulnerable to such attack. It has accepted the free market to the point where it regards itself, in the words of Philip Gould, as a 'brand' which has to be saved from 'con- tamination'. Politics has been replaced in Tony Blair's circle by marketing.

It is pointless to try to beat New Labour at this game. The only person who has yet humiliated Mr Blair at the ballot-box is Ken Livingstone, and he did not do it by proclaiming the wonders of the free mar- ket. Almost alone among prominent politi- cians, he has voiced the instinctive scepticism most people feel when confront- ed by the process known as globalisation. Once a week I go to the pub to ask drinkers what they think about some issue of the hour (the results of this deliberately unscientific riposte to Mr Gould's beloved focus groups are published on Saturday in the 'Your Shout' column of the Daily Tele- graph) and it is plain that many traditional Labour voters are disgusted by the new, pro-business version of their party. But it is also evident that virtually none of these alienated Labour supporters intends to switch to the Conservatives, who are regarded, not without justice, as even more uncritical supporters of the free market.

Workers at the Nissan car factory outside Sunderland said they bitterly resented being forced to accept new shift patterns in order to cut costs by a third, so that they, rather than workers in France or Spain, will win the contract to build the new Micra. For them, the company's complaints about the high value of the pound against the euro are simply yet another way of bul- lying both its employees and the British government into making further conces- sions to Nissan. Most of the workers have families to support and debts to service: mortgages, bank loans, credit-card accounts. They are much too realistic to suppose that they can reject the company's terms, and almost certainly this is the least bad option for them. But that surely is all that the free market often amounts to: the least bad option. It does not feel particular- ly free to the majority of those who toil to keep its cogs turning, whether in the City of London or at the Nissan plant. Readers of this magazine will know many members of the middle classes who, after yielding to the temptation to contract huge financial commitments (mortgages, school fees, etc.), find themselves driven to work so hard that they end up neglecting their fam- ilies. The workers at Nissan make the same complaint: as one of them put it, if he finds himself forced under the proposed new shift arrangements to work at weekends, his wife will go 'demented' looking after the three children on her own, especially as one child is by another woman and comes to stay with them only at the weekends.

We are in danger of building a Ben- thamite hell for ourselves, and it adds insult to injury when politicians imply that it is heaven upon earth. It should be second nature to a Tory pessimist to see the limita- tions of the free market, or what passes for it (did Nissan settle here without subsidies?), yet Conservative policy-makers search restlessly for ways to extend the free market still fur- ther. I sympathise with their desire to cut the size of the state, which is still preposter- ously large, but their tactless commitment to market forces, and more generally to business methods, makes it virtually impossible to win the elec- torate's trust when seeking to reform such bodies as the National Health Service. Almost everyone is prepared to admit that the NHS needs to change, but almost no one wants it run like Nissan.

Conservatives should know without being told that a great hospital is best run neither by Whitehall nor on the same lines as a car factory; that neither the bureaucratic nor the commercial motive is sufficient to inspire Florence Nightingale. There is, oddly enough, another way between these two extremes, or rather a great variety of other ways. Charities of every hue, mutual soci- eties, insurance companies, universities, the Churches, the armed services, are among the many institutions that can and have run hospitals. Did the NHS start the hospice movement? Of course not. Central planners may feel threatened by independent institu- tions. Conservatives should delight in them as a focus for our love and loyalty.

New Labour's Haringey council in London has just announced that it will allow Group 4, the firm best known for opening Britain's first privatised prison, to bid for the contract to run all 70 schools in the borough. Here we see market methods taken to the point of self-parody. It is quite possible that Group 4, if it gets the contract, will prove more effi- cient than Haringey local education authority has been in 'delivering the school standards agenda, such as raising educational stan- dards' (to quote from the council's account of what the successful contractor will be expected to achieve). But the Conservatives ought still to be able to mock the breathtak- ing crudity of the council's approach.

It would be wrong to imply that, in its anxious quest to improve our public ser- vices, Labour always resorts to market methods. The approach is often neo-Prus- Sian, even neo-Stalinist. Directives rain down on schools, targets are set, five-year plans proliferate. Tories ought to be able to ridicule all this activity as doomed to almost certain failure in a country where dirigisme has never been much of a suc- cess, and where people do not take kindly to being told what to do by officials.

Why cannot the Conservatives do this, or not with any conviction? Not just because everyone suspects them of want- ing to commercialise everything, but also because they have no idea of what authori- ty should be, or none that distinguishes them from Labour. They are as panicky and inexperienced as Tony Blair reveals himself to be in his leaked memoranda. Young men who imagine that the free market is a way of evading the very need for authority can hardly be expected to say anything very valuable about, say, the problem of crime. William Hague can pro- pose more draconian penalties than even Jack Straw has thought of until now, but this auction for the favours of the lynch mob demeans them both. The courts and police have lost much of the public respect they until recently enjoyed, and this will be restored only when they are seen once more to embody an authority that recon- ciles order and liberty. One without the other will not do. This is not a task for technocrats or demagogues. It demands all the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour.

The Conservative party used to draw strength, and some understanding of, not just authority but other non-commercial matters such as faith, duty, public service, patriotism, self-sacrifice, good manners and honour, from both the Church of England and the armed forces. The declining signifi- cance of these two institutions has present- ed the party with a difficulty, but it need only be an insuperable difficulty for those who forget Oakeshott's remark that tradi- tion is 'pre-eminently fluid'. The passing of the officer class, almost its last remaining representatives being our somewhat isolat- ed monarch and her heir, need not mean the end of a long and always changing tra- dition of free authority. (Not subservience: rudeness and cussedness, the willingness to abuse the great, are among the essential Tory virtues. What Tory would not have cheered if any leading politician had dared, during the recent News of the World pae- dophile campaign, to say that Rupert Mur- doch is a shit?) There remain deep wells of social conservatism from which the Conser- vative party ought to be able to draw strength. If Disraeli could appeal to the innate conservatism of the working class, why can his heirs not appeal to the innate conservatism of two forces that have emerged even more recently in British poli- tics: women and immigrants?

But Disraeli's heirs find it difficult to appeal to anyone. A high proportion of them has no experience of anything that one might call normal life. The more they try to sound like ordinary people, the stranger they become to us. However democratic the market may be as an idea, its ideologues strike a sectarian note, an uneasy combination of narrow dogma and narrow self-interest. 'We used to have more independent-minded MPs because they were rich,' a shire Tory remarked to me the other day. 'There was more of a feeling of doing things for the good of the country. It was partly because of the war, but it was also because until about 1960 most of us were very hard up. There isn't so much noblesse oblige as there was. Instead it's just grab, grab, grab. I know people laugh at paternalism, but there used to be much more of a sense of responsibility for your men or your employees, and they in turn were much more loyal to you. MPs today look more self-serving than they did.'

One of the superficial advantages of free-market ideas is that they seem to accord with the enrichissez-vous mentality which many take to be the spirit of the age. But few people want to be governed by MPs who are the incarnation of this men- tality. I do not mean that the Conservative party should reject the services of men of the distinction of Peter Walker, Michael Heseltine and Jeffrey Archer, but simply that it cannot afford to be a party of inter- est only to swashbuckling entrepreneurs. Nor are most people prepared to endorse the implied view of many free marketeers that the devil should take the hindmost. Unfortunately it is the Labour party that today seeks to express, however inade- quately, the idea of social cohesion (or `inclusiveness' as they call it) that once meant so much to the Conservatives.

Mr Hague and his friends may point out in their defence that by opposing the encroachments of the European Union they have taken a stand which owes noth- ing much to the free market. This is true. They defend our right to remain a self-gov- erning nation. Good for them. But this raises the question: what sort of nation? Who will set the tone? Shall we allow our football hooligans to become the custodi- ans of our patriotism, or are we resolved to develop (or conserve) a political tradition of slightly greater subtlety and depth?

This is by no means an abstract ques- tion. On the answer depends the Conser- vative party's ability to attract decent people of a conservative disposition who are not rich, have no aspiration to become rich and will never vote for a party they consider to be hard-faced or yobbish. A substantial number of these people voted at the last general election for New Labour. Next time, some of them will express their disappointment with Mr Blair by not bothering to vote at all, but a surprising number are likely to back the Liberal Democrats. My researches in the saloon bar lave not yet elucidated exactly why this should be so, but what are the Conservatives doing to prevent it? Or, to put it another way, why the devil did they lose the recent Romsey by-election to the Liberal Democrats?

Intelligent Conservative MPs, of whom there are several, have realised for years that the market is not enough and that they need some other cause such as the defence of civilisation. But few if any have realised that they cannot just bolt various other policies on to the free market in a utilitarian spirit and eventually assemble a winning coalition. Unless Labour is so incompetent as to destroy itself, utilitarianism will not be enough. We do not want short cuts to happi- ness peddled by sophists, economists and calculators. Nor do we want Mr Hague, energetic young fellow that he is, running as hard as he can go in pursuit of the mob. He got the leadership too young. Perhaps he will come good, but if he does so it will not be by overexerting himself.

`What's your buzzword?' a gifted young Conservative candidate asked me after lis- tening with touching respect to the argu- ments I have tried to make here. How one yearns to extend a helping hand to the young, but I am afraid I declined into silence. I have no buzzword. I should like the party to be more gloomy, and I would urge Mr Hague to become at least as fat as Ken Clarke.

Andrew Gimson is foreign editor of The Spectator.