ANOTHER VOICE
Time to lobby to be left alone
CHARLES MOORE
Mrs Virginia Bottomley is not normal- ly the heroine of this paper, but I gather that it was she, almost single-handedly, who resisted a complete ban on tobacco adver- tising. She settled instead for a new, stricter code of practice among the manufacturers which, among other things, banned any advertisement with a 'humorous' element.
Mr Nicholas Scott, too, has managed a long political career without much help from The Spectator, but it was Mr Scott who made sure, as he later shamefacedly half- admitted, that a bill giving 'equal rights' to the disabled would not get through the House of Commons.
Both these ministers' semi-victories are welcome, but both are typical of how laws are made now. A pressure group decides that it wants to use the law to get more power or money or both for the interest it claims to represent, or to take power or money or both away from the interest it hates. It gets up a lobby, often supported by officials within the relevant government department. This lobby succeeds in setting the terms of the debate. It is taken as read, for example, that it would be a good thing if fewer cigarettes were sold and if every business and public building and employer provided facilities for the disabled. It is also accepted without question that laws can achieve these supposedly self-evidently desirable things. The only line of resistance left to the Government, which actually has to see through, administer and pay for the proposed changes, is that they will be too expensive. The changes would 'cost jobs', we are told, or would 'put unacceptable burdens on business'. In the case of the bill for the disabled, the figure of £17 billion is conjured up.
The Government is presumably right, in general if not in detail, about costs and jobs. But if it is its only argument, it is a weak one. If something is right to do, you are under an obligation to do it. Lack of money may prevent you from doing it all at once or in a particularly bad year for the economy, but if you use that excuse indefi- nitely people will suspect that you do not want to do it anyway, and your dishonesty will be exposed, as has happened over the disabled. You are on the defensive from the start.
There is no need to be, because there is a reason in principle why laws of this sort are suspect, even if — which is unlikely — they cost nothing. It is that the law should not be the instrument of moral dictatorship. Even if it is wrong to smoke (which one should not, in most cases, concede) and wronger still to try to persuade people to take up the habit, it does not necessarily follow that it is right for the Government to try to prevent people from doing either of these things. Indeed it necessarily follows from the Government's duty to protect citizens' freedom to pursue whatever activities it permits that it should defend the rights of smokers and tobacco manufacturers, even if ministers themselves are fearfully disapproving of them, just as it should defend the rights of fascists and com- munists to hold and publish their opinions, even though most politicians will find those opinions noxious.
In the case of the disabled, it is right, from a Christian point of view, to help crip- ples, as it is to help anyone who suffers or is weak. It is a non sequitur to say that every- one must be made to help cripples, even if it could be shown (which it cannot) that such help could easily be legislated for and would cost very little and would be effec- tive. People cannot and should not be com- pelled to have moral priorities. They must work out their own in the light of their beliefs and circumstances, and this will tend to mean, in practice, that people come up with priorities that the pressure groups dis- like. Most employers, for example, will probably feel a stronger moral obligation to their shareholders, their customers, their existing work-force, their locality than to a generalised concept of equality between black and white, male and female, the crip- pled and the able-bodied. If they did not, in fact, they would be odd, cold, unreal peo- ple, which is what equality laws try to make them.
The assumption now is that if you disap- prove of something you want it banned, and if you approve of something you want the Government to pay for it and enforce it. Anti-blood sports people often make powerful arguments about why it is wrong to kill animals for pleasure which, despite instinctively knowing they are wrong, I find hard to refute, but they spoil their case when they go on to assert that the sports should 'therefore' be abolished, as if no other considerations could apply.
Most Green policies are the same, mov- ing without hesitation from the claim that something damages the environment to the insistence that the law should forbid it. In this frame of mind, a legal change is taken to carry a moral consequence. When homo- sexual acts were legalised, for example, vir- tually no one said they were morally equal to heterosexual ones, only that the law had no business telling grown-up men what to do. Now the legislation is taken to imply moral approval, and the reformers will not rest until every vestige of difference is abol- ished. The BBC would rather take away its sweet little £75 gift tokens from all honey- moon couples than deny them only to homosexual men who have found some minister from the First Church of Christ the Moustachioed to 'marry' them. The lib- eral acceptance that something should be permitted is twisted into the belief that it must be advanced.
Politicians seem to have lost all capacity publicly to resist this tide, though they retain some skill in running away from it in particular cases and waiting until it recedes. Ministers at the Department of Health, for example, would not begin to know how to find the words to explain that people should be free to smoke. Even when they are trying to shelter the tobacco industry a little from the blast of bigotry they continue to say how bad smoking is and how there is less of it about nowadays and how volun- tary 'education' campaigns are working very well in improving anti-smoking 'aware- ness'. Their conception of their job is the problem. Instead of seeing that the Depart- ment of Health should attend to hospitals and doctors and patients as the Depart- ment of Transport should attend to roads, they think they should be making people healthier. Their own rhetoric makes them the prisoner of the lobbies, because if mak- ing people healthier is really the task, the more zeal in forcing the pace the better.
It is almost embarrassing to be putting this case because it seems so painfully obvi- ous. Anyone who claims to believe in a free society is supposed to understand and accept it. But people don't. In fact, so far as I can see, almost nobody does. If you listen to something like the Today programme, the debate will always be between the lobb- byist who wants the new ban/subsidy/posi- tive discrimination and the minister respon- sible. The minister will agree how admirable the lobbyist's aim is, but mumble about how it might be difficult to achieve. The interviewer will compete with the lob- byist in righteous indignation, and the voice that says 'Why can't you all leave us alone?' will never, ever be heard.
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