Politicians with the integrity to openly declare their stance on the biggest political issue of our generation should be the rule, not the exception
Like most people in Britain, Iain Martin has had enough of equivocating politicians – specifically Conservative cabinet ministers – refusing to take a public position on Britain’s EU membership, and maintaining the fiction that David Cameron’s cosmetic “renegotiation” can have any possible impact on their decision.
Martin goes so far as to call Conservative ministers “a bunch of careerist scaredy cats”, writing in CapX:
Britain’s looming vote on the EU is not – or should not be – politics as normal. It is a historic moment, in which the UK will decide to take one of two quite different paths. Party management and careers matter, of course, but sometimes there are choices that should be about something more than the mere game of politics. The EU referendum is one such event.
This is absolutely correct. Whatever one’s views on the European Union and Brexit, surely all of us can agree that this debate is infinitely more important than the minor tweaks to education, healthcare and fiscal policy which separate the various political parties.
Having established the importance of the coming referendum, Iain Martin issues the following challenge:
Ministers, it is make your mind up time. Although David Cameron’s renegotiation with the EU for new membership terms could have been the real deal, it is clear that it will deliver very little. It is In or Out, probably as soon as this summer. For that reason, ministers need to do something that is highly unfashionable and considered downright deranged in the British Establishment: decide what you believe – enthusiastically for In, reluctantly for In, or Out because you think it is best for your country – and get ready to fight for it at public meetings across the land. Don’t be scared. You are grown men and women. You might even be surprised how much voters like politicians saying what they believe rather than what is convenient for their careers.
This argument is – I know – a stretch, considering how careerist politics has become. But for anyone playing a leading role in the affairs of a nation to base such a vital decision purely on career progression or fear of friends is not only wrong, it’s pathetic. And in ten years time, none of it, all the hedging and game-playing, will matter a jot. By then David Cameron will be having a snooze after lunch in rural Oxfordshire. Osborne will be running the World Bank or a hedge fund. The decision on the EU, on the other hand, now that will have mattered a lot.
In our current political climate, where the Conservative Party runs away from small government principles in pursuit of the centre ground and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is criticised for actually being left-wing, it is clear that the vast majority of politicians prefer the former to the latter.
Power is pursued for its own sake, even if it means the centrist coalition of supporters cobbled together to deliver victory make it impossible to do anything remotely radical, transformational or different once in office. Thus, despite the overwrought rhetoric from both sides, neither Labour nor the Conservatives propose a single policy which would move Britain away from its current centrist landscape.
Politicians who came of age in this age of the Tyranny of Centrism find it inordinately difficult to express a strong, sincerely held political opinion because all of their training and professional experience teaches them that pragmatic caution and a reflexive fear of fixed beliefs are the surest route to success.
Whether it’s the NHS, tax reform, constitutional reform or Britain’s relationship with Europe, MPs are strongly predisposed to fiddling around the edges themselves, while accusing others of partisan recklessness. Thus change is only ever incremental, and nearly always in the direction of More Government – the path of least resistance for any elected official.
Unfortunately, too many within the public and the media are willing to excuse this state of affairs, urging us to put ourselves in the politicians’ shoes rather than demanding sincerity and principle from our elected officials. It is therefore particularly pleasing to see Iain Martin losing patience with the status quo and demanding that those who seek to run the country actually declare the direction in which they would lead us.
The Tyranny of Centrism can only continue so long as we tolerate and enable it by rewarding glib superficiality and punishing strong displays of principle from our politicians. And on an issue as important as Britain’s future relationship with the EU, this is no time for fence-sitters, careerists or cowards.
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David Cameron’s rootless Conservative government is casting around, finding ever more ways to shoehorn the state into our lives
Buried in all the talk of Brexit and Bowie this week has been the Prime Minister’s announcement that he intends to force every British parent to take state-run classes in parenting – if not on pain of criminal penalty then at least at the sharp end of some pointed fiscal incentives.
All parents should enrol in state-backed parenting classes to learn how to raise their children properly, David Cameron will say as he announces a new plan to stop families breaking up.
[..] He will use a major speech on Monday to set out proposals for a new voucher system to incentivise parents to attend the classes in an attempt to make parenting advice socially “normal” and even “aspirational”.
The Prime Minister’s plan comes as he announces a £70 million investment in relationship counselling to prevent hundreds of thousands of families splitting up over the next five years.
Mr Cameron’s speech marks the latest step in delivering on the Conservatives’ key election promise to help families at every stage of life.
One does not have to deny that family breakdown and – how to put it – “unaspirational” parenting have real, negative consequences in our society to balk at the notion of government run classes enforcing the childrearing fads of the day on first time parents.
And Cameron is not even targeting potentially troubled familes – that would be far too judgemental. No, these classes will be “made available” to all, because children “don’t come with a manual” and apparently what has worked for parents for thousands of years is suddenly insufficient to the task of raising a child in twenty-first century Britain.
As parents well know, it is one thing to seek out genuine expertise and help when a child has specific problems (for example, parents of a sick or disabled child will do everything they can to get help from doctors and find all the advice possible to make their child’s life better). But it is quite another to imagine that parents want to be taught the supposedly general skill of parenting. Rather, being a parent means taking on the responsibility for trying, experimenting, failing and learning from experience over and over again. And parents find that the best people to support them in their childraising are those in their family and local community.
… [This] episode shows how a belief in parental determinism, justified through neuro-nonsense, generates a policy programme based on the idea that raising children is just too important and difficult to be left to mere parents, their families and their communities. Those who hold an a priori belief in the need for parenting education simply cannot accept that parents may neither need nor want expert advice. The only conclusion they draw is that more must be done to find ways to train parents, and to increase parents’ ‘demand’ for their own training. Furthermore, they openly support the idea that taking babies away from their mothers is a way to ‘alter destinies’ and ‘improve life chances’.
Policymakers and a parasitical layer of third-sector organisations, whose claim to expertise and professional status lies in knowing how to improve others’ ‘relationships’, are telling us nothing about parents and the family. And it’s not just parents who lose through the relentless politicisation of parenting, and, by association, the private sphere; it’s all of us.
How long, one wonders, until David Cameron seizes upon that totalitarian idea from north of the border, and seeks to introduce a Scottish-style Named Person scheme in England and Wales, whereby a specified adult named by the government is placed in a position of co-responsibility, together with the parents, for the welfare of every newborn child?
Don’t think he wouldn’t do it. If we have learned nothing else about David Cameron since he came to power in 2010, we know that there is no conservative, small government principle which he is not happy to cast into the woodchipper if it helps him to dominate the political centre ground and atone for the supposed reputational sins of Thatcherism.
Never mind that the Named Person scheme was cooked up by Nicola Sturgeon’s swivel-eyed SNP government in Scotland, and is the complete antithesis to how a restrained state should behave. That won’t stop David Cameron if he spies an opportunity to undermine the nationalists, steal a march on the Labour Party and gain short-term tactical political advantage.
But that doesn’t make it good policy, good politics or the right thing for any party calling itself “conservative” to be doing. Who within the Conservative Party – James Cleverley, Chris Philp, Lucy Allan, David Nuttall? – will stand against this creeping tide of paternalism, one which is otherwise likely to be implemented unopposed given that both sides of the warring Labour Party would probably also approve?
Mandatory parenting classes as part of your masterplan for every stage of our lives?
Dear God, man, stop talking. You sound more socialist than Jeremy Corbyn.
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The hysterical left will always call conservatives “Tory scum” and hate us with a blind, unthinking rage. It’s time to stop cowering at their attacks and apologising for our values
As 2015 draws to an end, we still have four and a half more years of David Cameron’s wishy-washy, ideologically rootless, Conservative In Name Only government to look forward to, followed by a general election which will almost certainly deliver another five years of blandness.
For small government conservatives and libertarians, this continual betrayal of principle is bad enough. But as an added insult, it also means four more years of being spat on and called “Tory scum” by demented far-left types who view David Cameron and George Osborne’s half-hearted attempts to pare back the state as the modern-day equivalent of Nazi war crimes, and who have no reservations in publicly saying so. Not very appealing.
That’s why the time has come for conservatives of all stripes to finally seize back the word “Tory” from the haters and reclaim it with pride, rather than meekly and apologetically crawling around and apologising for our values – values which saved this country from decline and irrelevance three decades ago, and can do so again if only we fully unleash them.
In his article, entitled “Why I’ve Become Tory Scum”, Tony Parsons calls out the Labour Party and other forces on the Left for the sanctimonious nature of their campaigning during the general election, and their utter inability to empathise with their opponents – or even entertain the thought that those who oppose them might be doing so from a position of legitimate, morally valid disagreement.
Parsons points out:
The general election was decided not by shy Tories but by us reluctant Conservatives. The millions like me who saw nothing but catastrophe in Labour’s addiction to high taxes and big spending, their loathing of success, the way they could use a word like “mansion” with a straight face and, above all, that endless pious prattle about the NHS – as though the British have no other identity but as a sickly, enfeebled, diseased people in need of having our bottoms wiped by the state from dawn till dusk.
But the truth is that David Cameron’s government is very much an unremarkable continuation of New Labour. Far from being a son of Thatcher, Cameron and his leadership team are very much the heirs to Blair, and would bear comparison with many centre-left governments around the world. The Conservative Party, even under Thatcher, has in many respects always been to the left of even the Democratic Party in the United States, and certainly is so now.
Of course, you would not think that the Conservatives were in any way moderate, judging by the hysteria among many vocal parts of the Left, who present David Cameron’s steady-as-she-goes paternalism and tentative deficit reduction as some kind of outrageous economic shock treatment combined with “human rights” abuses worthy of the Nazis.
Tony Parsons ponders why this is so:
Why are those of us who believe in a different economic model – one where aspiration is encouraged, where the state gets out of your way and doesn’t spend money it doesn’t have – morally reprehensible? Exactly why are we scum? History suggests that, when presented with the chance to vote for socialism the British people always run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It doesn’t make us bad people. But the left have lost the argument and are reduced to shrieking abuse.
But then the hysterical far left have always talked about conservatives thus, and they always will. Parsons recognises this as he writes:
The loud left are as pertinent to modern Britain as blacksmiths. No wonder their protests are increasingly ugly. They react with furious disbelief at the result of a democratic election. They rave about balancing the nation’s books as if it was like drowning kittens in a sack. They scream in our faces about their own compassion while bandying around epithets like “scum” and “filth” with the vicious abandon of Nazis talking about Jews.
Since the abuse will never end, clearly there is nothing to be gained from running from it any longer. Nor is there anything to be gained by continually apologising for core conservative principles – free individuals and strong families, fiscal conservatism and a prohibitive national defence – as the current Conservative leadership sadly continues to do.
What British conservatism and libertarianism really need is their own version of Jeremy Corbyn – someone who unapologetically sticks to their principles, refusing to water them down for political expediency, and who seeks to lead and persuade rather than conform to the results of the latest opinion poll or focus group.
Or to use a West Wing analogy, British conservatism needs a Matthew Santos-like figure, someone willing to proudly wear the “Tory” label just like Santos refused to apologise for being a liberal in the famous presidential debate episode:
Speaking up for American liberalism in a way that one can only wish David Cameron or George Osborne would do for small government conservatism, Santos says to his Republican opponent:
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created social security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every single one of those things. Every one.
So when you try to hurl that label at my feet – liberal – as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator. Because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honour.
Of course it is almost unimaginable for a conservative to ever talk this way, with such passion, partly because we tend not to make such grand claims for ourselves in reshaping the world or forcibly changing human nature in pursuance of our goals. It is not in our nature to brag about our accomplishments, because the biggest accomplishment a conservative can aim for in government is to get out of the way and help remove obstacles from others so that they might reach their full potential.
But more than this, British conservatives since Margaret Thatcher have had precious little to brag about. Locked out of office under thirteen years of New Labour, the Conservative Party which emerged under David Cameron has made so many compromises with triangulating, Blairite centrism that there are almost no genuinely conservative policy victories or changes in the country which we can claim.
What are we supposed to brag about? Remember when the Tories stood up to the growing climate of intolerance toward freedom of expression, and formally codified a British citizen’s right to free speech? We can’t say that because it didn’t happen. Indeed, under Theresa May Britain is becoming an even more authoritarian police state than it was before, with human beings languishing in our prisons simply for saying, singing, or tweeting the “wrong” thing.
Remember when George Osborne struck a blow for fiscal conservatism, rallied the country with his argument that it was morally obscene for government to spend more on debt repayments than education or the military, and achieved a real budget surplus in order to finally begin paying down the national debt? We can’t say that either, because although Osborne is happy for the public and lazy journalists to believe that the Tories are “paying down Britain’s debts”, in reality the government is doing no such thing.
Conservative supporters truly have the worst of both worlds at present. We are attacked by the furious Left for an ideologically-motivated attack on the state and its poorest dependants, while in reality almost zero real conservative reform is being enacted. We are stuck with the leftist abuse, but have absolutely nothing positive to show for it.
If David Cameron’s Conservative Party was voted out of office today, what will future historians and political commentators say about this government fifty years from now? What will be the Cameron / Osborne legacy? What edifices of stone, statute and policy will remain standing as testament to their time in office? Try to picture it clearly.
Are you happy with what you see?
No real conservative should be happy with what they see right now. Assuming that the political pendulum will at some point swing back in favour of the Labour Party, we conservatives have almost nothing to show after five years of David Cameron other than a half-finished job clearing the budget deficit. We have a reanimated Ted Heath sitting in Downing Street, not a worthy heir to Margaret Thatcher.
But just as the American Tea Party lay conspicuously dormant for the many years of fiscal profligacy and budget-busting spending under the George W. Bush administration only to miraculously awaken when a man named Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, so the hysterical British Left are now shrieking bloody murder over a set of very pedestrian, middle-of-the-road centrist policies being enacted by the Conservative Party after having airily ignored the very same governing philosophy when the now-hated Blairites were in charge.
As conservatives, we realise there is no point in launching a futile battle against human nature or the instinct of many on the Left to demonise that which they do not or cannot understand. They will continue to call us “Tory Scum” and we have no control over that.
But we do have the power to take back ownership of the label “Tory” and refuse to see it as an insult.
We do have the power to point out that there is nothing virtuous or compassionate about throwing more money at unreformed healthcare and welfare systems, or spreading the wealth around so much that wealth creation is destroyed or driven overseas.
We do have the power to proclaim the importance of fiscal conservatism, not out of some wonkish obsession with balancing the books but because running up further government debt today is a blatant act of intergenerational theft, living at the expense of our children and grandchildren. And because as we have seen with other countries, excessive national debt can become a foreign policy and national security issue too.
We do have the power to point out to anyone who will listen that the modern Left love to parade their virtue and ideological purity but have apparently given up on coming up with alternative policies of their own, and to demand that Labour produce some costed tax and spending plans rather than simply railing against the inhumanity of the Evil Tories.
We do have the power to point out the many ways in which David Cameron’s pitiful excuse for a Conservative government ignores or betrays real conservative values, and to declare “not in my name”.
The Left are not going to change, so we had better get used to the spitting, the vandalism, and the overwrought, emotional and short-termist way in which they discuss public policy.
But we can change. We can stop lying down and taking it every time a virtue-signalling lefty pontificates on welfare without offering a plan of their own, or seeks to win an argument on healthcare by stoking the public’s idolatry of the NHS.
We can stop fighting on the Left’s terms.
And who knows, if small government conservatives and libertarians actually succeed in getting off the back foot for the first time since Margaret Thatcher left 10 Downing Street, we might even manage to salvage something from David Cameron’s woeful premiership.
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Not so fast, Toby Young. Dan Hodges is an honourable man, but he has no place in the party of Margaret Thatcher
It wasn’t the first time and it probably will not be the last, so understandably you may have paid little attention when Dan Hodges quit the Labour Party this week in disgust at the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and the behaviour of his supporters.
I’m done. Yesterday I cancelled my direct debit to the Labour Party. “Why don’t you just sod off and join the Tories”, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters regularly ask anyone who dares to challenge their rancid world view.
I won’t be joining the Tories. But I am sodding off.
Fair enough. Dan Hodges has legitimate, irreconcilable differences with Jeremy Corbyn – both his policies and the way in which he runs the party (though Hodges’ sudden sensitivity to supposed bullying from the Corbynites seems a little odd coming from someone who was only too happy to get scrappy in his past life as a political campaign manager).
But clearly Dan Hodges and Jeremy Corbyn have very different visions of what the Labour Party should be, and nobody should fault Hodges’ decision to quit. I made the conscious choice not to re-join the Conservative Party when I returned to Britain in 2011, out of disgust with the centrist course plotted by David Cameron and an unwillingness to associate myself with the record of the coalition government, and so I’m certainly not preaching any kind of “stand by your man” dogma.
And now, inevitably, the offers to Dan Hodges to come join the Conservative Party are coming rolling in. At first, these were mostly coming from mocking Corbynistas on social media, rejoicing that a turncoat “Red Tory” like Hodges had finally gone (again). But then the mocking from the far left was replaced by more earnest offers from the supposed political Right.
On all the biggest political issues facing our country – what to do about the Islamic State, tackling the deficit, the renewal of our independent nuclear deterrent, education reform – you and the other Labour moderates are far closer to the leadership of my party than to Labour’s. I think that’s even true of the NHS, given that the health budget has increased in real terms year-on-year since David Cameron became Prime Minister. The commitment to increase spending on the NHS even further in the Autumn Statement surpasses anything promised by your party. And, as I’m sure you know, the minimum wage is set to rise faster under this government than it would have done under Ed Miliband, assuming he’d stuck to Labour’s manifesto.
And it’s true – Dan Hodges does hold refreshingly realistic perspectives on tackling ISIS in Syria, the deficit and Trident. When it comes to fundamental issues of national security, as all of these are, people from the Left and Right are often united.
More worryingly though, when it comes to trampling civil liberties in pursuit of an unattainable degree of security, both he and Theresa May are on the same page. And if Dan Hodges actually believes that throwing more money at a fundamentally broken and outdated NHS model is a good thing, then there is great crossover potential there, too. I’m just not sure that this is a good thing, as Toby Young seems to believe.
Young continues:
Indeed, on all the most important aspects of Osborne’s economic policy, the Labour moderates are much more closely aligned with us than you are with John McDonnell, not least because it’s virtually indistinguishable from the policy set out by Alastair Darling. In this respect, as in so many others, the Prime Minister and his Chancellor are the heirs to Blair.
Toby Young clearly meant this to be a bright and positive pitch to Dan Hodges to jump ship. But by hammering home the similarities between George Osborne and Alastair Darling and their remarkably similar (in practice if not in rhetoric) approaches to deficit reduction, all he manages to do is reveal just what a weak and ineffectual supposedly conservative government we currently have – Blairites with a patrician Tory façade.
Young concludes:
If your only hope of improving the lot of the least well-off is to persuade the Conservative Party to be more compassionate, then shouldn’t you do exactly what you’ve been urging the leadership of your own party to do? Say to hell with ideological purity and strike a bargain?
[..] I also think that, in time, many people on my side will come to see the value of a Blairite faction within the Conservative Party. Some of us are already worried about the corrosive effect that a lack of serious opposition will have on the government and would welcome a proper challenge. If that’s not going to be provided by Labour, then it must come from within our own ranks. Those of us who style ourselves “modernisers” will regard you as natural allies. In my mind’s eye, I can already see Lord Finkelstein standing at the other end of the welcome matt, bottle of champagne in hand.
So come on over, Dan. You already have many friends in the Tory party,including the Prime Minister, and I’m sure you’d quickly make many more. I think we’d be lucky to have you.
Unfortunately, in his rash invitation to Dan Hodges, Toby Young is falling into the same trap as David Cameron’s woolly “One Nation” model. Sure, it may be possible for the Tories to eke out a couple more narrow election victories by becoming so blandly inoffensive and unrecognisable that a sufficient number of the most bovine voters grunt their approval. But these narrow victories, like David Cameron’s “miracle majority” of twelve, provide a mandate only for the dull, technocratic management of Britain’s public services. Essentially they elect a Comptroller of Public Services – someone to kick when the trains don’t run on time or NHS waiting times get too long – not a world leader.
Convincing majorities – margins of the sort that allow radical changes to the country like realigning foreign policy, rolling back the remaining vestiges of the post-war settlement and delivering a smaller, more effective state – don’t come from pretending to be sufficiently like the Labour Party that it tricks a few wavering voters into switching sides. They come from articulating a vision so clear, so exciting and so blazingly inspirational that people vote as enthusiastic citizens inspired by the message, not self-interested consumers voting based on fear or greed.
A Conservative Party that is tame and toothless enough to accommodate someone like Dan Hodges would by definition be of the former type, not the latter. The mere fact that Toby Young is able to make his offer with a straight face proves that there is not currently a cigarette paper’s worth of difference between Blairite Labour-in-exile and the Cameron Conservatives, a party which enthused the electorate with their vision so much that they are perpetually just six defections away from defeat in the House of Commons.
There are dangers in consensus; it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything. It seems more important to have a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority.
[..]
No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.
Many supposed conservatives and Tory party members seem to have forgotten that lesson – the essential truth which delivered three terms of a Thatcher premiership, saving this country from seemingly inevitable decline and irrelevancy. David Cameron and George Osborne, both old enough to reap the fruits of Thatcherism without having really understood why it was so necessary, seem never to have absorbed this lesson in the first place.
Announcing the defection of Dan Hodges to the Conservative Party – having David Cameron welcome him at the door of Number 10 Downing Street with a big bottle of champagne and a basket of pears – would be the ultimate triumph of One Nationism. It would complete the transformation of the Conservative Party, underway since Thatcher left office, from a party of some ideological coherence to a well-oiled and finely calibrated PR machine, excelling in being all things to all people. An intelligent but soulless hive mind of people who quite fancy being in power, and who are content to say anything or compromise on any conviction in order to keep it. Thus, David Cameron will go down in history as the twenty-first century version of Ted Heath.
I don’t think that this is good enough. A Conservative Party sufficiently bland and uncontroversial that it might appeal to Dan Hodges, even on his most jaded day, is not one which I could bring myself to vote for at the ballot box. It’s not good enough for me. But way more important than that, it’s not good enough for Britain. This country is crying out for real leadership, a renewed sense of national purpose, and the re-imagining of the state and its role in our lives. Monolithic institutions like the broken welfare state and “our NHS” (genuflect) – fraying anachronisms from the post-war consensus – need to be redesigned from the ground up, with their blind apologists and vested interests dragged kicking and screaming into the new century.
But if Dan Hodges is walking around with a Conservative Party membership card in his wallet by the time 2020 rolls around, it’s all over. None of this essential conservative reform will happen. Not because Hodges is in any way a bad person, but because he is Labour to his core – and a Conservative Party which provides a political home for him is quite simply no longer a conservative party at all. They will defeat Labour and win a third term, sure. But their voter coalition will be so broad and so lacking in common aspiration that they will be even more rudderless and scattershot in government than they are today.
I’m almost certain that I know who Toby Young would pick if he was forced to choose, but I’m going to make the ultimatum anyway, because I care deeply about the Conservative Party too, and I am deadly serious about this.
Toby Young: It’s Dan Hodges or me.
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In their rage against the Evil Tories, activists are in danger of expanding the definition of “human rights” so far that the term loses all meaning
Last month, a ruling was handed down by a High Court judge. It barely received a ripple of attention in the media at the time, but it has potentially profound implications for our country and the ability of our elected governments to make policy.
In a stunning act of judicial activism masquerading as enlightened compassion, Justice Collins held that by implementing the welfare cap pledged in their manifesto, the Conservative government is actively discriminating against disabled people who might rely on the help of carers – other people – hit by the benefit cap.
The welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, unlawfully discriminated against disabled people by failing to exempt their carers from the benefit cap, a high court judge has ruled.
Mr Justice Collins said the government’s decision to apply the cap to full-time carers for adult relatives had created serious financial hardship for them, forced many to give up caring for loved ones, and loaded extra costs on to the NHS and care services.
The benefit cap, which limits working-age unemployed people to £500 a week in benefits, was introduced by the government on the basis that it sent a strong message to so-called workless families that they had to try harder to get a job.
The court ruled that the two carers who brought the case – and who were caring for upwards of 35 hours a week – were effectively in work even though they were in receipt of benefits, and therefore should be exempt from the cap.
Clearly the government should not have used the word “workless” and referred instead to “families without employment”. Of course caring for someone with illness or disability is work, though not employment. But a failure of semantics is hardly sufficient reason to overturn a flagship government policy, as Justice Collins seems to advocate:
Collins ruled that by applying the cap to unpaid family carers the secretary of state had unlawfully discriminated against seriously disabled people, because it meant they would no longer receive care from a trusted family member or relation.
He said: “For many it matters deeply that they are cared for by a family member. Thus there is adverse treatment since, although care can be provided by others, the loss of a trusted carer can be devastating”.
Let’s be clear – making somebody worse off financially is not a breach of their human rights, let alone the human rights of somebody else for whom they act as carer. It may be bad policy. It may be mean spirited. It may be short sighted or have any number of other flaws as a piece of social policy. But to call it a breach of a person’s human rights is an extraordinary over-stepping of the mark. Discrimination means treating somebody differently because of an inherent characteristic, but activists are now crying “discrimination!” when the government fails to treat people sufficiently differently.
But the American founding fathers were also quite clear that there is no human right to be happy, or to live a carefree, comfortable life. There is only the right to pursue happiness. This properly reflects the fact that one person’s idea of happiness may be quite different to another’s, and that proper government becomes impossible when the state is continually forced to adjudicate between competing claims of infringement on happiness.
Indeed, the difficulty comes when activists and pandering politicians try to drill down from these lofty principles in a control-freakish attempt to ensure equality of outcome for all. We are all different, and require different social and environmental factors in order to be happy and free.
For some people, their inability to express certain outdated or bigoted views for fear of police harassment or prosecution is a gross infringement on their liberty to hold and express personal thoughts and beliefs. But for other sensitive souls, the mere possibility that they might encounter such unpalatable opinions in the real world – and the belief that unpleasant words heard are somehow comparable to physical harm inflicted – infringes on their own happiness and liberty.
This puts the government in the impossible situation of having to pick winners. Does one person’s human right to live life offence-free trump another’s right to freely express their own thoughts? Does the right of some people to enjoy new public infrastructure trump another’s right to peaceably enjoy their own property without having it seized, built over or spoiled? Does the right of a foreign criminal to maintain links with their UK-based family trump society’s right to deport foreign nationals convicted of a crime on the grounds of cost and public safety?
We live in an imperfect world and so long as we maintain our current expansionist view of human rights, such tough calls will always exist, regardless of who holds power. The best that any government can do – to avoid becoming bogged down in endless competing claims for favouritism – is to remain as neutral as possible and stick to enforcing only the most core human rights.
And let us remember that it is quite possible to establish various additional rights and principles to protect the vulnerable – enshrined either in law or through codes of practice – without elevating every single claim to the level of an “human right”.
For example, as a society, we may well want to establish a duty on large businesses or government departments to spare no expense in accommodating the accessibility requirements of the severely disabled. But if an organisation happens to fall short of the required standards, is it really right that they are sued according to the same laws that govern torture, detention without charge or war crimes?
Consider the London Underground, the world’s oldest underground metro system. Because of its age, the vast majority of the Tube network does not conform to modern accessibility standards, and could not quickly be brought up to standard without exorbitant, prohibitive cost. Of course this is hugely unfair to those with mobility impairments, as they are unable to avail themselves of the full range of London transport options. But to call it an infringement of their human rights is wildly excessive, and something of an insult to the millions of people living in more benighted parts of the world whose fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are routinely trampled.
In the information age, and with the growth of social media, it is easier than ever to identify businesses, organisations and government agencies which fall short of their responsibility to provide accessible services for all, and to apply pressure on them to raise their performance. One trending Twitter hashtag, coined in outrage at the insensitivity of an organisation, now has the potential to achieve more far-reaching change than any judgement handed down in Strasbourg.
But we absolutely can not continue to abide the corrosive idea that government policies should be struck down if they impact differently on different citizens. Because nearly every government policy will, by definition, impact different groups in different ways.
Spending more money on roads penalises those who walk or use public transport. Spending more money on pensions penalises those people of working age who will inevitably receive a less generous settlement when they retire. Spending more money on education penalises those currently in retirement. Enacting tougher prison sentences for criminals penalises people from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds who are more likely to end up in court. Government funding of research into cures for disease A penalises sufferers of disease B.
Where does it end? By clinging to the notion that individual government policies must never be disadvantageous to anybody, ever, we render ourselves ungovernable. We descend from being a cohesive society into a splintered and warring coalition of special interest groups, each jealously guarding their own perks and privileges at the expense of all others.
Government spending disproportionately benefits those who are not economically self sufficient. That much is obvious and unavoidable – rich people either do not or cannot claim the benefits on which poor people rely. And the fact that wealthier citizens support their less fortunate compatriots with their taxes is part of the social compact we make in order to maintain our inclusive society.
But to suggest that cutting government spending infringes on the “human rights” of the recipients is utterly abhorrent, even immoral, because it effectively enshrines a formal, limitless claim on the labour and earnings of the economically productive by the non-productive. It says that by refusing to fund government services with ever increasing taxes until the wishes of every welfare recipient are fully satisfied is to violate their human rights, to effectively inhabit the same low category as torturers and dictators.
It is perfectly possible to disagree with this Conservative government calmly and rationally. It is perfectly possible to advance the case that government spending restraint, the “bedroom tax” and welfare reforms are bad policy. But to claim that they infringe anyone’s human rights is a grotesque exaggeration that should be laughed out of town, not treated seriously and earnestly investigated by the UN.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness: these inalienable, indivisible rights have served us well for centuries – and not only in the United States of America. Generations of campaigners before us were able to argue for (and win) the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage and civil rights protection with reference to these noble aims. And they would be appalled at the modern-day assertion that we should obsess over whether each and every government spending decision has been carefully calibrated to benefit us personally, rightly viewing this as a condescending attack on our liberty and autonomy as free citizens.
If human rights are to mean anything at all, we must stop trying to invoke them every time the government does something with which we disagree, or whenever we have a less than wholly successful interaction with a business or government agency. Human rights violations are real. Even today, while puffed up social justice warriors in the UK write furious screeds accusing Iain Duncan Smith of human rights abuses, people in other countries are being imprisoned, tortured, spied upon, maimed and executed. Babies with entirely survivable conditions and disabilities are being killed, or aborted before they are even born.
If we really cannot find a way to discuss the human consequences of shrinking the state without resorting to shrieking about supposed human rights abuses then truly, we are suffering from a grievous failure of empathy and imagination as a country.
And that’s the real crime.
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Semi-Partisan Politics 