How About Those Britcons - Road to the Middle Class

FOR ELEVEN long years the British Conservatives have wandered in the political wilderness. Political magician Tony Blair won three smashing elections with a re-branded “New” Labour Party in 1997, 2001, and 2005. The Tories were written off as the “nasty” party, and it looked like New Labour would rule forever.

Not to worry, an old Tory, Ken Clarke said. “Labour governments always run out of money,” and Conservatives get back in to clean up the mess.

Only this time, Labour didn’t run out of money. This time, it’s worse. Labour has spent money like a drunken sailor as of old, but it hasn’t quite run out yet. Instead, Britons are looking back at the last eleven years and saying: What was the point?

All the reckless promises New Labour made in the 1990s about education, crime, “joined-up” government, and an “integrated transport system” have turned out to be just that: promises. Education is dumbed down, children are regularly robbed of their “mobiles,” government screw-ups are reported weekly, and the British railway system is plagued by endless delays.

As soon as magician Tony Blair left the stage the magic show collapsed. A couple of weeks ago the Conservative Party won an overwhelming victory in the May 1, 2008 local elections, even electing Conservative Boris Johnson as mayor of Labour London.

OK, so British Conservatives won a famous battle. What comes next is obvious: pursuit.

Last week, Conservative Party leader David Cameron sallied forth to sow discord and demoralization in the Labour rank-and-file. He wrote an op-ed in the lefty Independent newspaper “We are the champions of progressive ideals”and advised his progressive readers to give up on the Labour Party.

Look, he wrote, let’s agree for the sake of argument that throwing money at the poor worked back in the twentieth century. But the returns from redistribution programs are “not just diminishing, they are disappearing.” If you look back at the Blair/Brown years you realize that something went wrong with the progressive program:

A painful reality is dawning on Labour MPs: in its longest unbroken period in office, Labour has done little to advance progressive ideals.

You can see the cavalry saber flashing in the light. The game is up, Cameron tells his lefty readers.

No more thinking that the central state shifting money around can provide the long-term solution to poverty. It is now widely accepted that it is the cycle of family breakdown, worklessness, crime, drug and alcohol abuse that traps people in deprivation.

Everyone now understands that the Labour Party’s governing strategy of top-down redistribution fails to help people trapped in deprivation. But the Conservatives have a plan.

Our plans for radical school reform, bringing the best education to the poorest children by opening up the state system to new providers, show we are not prepared to let ideology, dogma or vested interests stop children gaining the best start in life.

Finally, down comes the saber on the cowering foot-soldier of the left.

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only [Conservatives] can achieve real change.

The Daily Telegraph’s Janet Daley tells us what is going on here. In the old days the British Labour Party was the tribal party of the working class. Workers voted for Labour because it was the workers’ party. Then along came Margaret Thatcher and broke up the working class.

Thatcherism had detached the aspiring portion of it (what used to be called the "respectable" working class), and a vastly inflated welfare state had turned the unaspiring portion into a non-working underclass.

Tony Blair papered over this chasm with his personal charisma “and the phenomenal skills of [his] image builders.” Now that Blair has gone, the Labour Party suddenly feels like a cartoon character looking down in horror at a thousand feet of emptiness. For if it no longer leads a unified class-based working-class movement, what is it for?

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, himself a liberal, has attempted to articulate the liberal belief system in his Sources of the Self. It is, he writes, founded upon the idea of dignity, creativity, and equality as the highest goods, superceding like the Protestant celebration of ordinary life and older notions of duty and honor.

This is all very well in theory, but conservatives have some questions about how this works in practice. What kind of equality is it for the poor to go to lousy government schools, we ask? What kind of dignity is it for single mothers to raise broods of fatherless feral children on government housing projects? Only the Conservative Party, Cameron tells the British lefties, have a workable plan to deliver dignity and equality. Only Conservatives have the right to call themselves “progressive.”

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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