ConservativeHome | Thinkers' Corner

The Labour of the Negative

By Roger Scuton.

The case of the children removed from foster parents by Rotherham Social Services, on the grounds that the parents are supporters of UKIP, is now notorious. I doubt that any reader of this blog will be surprised by the facts of the case, or by the conduct of the social workers involved. But there are lessons to be drawn by conservatives that are not publicly referred to, even though publicly felt. The head of Children’s Services at Rotherham, Joyce Thacker, made it quite clear that she was acting on her own principles as well as the advice of colleagues, in making all of the following judgements: UKIP is a racist party because it is opposed to multiculturalism and urges a strict policy on immigration; councils looking for foster parents for the children that are dumped on them (especially when dumped by foreigners) should look for an appropriate ‘cultural match’, which means choosing foster parents who do not belong to the majority culture; a party like UKIP, which emphasizes national independence as its central idea, is some kind of threat to the new order of things, in which all people are to be treated equally, without preference for the inherited national life-style.

Those judgements are not the arbitrary prejudices of a particular bigot. They are the norms inculcated over decades by academic sociology, by the training in social work, by the quangocracy that has been fed from our social problems, and by the Labour Party and its ideologists. Their meaning is not to be found in such positive actions as seem to flow from them – for as we know, little flows from them of a positive kind at all, as the Rotherham case amply illustrates. Here were abandoned children being offered not just a home but a way into the surrounding society, a way of being normal and protected members of a successful historical community, the very community that granted protection in our formative years to you and me. It is precisely that positive result that horrified the social workers, and caused them to fall back on their fundamental axioms, which are not positive but negative.

Free speech

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This freedom was enshrined in the American Constitution, defended in the face of the Victorian moralists by John Stuart Mill, and upheld in our time by the dissidents under communist and fascist dictatorships. So much of a shibboleth has it become, that journalists barely distinguish free speech from democracy, and regard both as the default positions of humanity – the positions to which we return, if all oppressive powers are removed from us. It seems not to occur to people now that orthodoxy, conformity and the hounding of the dissident define the default position of mankind, or that there is no reason to think that democracies are any different in this respect from Islamic theocracies or one party totalitarian states. 

Of course, the opinions that are suppressed change from one form of society to another, as do the methods of suppression. But we should be clear that to guarantee freedom of opinion goes against the grain of social life, and requires people to take risks that they may be reluctant to take. For in criticising orthodoxy you are not just questioning a belief; you are threatening the social order that has been built on it. Moreover, orthodoxies are the more fiercely protected the more vulnerable they are.

Both those principles are surely obvious from the reaction of Islamists to criticisms directed at their religion. It is precisely what is most absurd that is most protected: just as it was in the wars of religion that ravaged Europe in the 17th century. And the critic is not treated merely as a person with an intellectual difficulty: he is a threat, the enemy of society and of God. It is not surprising to find Islamists in the forefront of modern censorship.

Europe and the Nation

By Roger Scruton

Anthony O’Hear has already commented on Ed Miliband’s appropriation of the ‘one nation’ idea, in order to make a bid for the patriotic vote. Just when this particular disciple of Eric Hobsbawm decided to abandon the internationalist cause is not entirely clear. But one thing is certain, the Tory Party will be very much to blame if it fails to impress on the electorate that it is the party of the nation. Conservatives are heir to a tradition that puts national sovereignty at the centre of politics, and which identifies the nation as the unifying object of our loyalties. The causes espoused by the Labour Party are not, as a rule, national causes. The attitude of the Party in domestic affairs has been deliberately divisive, setting class against class, making war on institutions that represent ‘privilege’ (which often signifies nothing more than merit), and gratuitously pouring scorn on family values and old fashioned respectability.  In the matter of Europe it has been normal for Labour politicians to sneer at the ‘Little Englanders’ who question the way things are going (the disgraced Denis MacShane, once Minister of State for Europe, was particularly given to this habit). And when it comes to the Union, it is very clear that the Labour Party wants to have it both ways – to break it up, and at the same time to retain the Celtic vote in Westminster in order to oppress the English.

The test case for the Tory Party is of course Europe. The European organism has developed according to the principles programmed into it by Jean Monnet, and concealed within the Treaties. It has grown to such an extent that its obligatory inheritance of laws and regulations – the acquis communautaire – now runs to 180,000 pages. For the thirteenth year in succession auditors have refused to sign off its accounts. It has a President from a country that hardly has a government, half of whose people are itching to have a nation state of their own. It has a foreign minister who has never stood for an election and who rose through the ranks of leftist NGOs and quangos to become the Labour Party’s representative (but not the representative of you or me) on the international stage. It awakens no loyalty in the ordinary people of Europe, who must constantly be prevented from voting on its legitimacy. And in every matter in which it depends on popular support it leans on the national sentiments that its officially propaganda covers with suspicion. In a way there is no greater proof of the need for the nation than the EU, which tells us that it, and it alone, brings peace to the nations of Europe, and in doing so surreptitiously reminds us of the thing to which our communal and political life is really owed.

Europe is, and will forever be, a continent of nation states. Its people have passed their own laws, and rejected the attempts by Popes, Emperors and internationalists to dictate those laws from outside their borders. Those are the premises from which a coherent European politics must flow. Now that the grey apparatchiks who destroyed Margaret Thatcher have drifted away, it is surely time for the Tory Party to repossess itself of those premises, and to ask itself what the national interest requires.

One nation

By Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, and editor of Philosophy journal.

Following Ed Miliband’s evocation of ‘one nation’ at his party conference, various Conservative big-wigs immediately began lamenting this theft of their clothes.  But few seemed to have reflected on what might be involved in ‘one nation’, particularly in Miliband’s understanding of the phrase, which is very un-conservative indeed, the very last thing we should fighting to own.

We can leave aside the extent to which Disraeli was a conservative, perceptive as he was in identifying the intrinsic conservatism of the English working class. We should focus rather on ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer’, or its variants, that perennial siren call of tyrants and demagogues. And we should ask whether in the Miliband vision, Fuhrers aside, ein Reich will require more than ein Partei.

Certainly it involves far more than a sense of equal rights under a shared constitution. For one of Miliband’s stripe, one nationhood means one education system, one system of health and child care, one trajectory for each citizen from cradle to grave. There will be one ‘level playing field’, ironing out differences of investment between different parts of the nation, and centralised regulation of pretty well everything that moves, from railways to power utilities to the press and the media. Miliband’s nation is also one all-inclusive nation, supposedly embracing all differences in a superficially soft relativism, but enforced by ever more petty systems of thought and speech control.

Non-discrimination

By Roger Scruton.

It all seemed so harmless when first introduced. Wasn’t it obvious that goods and services in a market should be offered freely to everyone, regardless of race or sex? Wasn’t it obvious that there should be legal protection against discrimination in employment, given the history of racial and religious prejudice? Without stopping to question what was happening Western systems of law began to make room for ‘non-discrimination’ clauses, not only in contracts of employment, but in all matters in which opportunities were openly offered to members of the public.

That this restricted the freedoms of employers has seldom been regarded as an objection. We live in a society in which equality trumps freedom whenever the two conflict. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between relevant and irrelevant grounds for discrimination, and discrimination on relevant grounds has until now been permitted by the law. It is acceptable to discriminate in favour of large people when offering a job as a bouncer. But maybe it is not acceptable to discriminate in favour of people from your village back in Pakistan when offering a job at the cash till.

All might have gone smoothly, with an emerging consensus as to the distinction between the relevant and the irrelevant, had not the concept of non-discrimination been captured by a political agenda. Those agitating for equal treatment for women, for gays, for transsexuals and for other groups commonly regarded as marginalised have managed to write their causes into the very idea of non-discrimination. It is always irrelevant to discriminate against someone as a woman, or a homosexual, and this is made clear in the open-ended lists attached to non-discrimination clauses, and now enforced by the European Union under the Treaties and by the European Court of Human Rights. There is no longer an argument that could be heard in a court of law. Non-discrimination has become the latest step in a process whereby the rights of the individual are extinguished by the rights of the group.

Introducing Thinkers' Corner

By Roger Scruton.

For too long conservatives have been reluctant to lay claim to their intellectual heritage, while the media, muffled by political correctness, have given little or no space to any way of thinking that would challenge their left-liberal orthodoxies. It is time to change all that. Achievable policies require believable principles, and believable principles depend on clear ideas. Recently a group of thinking conservatives got together with a view to defining those ideas and to encouraging the Conservative Party to subscribe to them and to build them into its policies. In this section of ConservativeHome we will present short statements of 250-500 words, each devoted to some concept vital to the presentation of the conservative worldview. We invite comments from readers that will help us to take the discussion forward. Our goal is to expose the intellectual and moral flaws in the soft left orthodoxies of our day, and to provide strong and believable arguments for the kind of conservatism that could again win an election. We hope to post something every week, and begin this week with my own thoughts on the nature of charity.

Charity

By Roger Scruton.

Charity is not politics but the opposite of politics. It is not an attempt to control people, to create a new political order or to impose an ideological agenda. It is an offer of help, from one body of citizens to another. Recognising this, the English law has defined charity as a sphere of its own, outside the activity of government and exempt from taxation. Educational, medical and philanthropic charities brought our country relatively painlessly into the modern world. It is not the state that made higher education in this country the envy of the world, but the private endowments of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. It is not the state that protected our environment and made it unique for its beauty, but a long string of charitable associations from Ruskin’s League of St George to the National Trust. It was not the state that laid the foundations of the NHS but the Victorian hospitals, the British Medical Association and the work of Florence Nightingale and the Royal College of Nursing.

Charity, in its true understanding, is the work of volunteers. It is a way in which people give to others, and receive in return the gratitude of those they help. It is the stuff of civil society, and without it there is no true intermediary between the citizen and the State. The first act of totalitarian governments is to abolish the charities through which people help themselves, and which are the main obstacle to creating the total dependence of the citizen on the State.

Appreciating this, our law has upheld the exemption of charities from taxation, but only on condition that they remain apart from politics and do not engage in campaigning. Gordon Brown changed all that, since he saw the possibility of using charitable funds to promote a political agenda, and to advance the influence of political activists who share his socialist goals. For the Labour Party charities are really ‘NGOs’, and the label is significant. A non-government organisation is an organisation, in the same business as government, and usually run from the top by a member of the political class. It lobbies government for funds, and uses those funds for political campaigns. This is the very opposite of charity, in which people give their time, energy and resources for free, in order to help their neighbours along a path that the neighbours themselves have chosen.

Conservatives need to reclaim the name and the purpose of charity. They need to uphold the sphere of charity as a part of civil society, outside the reach of government, free from ideological campaigning, and devoted to creating the trust and affection from which national sentiment begins.