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The conservative neglect of culture

By Roger Scruton.

Nobody knows what a cultural policy should aim at, what means it should use, or how it could lead to legislation or other political initiatives. Hence, in Conservative Party thinking, considerations of culture remain on the margins. Worse, as in so many areas of political life, the Conservatives seem to have abandoned this fertile territory to the Left. Here is an instance of which I have some knowledge: the Arts Council has refused to provide funding to the English Music Festival, an initiative devoted to one of the greatest and least explored legacies of our national culture. The Council objects to the word ‘English’, and to all that it means by way of settled loyalties, old-fashioned decencies, and the love of our country and its past. For the arts establishment culture should be anti-national, disruptive, part of the ‘labour of the negative’ that I described in a previous contribution to this blog. My attempts to get conservative politicians, including the Minister for Culture and the Chairman of the House of Commons Cultural Committee, to take up this cause have been greeted with silence. Who cares about Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax or Ivor Gurney, and what have they got to do with GDP, RPI, VAT, or any other collection of  letters that the government cites in the place of a philosophy?

This neglect of culture is a mistake, and here are three reasons why:

1. Conservatives are, at their best, rounded human beings, who are attached to forms of life and practices which might reasonably be described as cultural: they tend to believe in family values and the rewards of family life, and to have a love of literature, art, music and natural beauty. Their tastes vary, but they gravitate towards the serious and the enduring, and indeed it is their sense of the seriousness of human life that turns them in a conservative direction. It disheartens them to think that there is nothing to conservatism except the bits that can be transcribed as economic policy, and they would be comforted by the spectacle of a party endorsing the cultural values that they share.
2. Policies towards culture may be futile; but policies influenced by culture issue all the time. And when the culture is trivial or ideological the policies can be very destructive – as we have seen in education, multiculturalism, and the rise of the leftist thought police. To be confident in one’s cultural base is therefore a prerequisite for making firm and durable political decisions.
3. It is good for the image of conservatism that it should not be caricatured as a business consortium or a neo-liberal conspiracy. It should be seen also to be tentatively exploring the deeper issues, and making reasonable but non-belligerent contributions to the debates that occupy intelligent people today: for instance, religion and atheism, social media, pop culture, the fate of real music, architecture and the city.

Public sector pension reforms

Neil Record is the author of "Sir Humphrey’s Legacy", IEA, 2006.

On 20th June 2010, the Chancellor announced the formation of an Independent Public Service Pensions Commission chaired by Lord Hutton – former Labour Government Work and Pensions Secretary.  In the Commission’s Terms of Reference, the Chancellor asked for “recommendations … on pension arrangements that are sustainable and affordable in the long term, fair to both the public service workforce and the taxpayer … while protecting accrued rights”.

Lord Hutton’s report made two major recommendations for reform, both of which the Government accepted.  One was to raise the pension age in public sector pensions from generally 60 (occasionally 65) to the new State Pension Age (equating men and women at 65 – then rising to 68 by 2046).  The other was to change the basis of calculation of the pension from "Final Salary" to "Career Average Revalued Earnings" (CARE).  The imposition of the raised pension age has reduced the value of public sector pensions; the change to CARE has broadly not (although was portrayed in the press and by the unions as doing so).  Other provisions included a government "cost cap".

Wealth Creation

Adam Afriyie is the Member of Parliament for Windsor.

The tax practices of international corporations have brought the debate on tax avoidance and wealth creation sharply into focus.  Yet the moral outrage directed at Amazon and others may well be misplaced.  If our tax laws are not being broken, then any blame for a failure to collect what is "felt" to be a proper proportion of tax lies firmly at the door of governments and politicians. 

Tax evasion is a crime which must be rooted out, but the avoidance of unnecessary taxes is a moral duty for individuals, families and company executives who must serve their shareholders.  The current UK tax regime is doing exactly what it has been “designed” to do.  The problem lies in the lack of any coherent design.

The answer to the tax avoidance dilemma lies in building a sane tax system which recognises that wealth creation is an economic, social and moral good.  The goal must be to allow the least advantaged in society to have the chance to get on in life by creating a stream of new jobs in a dynamic and competitive market.  And to create jobs, we must unashamedly back British enterprise.  Removing barriers to prosperity is a sound, age-old Conservative ideal, and it must be at the heart of the current economic strategy.

Thomas Hobbes wrote that “riches are gotten with industry”, and if we are to allow industry to flourish, we must heed the argument that it is the role of government to create an environment in which citizens are free to function as they see fit as wealth-creating individuals.

Equality

By Paul Goodman.

"Equality is the great thing, equality is everything," says Steerpike in Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan".  But what kind of equality, since one sort tends to clash with another?  For example, equality of opportunity, that liberal objective of an older generation of Conservatives, is incompatible with equality of outcome, that bluntly-expressed aim of an older generation of socialists.  After all, a man can't ascend as far as his talents or luck will take him, propelled by equal opportunity, if his rise is also to be blocked by an iron ceiling, equal outcome.  The one can't be moved without the other being pulled with it: they are like the two ends of a toy train.

Indeed, how equal can opportunities ever be, given the new insights which science is opening up about what is "written in our DNA"?  Or given truths that we should have known all along - such as the way in which parents guard the interests of their own children more zealously than those of others?  Consider, for example, the coming rise of a new generation of Labour politicians: Euan Blair, David Prescott, Will Straw - all reported recently to be seeking to follow in their fathers' footsteps and enter the House of Commons.  All have had access since birth to a social capital which future constituents, and sometimes their parents, did not.  They are, literally, privilege's children.

Their story is a reminder of the way in which some left-wing politicians, bourgeois to a fault, are able first to manoeuvre their way up the ladder to wealth and advantage, and then to try to pull the ladder up behind them, thus preventing the poor from ascending towards greater prosperity and freedom.  This is often what is going on when, say, Michael Gove's school reform programme is opposed.  It is hard to know whether one should be more struck by the hypocrisy of such politicians - and angry too - or impressed by this surreptitious triumph of the hereditary principle.  And it is tempting to wave the whole idea of equality away as a charade, before recalling that all Conservatives approve of at least one form of it.