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Roger Scruton: Conservatives must think. So come and do so at the second Conservative Renewal conference.

By Roger Scruton

During 13 years of opposition the Tory Party had the opportunity to think. Issues that were of ever increasing prominence in the minds and the feelings of the electorate were ignored or fudged by the Party hierarchy. There was a need to re-examine the core beliefs and assumptions of Tory politics, and to reconnect with the instincts and values on which the Tories had in the past depended for their support. But the Party entered into coalition government with virtually no intellectual contribution of its own, and with a rooted desire to avoid the places where thought was needed. It was as though the entire period out of office had been spent sipping cocktails in the Bahamas, watching the antics of the Labour Government on television with quiet murmurs of dismay. Issues where the Party should be taking the lead – the environment, marriage and the family, the place of religion in the public square, press freedom, policing, the armed forces – have all been addressed as though the Labour Party were still in office, and as though there were no need to change one iota of the left-liberal agenda. True, in the matter of Europe the Party has made moves to protect national sovereignty, though largely because UKIP has forced the Tories to recognise that, by not doing so, they have jeopardised their core support. Perhaps it is only in the fields of education and welfare that we see the evidence of serious thinking, with Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith making a courageous attempt to unravel fifty years of egalitarian claptrap.

Roger Scruton: Truth in Politics

By Roger Scruton

Human beings make rational choices, and choices are rational only if they seek out the truth. But the truth may be uncomfortable, so that we have a motive to avoid it. Or it may be unacceptable to those on whom we wish to impose our decisions, in which case we have a motive to conceal it. Perhaps the deep truth about our condition is so uncomfortable that we stand in need of some collective delusion that will make us governable – so Plato thought, and advocated the ‘Noble Lie’ as a means of crowd-control. The totalitarian systems of the 20th century took this seriously, and rewrote the human condition in terms of mythical ‘struggles’ between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the master race and the human vermin. In due course the totalitarian project advanced in the way foretold by George Orwell, inventing a language and a doctrine that would make the truth inexpressible, so that people would have to ‘live within the lie’, as Havel put it.

Roger Scruton: Conservatism and the Environment

By Roger Scruton

There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home. Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself ­ to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the Conservative Party has not seized hold of that cause as its own.

The problem arises because the agenda has been set by the globalisers. Global problems, we are told, require global solutions, and global solutions are trans-national solutions, involving the loss of sovereignty and the surrender to treaties that tie our hands. There may be reason to fear what is happening. But much more important for the activists is the political use to which that fear can be put – which is to destroy national sovereignty and to exert a top-down control by the self-appointed experts over the ordinary activities of mankind.

Moreover, by concentrating on climate change the activists have managed to distract attention from the many other environmental problems that could be, and often have been, solved by people acting in the conservative spirit. Environmental problems arise when homeostatic systems break down – in other words, when the feedback loop that establishes equilibrium is, for whatever reason, destroyed. The homeostatic system that has been most studied is the free market, which returns to equilibrium in changing conditions, provided the participants bear the costs of their actions. Left-wing thinkers refuse to accept this, and constantly invent bogeymen – ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘corporate greed’, ‘market failure’ – in order to justify the intervention of the state, and therefore control by socialists. But intervention by the state is the major cause of disequilibrium, and the environmental consequences can be seen all across the former communist world – in the Soviet case in the form of total devastation. The market ceases to deliver solutions to environmental problems when participants can externalise their costs – in other words, when they can escape the internal rules of the system. It is this that gives rise to ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

The solution is not automatically to call on the state to intervene but first to look for the social mechanisms that cause people to bear the costs of what they do. That is what the common law of tort has done in our country, acting often in conjunction with the law of trusts. It is what oikophilia naturally prompts us to do, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we are permitted to regard ‘common pool resources’ as shared by a defined and localised community. It is what the conservative instinct for trusteeship spontaneously urges upon us.

If we look at the history of the environmental movement in Britain we see those conservative principles working successfully, not through the state, but through the civil initiatives that challenge the state, beginning with the protests on behalf of the forests in the 17th century, initiated by John Evelyn's Silva, and leading to the creation of the National Trust at the end of the 19th century.
Vital to this conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of ‘social capital’. Beauty, they have recognised, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers.

But the environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority – for the science, such as it was, has been exploded – but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism – the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment – irrelevant.

Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore. Conservative-minded architects like Leon Krier at Poundbury and John Simpson at Swindon have shown that this need not be so, that we can learn from our traditional architecture how to build in ways that enhance the neighbourhood, and in ways that produce affordable housing too. People protest at the faceless estates that destroy the view from their window. But no-one protests at Poundbury except the modernist architects who sense the threat that it poses to their monopoly game.

The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?

Roger Scruton: The Health and Safety culture is killing volunteeering and the benefits of risk

By Roger Scruton

The Conservative Party has rightly emphasized that it is civil society, not the state, that is the source of our shared values and our public spirit. Each function that is taken over by the state ends up in the hands of the bureaucrats. And the bigger the bureaucracy the more prone it is to invasion by special interests. That, in brief, is why the private schools in this country are succeeding in their education task, while the state schools are failing. To return our institutions to civil society, to encourage the emergence of a new generation of volunteers, to liberate the charitable impulse – these are the paradigm conservative causes, and the long-term goal of all the initiatives we might take to ‘get the state off our backs’. It is not that we want the state to be weak, but that we want civil society to be strong.

There are many obstacles to this cause, including the vast number of state-dependent clients, who lobby in the name of ‘compassion’.  New Labour greatly increased the number of these people, recognising that their vote would always tend in a socialist direction. But there is a more insidious obstacle, and one that is not often noticed because it seems so paradoxical to be opposed to it. The name of this obstacle is ‘health and safety’.

Civil society exists only where individuals have the courage and initiative to get things started. Sports teams, festivals, fairs and markets; shelters, dance-clubs and equestrian events; schools, colleges, scout troops and children’s outings – all these things, which are the stuff of civil society, are now tied in regulatory knots. Activities involving children have been effectively removed from the competence of ordinary unqualified people; playgrounds have been closed for fear of improbable accidents; premises where the Women’s Institute might have run a cake stall, or where teenagers could have got together for a dance, have been condemned by the health inspectors, and scarcely an activity now occurs in the countryside which does not have to be carried out in some clandestine version, for fear of the bureaucrats whose job it is to snoop on us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.