WRITTEN ON June 4th, 2008 BY David Moss AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?
In which your correspondent discovers that Gordon Brown is not a conservative …
What is the point of being in government?
We have it on the authority of Frank Field that, in a nushell, the answer is to promote equality:
“Anthony Crosland, now the best remembered of the early revisionists, attempted to prise Labour away from the belief that only by nationalising the commanding heights of the economy could socialism be established. Labour instead needed to stress equality as its goal and high public expenditure as a means of achieving this new society.”
That is certainly what most traditional supporters of the Labour party believe. But we have it on the authority of David Miliband that:
“Labour’s success has been built on the Blair/Brown mantra that ‘what counts is what works’ … from independence of the Bank of England to ASBOs to nuclear power, Labour ditched dogma and embraced common sense.”
And as far as those in command of the Labour party are concerned, equality is one of the dogmas that has been ditched. Thus Frank Field’s cry of pain over the 10p tax debacle and all the Blair/Brown reform of the party that led up to it.
Is that right? Has equality been ditched as an objective? Yes. We have it on the authority of Gordon Brown:
“I am concerned that too often in recent years the public dialogue in our country has undervalued the importance of liberty. Too often the political debate has become polarised between a new right that has emphasised laissez-faire more than liberty and an old left that has mistakenly marginalised liberty by seeing it as the enemy of equality.”
It is a mistake, says the Prime Minister, to press for equality if that reduces liberty. Given a choice between the two, as far as he is concerned, equality is trumped by liberty.
That is a problem for traditional Labour supporters.
Let that pass. The question arises, does he really believe in liberty? He seems to:
“Some politicians of the left have mistakenly seen liberty at odds with equality and were too often prepared to compromise or even ignore the sanctity of freedoms of the individual.”
Sanctity? That sounds like unqualified support. But it isn’t:
“This will only be possible if we face up to the hard choices that have to be made in government. Precious as it is, liberty is not the only value we prize and not the only priority for government. The test for any government will be how it makes those hard choices, how it strikes the balance. To claim that we should ignore the claims of liberty when faced with the needs of security would be to embark down an authoritarian path that I believe would be unacceptable to the British people. But to ignore the duty of government to protect its people – and to be unwilling to face up to hard choices – is the politics of gesture and irresponsibility.”
Even the sanctity of liberty can be trumped by the super-sanctity of security. He’s not an equality man (Labour). He’s not a liberty man (Liberal). He’s a security man (Raytheon).
That’s why all our air travel details are shared with our 26 partners in the EU and with the US – even domestic air travel.
That’s why he wants 42 day detention without charge.
That’s why he wants ID cards.
That’s why he’s given 652 public bodies access to all our phone records and email.
It is debatable whether those measures will achieve security. Whether or not they will, civil liberties can go hang in the attempt and equality doesn’t even come into it.
800 years of Magna Carta is to be sacrificed on the altar of security. Why? Because, like Tony Blair before him, Mr Brown believes this is a new world:
“In a world of increasingly rapid change and multiplying challenges … while some people argue that in this changing world …”
It isn’t. It is the same world we have always lived in. He isn’t a conservative. And that, ultimately, is the problem.
Hypothesis: the point of being in government is determined by whether you think this is a new world (or you can make a new world, i.e. you are a revolutionary) or whether you think it’s the same old world we’ve always had.
If the former, obviously you can tear up the Constitution – the world is a new game and the old rules won’t apply.
If the latter, you might recognise some value in the accretion of wisdom over the centuries and preserve it.
2 Responses to “So what’s new?”
I think the problem here is that Brown generally defines liberty as “the freedom to shop”, rather than a more general freedom from state interference or intrusion. As long as we accept the security checks at the entrance to the mall (and at all points on the journey) our brand choice is unimpaired. Hence liberty trumps equality over say, choosing a school, or health treatment; a transaction unencumbered by the security blanket that surrounds everything. Meanwhile we can find equality in the state of permanent suspicion in which we each are held.
Nice article. I have to say I am still struggling to understand the current obsession with terrorism. Is it purely down to 9/11? When the IRA were planting bombs or the Luftwaffe flattening our major cities we gritted our teeth and carried on our lives, determined not to be swayed. Now it seems that a handful of suicidal nutcases have persuaded us to throw away hard-fought freedoms in the search for security. As Bruce Schneier says the point of terrorism is to terrorize. If we refuse to be terrorized then that makes the job of the terrorist much harder.