Let me list all the people we are not particularly proud of in Britain at the moment. First off, are the politicians. Nothing new there, you might say. Whoever could be proud of politicians? Still, they seem to have messed up the aftermath of the Iranian hostage-taking and release in a particularly noxious fashion, not least because of their pusillanimity with regards to the boys in uniform. No, I don’t mean the Iranian Revolutionary Guard but our own boys in uniform, specifically the First and Second Sea Lords.
Britain
Thinning the Herd
Scott Burgess has an op-ed in the UK Times today. He talks about how the National Health Service in Britain is in the midst of a financial crises so severe that they are removing every third light bulb to try and keep their electric bill down. Yet the government agency still funds alternative medicine as a viable option for their patients, even going so far as to shell out the cash for five homeopathic hospitals.
Scott wonders how this can be, and seems to think that it is an unnecessary drain on an already tottering system. I disagree, and I think that it is a very clever way for the British government to relieve the pressure.
Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?
What are the deepest roots of Anglosphere exceptionalism? Some of the most commonly attributed sources are wrong: Protestantism, for example. England was exceptional long before Protestantism. Alan Macfarlane, from an anthropological perspective, has taken the story back into the Middle Ages. His predecessor F.W. Maitland, from a legal perspective, took it back a little farther. The Victorians and Edwardians (Stubbs, Maitland, Acton) agreed that the English retained from their Saxon ancestors something of the “liberty loving” ways of their Teutonic forebears, as depicted by Tacitus almost two thousand years ago. This type of thinking fell into disfavor in the 20th Century. But I think the Victorians were on the money.
Passing of a great man
Some of our readers might have heard the sad news of the death of Lord Harris of High Cross. Yes, yes, I know he was in his eighties but that does not alter the fact that his passing fills one with great sorrow both on the political and, in my case, personal level.
Ralph Harris was one of the people responsible for the intellectual underpinning of the Thatcherite revolution. His colleague, Arthur Seldon, died last year. (And, by a strange coincidence, I attended yesterday the memorial meeting for Sir Alfred Sherman, a somewhat more controversial figure but one whose achievements must not be overlooked. Lady Thatcher was present, looking fragile but well.) Sadly, that generation is going and we shall all be the poorer for it.
I have known Ralph since my late teens (though he actually thought he had known me as a young child) as my father attended the IEA lunches in the late sixties and early seventies, when their ideas were generally considered to be a brand of harmless lunacy at best. Even in those days Ralph cultivated his persona of the Edwardian gentleman, hats, moustaches, waistcoats and walking sticks included.
What mattered above all was not his mannerism, not even his fantastically ebullient personality nobody could ever forget Ralph even after a brief meeting but his hard-headed approach to Britains problems.
Neither he nor Arthur Seldon would have been welcomed in the wishy-washy, condescending tory-toff Conservative Party of David Cameron. They would both have been horrified to hear that a Conservative Party leader could snootily dismiss the notion of choice in education for all. I can still remember Ralph Harriss tones when he talked about that public school boy Anthony Crosland vowing to destroy every f***ing grammar school. [Apologies for the implied swearing those are the words Crosland used.]
Ralph Harris came from a working class family in north London, went to a grammar school and thence to the University of Cambridge. He knew the importance of good education for people who wanted to rise and achieve; he, as well as Arthur Seldon, knew that the working classes had been perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their families; they knew how destructive the welfare state, imposed largely by do-gooding middle class politicians, been to working class families and, beyond that, to the whole of British society.
Same old, same old …
With this posting I shall break my resolution not to write about the Conservative Party, its Boy-King leader or the preternaturally boring conference in Bournemouth. The reason is that I am a little tired of the accepted wisdom (when am I not tired of that?), which says that the Tories have no policies. They do, too, have policies.
Back in the days of the Cold War many of us grew hoarse repeating the same thing over and over again: if the Soviets say that they are at war (hot or cold) with the West and their aim is victory, then let us give them credit for telling the truth and accept that this is so. Then let us ensure that it does not happen.
If the Islamists insist that their aim is, at the very least, to destroy our culture, undermine our liberties and effectively enslave us, then let us give them credit for telling the truth and accept that this is so. Then let us ensure that it does not happen.
If the high panjandrums of the European Union insist that they want to see an integrated European state, which is run along managerial rather than political lines, then let us give them credit for telling the truth and accept that this is so. Then let us ensure that they do not succeed.
So it is with the Conservative Party. They have been shouting their policies from the rooftops (though, possibly, those windmills have been too loud).
What are those policies? Well, dear readers, to start with, a Conservative Government under Cameron would be a high-tax, high-regulation government with extra controls of the fiscal and legislative kinds imposed from an outdated understanding of environmental matters: not new technology but taxes and controls.
It will be a government that will insist on keeping health and education in its hands and try to abolish the few remaining choices (except for choices for the rich, such as errm Cameron, Osborn and others). They will, of course, ensure that the money is spent in the best possible way and is directed to those who most need it but we have heard all that before. Same old, same old. The people are not to be trusted with their own lives but to be governed, wisely or otherwise, by those child-faced politicians and the bureaucrats.
It will be a government that will veer from repressive measures against all of us in the name of the war against terror to appeasement towards all existing criminal and potentially terrorist organizations.
It will be a government that will not be able to grapple with the concept of national identity or deal with the problem of generations of youngsters who are uneducated and frustrated by the fact that they are not given any education or pointed towards any possible achievements. Be nice to everybody is not an adequate aim in life.
It will be a government that will flounder in its foreign and defence policies, making sure that they are not accused of being too American and, therefore, being members of the Anglosphere but waffling on about not being ruled by Europe. And, in the meantime, the country will go on drifting into an ever closer and more expensive integrated European defence structure. Then, when it is too late, they will squeal.
How do I know all this? Because, dear reader, I have been told by the Conservative leaders, the Boy-King and his acolytes. Told, loud and clear. It is time to start listening to them.
You, dear reader, may not like these policies. I certainly do not like them. But there is no point in pretending they do not exist. This is what every single person who votes Conservative in the next election will be voting for. You have been warned.
And now, thats enough Tories. (Ed.)
(Cross-posted from EUReferendum)