By John O’Sullivan
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
As the poor old GOP comes to terms with its presidential
defeat, it is getting a lot of advice from liberal and journalistic
well-wishers on how it must change in order to win or even survive. This gloomy
kind of postmortem is probably overdone for a party that got 47 percent of the
popular vote and retained control of the lower house of Congress. Nor can one
help noticing that the advice given this time is suspiciously similar to the
advice given on previous occasions when the GOP had lost an election: namely
move to the left and adapt to America’s progressive pop culture. This panacea
is marketed under different brand labels, but the mixture is pretty much the
same advice.
On this occasion, however, one element from past
asessments seems to be missing. We are not being told that the best model for a
GOP makeover is David Cameron’s “de-toxification” of Britain’s Tory party. That
was a theme we heard a few years ago from several commentators, some of them
good friends of mine, notably David Frum and David Brooks. Never having
believed it, I naïvely thought that the chorus would die down when Cameron
failed to win a majority in an unlosable election against a Labour government
presiding over economic collapse. Instead, when that duly happened, the theory
of Cameron’s model conservatism stopped breathing for a moment, and then
quickly revived, getting off its sick-bed and holding forth about the virtues
of David Cameron’s “Big Society,” his shrewdness in forming a stable coalition
with the Liberal Democrats, and his prudent toughness in embracing austerity
based on tax hikes today and spending cuts down the road.
Well, 33 months later, the Cameron model looks distinctly
Heath Robinson (British English for Rube Goldberg). No one any longer talks
about the “Big Society,” because no one understood what it meant when they did
and — more depressingly — because Britain is moving steadily in the opposite
direction, towards a more statist and welfarist society. Last week, for
instance, the Con-Lib coalition — one in which the Liberal Democrat tail wags
the Conservative dog most of the time — announced a new universal old-age
“social care” scheme to be financed by maintaining a low threshold (of about
$500,000) for the payment of estate tax, which will become an increase in real
terms as inflation and house prices rise. When in opposition, the Tories had
promised to raise the threshold to about $1,500,000. It was almost the only
popular item in their manifesto. Labour alone promised to defend the existing
estate-tax threshold, which the Tories denounced as an attack on the middle
class. The coalition’s decision last week amounts to trebling the tax by
comparison with the Tory manifesto pledge. It’s an abandonment of principle and
a betrayal of their middle-class supporters in areas such as Southeast England,
where quite modest houses are now subject to estate taxes.
And how is deficit reduction going? The answer has to be:
not very well. The coalition’s budgetary plans under Tory chancellor George
Osborne have gone completely awry. As the British economy has faltered — it
looks as if it’s about to enter its third recession under the present
management — the chancellor has postponed spending cuts and added additional
expenditure items. Public spending as a share of GDP has risen from an alarming
48 percent under Labour to 49.9 percent today. The coalition’s budgetary plans
— allegedly the basis for the Con-Lib coalition — are laxer and more
spendthrift than those in Labour’s last budget under the widely respected
chancellor of the Exchequer Alastair Darling. And as the mirage of future tax
cuts grows ever more evanescent, real new tax hikes loom. To fill the voracious
appetite of the regulatory and welfare state, the Lib-Dems are calling for a
“mansion tax” on homes worth more than $3.2 million (in addition to wealth
taxes on other items, too, such as jewelry).
Some conservatives justify such wealth taxes as a better
(and more capitalist) way to raise revenue than income taxes. Even the
estimable Tim Montgomerie argues in his London Times column that they hit the
undeserving rich rather than the hard-working poor. Even if we grant this —
which we shouldn’t since the undeserving rich pay 27 percent of income tax in
the U.K. and property taxes are already among the highest in advanced countries
— the real significance of this debate is that it illustrates the drift leftwards
of British opinion, including conservative opinion, during the short life of
this government. To quote the shrewd Scottish political critic, Iain Martin,
responding to Montgomerie: “All sorts of ideas which a decade ago would have
been regarded as potty are now mainstream; the government owning enormous
shareholdings in banks springs to mind. Adding one trillion pounds to the
national debt is another. A government with Conservatives in charge of the
Treasury is dragging millions more into the 40p tax band with such
relentlessness that one wonders whether George Osborne hopes eventually to make
40p the new flat-tax rate paid by middle class Britain.”
Not only the tax debate illustrates this inexorable drift
leftwards. Most areas of policy are now moving in the same direction. To take
the latest example, the Tories now seem committed to protecting the principle
of socialized medicine from any blame for the abuse and neglect of patients in
the National Health Service that has led to thousands of deaths. This inertial
drift is rooted ultimately in Cameron’s “detoxification” strategy, which
amounted in essence to a firm refusal to challenge metropolitan liberal opinion
on anything whatsoever and to abandon those conservative ideas that liberals
find unpalatable. Indeed, early accounts of the “thinking” of Cameron
strategists stress that policy should aim at winning centrist Lib-Dem votes
rather than natural right-wing ones. Some even argued that the Tory Party
should deliberately and visibly alienate natural conservatives as a way of
demonstrating to the target centrists that the party was sincere about
rejecting its “nasty” (i.e., realistic) image and ugly supporters. Cameronians
were always talking about seizing a “Clause IV moment” — a reference to Tony
Blair’s rejection of Clause IV of the Labour-party constitution, which
committed the party to full-bore nationalization of industry — when one
arrived. And when one was slow to arrive, David Cameron provoked one anyway by
committing his government to same-sex marriage.
Same-sex marriage is a rich topic on which much could be
said. In the context of the “detoxification” debate, however, its relevance is
that it was a strategy for the Cameronians to demonstrate their metropolitan
liberal credentials by mounting a kultukampf against their own conservative
supporters. As Andrew Lilco — a supporter of same-sex marriage, as it happens —
points out, the practical benefits of such marriage could have been achieved by
quite minor technical changes in the law on civil partnerships and any wider
acceptance of it left to slower and less contentious social processes. Such a
strategy would have achieved whatever it achieved with the least ill will and
social upheaval and with the rights of those who objected to it fully preserved.
But, as Lilco ironically observed, there was also a path to same-sex marriage
that maximized the damage to social relations and to the rights of Christians,
traditionalists, and others. Helpfully Lilco gave the recipe for how not to do
it:
Go around
saying: “The problem with this country is that there are still far too many
people that disapprove of homosexual sexual relations. Something must be done
about that.”
Say: “The fact
that heterosexuals get ‘married’ whilst homosexuals get ‘civilly partnered’
enshrines in law a moral inequality. That is a terrible thing, and that
difference must be removed.”
Say: “Anyone who
wants to use a different word for heterosexual partnerships from homosexual
partnerships is, by definition, a homophobe and a bigot.”
Say: “The
central purpose of this new law is twofold. First, it aims to deprive opponents
of homosexuality a language in which to express their dissent — we shall take
their central moral terms, the thing they say is the ideal and what is right
and any deviation from which they regard as wrong, and change its meaning.
Furthermore, we shall do so in the context of the widespread use of equalities
legislation to crush dissent to modern moral norms. Second, it aims to
demonstrate to the country that the Conservative Party is in a process of
unceasing revolution, rooting out anyone with old-fashioned socially
conservative opinions, because we don’t want their sort as our members even if
we have to tolerate them amongst our voters.”
Finally, having
done all the above, just to emphasize to everyone that our purpose had nothing
whatever to do with allowing homosexuals access to legal partnerships that
regulate sexual activity and, instead, everything to do with crushing moral
dissent, the law we shall actually introduce to Parliament will explicitly
exclude homosexual adultery and homosexual non-consummation (see p26 here,
noting that Section 12 paragraphs (a) and (b) of the Matrimonial Causes Act
1973 are the non-consummation provisions).
Now, dear reader, would you like to guess which of these
two paths the Conservative-party leadership and government chose? Did they make
this a morally neutral measure, adding to available contracting opportunities
for law-abiding and peaceable people in a liberal way? Or did they make this a
morally censorious measure, aimed at depriving their moral opponents of a
language (or even in some arenas, potentially, a legal right) to express their
dissent, without even adding to the legal opportunities for homosexuals? Take a
wild guess.
Mr. Lilco’s diagnosis is spot-on, and events have turned
out exactly as he argued — except in one respect. It is not even clear that the
same-sex marriage legislation will become law this year. More than half of the
Tory party in the House of Commons either voted against it or abstained. Its
opponents in the House of Lords may well be emboldened by that fact when the
bill comes before the upper house. They might reject the bill or slow its
passage with parliamentary trench warfare. Win or lose, however, the
introduction of the bill without any serious consultation or discussion has
proven a political disaster. It has split the Tory party, alienated the
Christian churches, angered the ethnic minorities whom Cameronians want to woo,
and given additional fuel for the rise of the socially conservative United
Kingdom Independence party, which now regularly gets 9 to 12 percent in opinion
polls. (Recent polls have put the Tories as low as 29 percent.)
“Detoxification” looks more and more like a strategy for
reducing the Tory party to a rump party of libertarians and big business on the
model of the German Free Democrats — except that its commitment to sound
finance and property rights is much less reliable. Social, religious, and patriotic
conservatives have been told that they and their opinions are not wanted even
if their votes are. They in turn show signs of drifting toward UKIP, which for
the first time since democracy was first established offers such voters a
plausible conservative alternative to the Tories. Indeed, as I pointed out
(yes, well, but I did tell you so) in the Financial Times not long after
Cameron was elected Tory leader:
Perhaps the best criticism of this strategy came from a
French Gaullist: “Cameron is trying to create the very division of the Right
that has been the biggest obstacle to French conservatives since Mitterrand
deliberately fostered the rise of the National Front.” Were he to succeed, the
Tories might have to wait for a Gianfranco Fini to emerge from UKIP to put
Humpty Dumpty together again.
Well, maybe Nigel Farage can do it. Or maybe Boris
Johnson will steal his Mandate of Heaven. In either event, the Cameron caper is
a model for the GOP — of what not to do.
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