Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
Anthony Browne, the new Director of Policy Exchange, has an article in the Spectator this week with quite a statement in it: ‘The reason so many go from left to right is the realisation that the Right is, well, right. About pretty much everything’.
His argument is that it’s not Cameron that is ‘lurching to the Right’, but the rest of the country – and in particular the, err, Left. In support of his argument Browne lists a series of specific policy areas – market forces in public services, multiculturalism, criminal justice – where he sees the Right winning the argument. You can’t buck the evidence, he insists.
What to make of it? Well, if you wanted to disagree you could certainly list a similar set of policies areas in which the Left seems to be in the ascendancy. Spending on public services, for example. Or signing up to elimating poverty within a generation. Or deciding that there are social ‘causes of crime’ other than criminals.
For me though, the bigger case for the Right to answer is against an assertion made by David Miliband here: that the Right lacks a coherent intellectual framework for the modern world – particularly when it takes on the polcy goals like ending relative poverty and improving quality of life. Miliband argues:
There is a second step in the ideological journey…understanding the centrality of economic, social, cultural and political interdependence is critical to our strong ideological and political direction as a governing party, because it provides a prism through which to understand the modern world. I have seen no idea of similar leverage from the Tories.
From traffic to terrorism, the economy to the environment, our interdependence means that the extension of personal freedom relies on collective action (and if it needs underlining, not just state action).’
This, for me, encapsulates why there is no intellectual crisis of confidence on the Left, as Browne suggests – and why most of the fundamental re-thinking is being done on the Right.
None of this means, of course, that the Left does not its own critics to answer to – Browne cites digruntled Liberals such as Nick Cohen and Andrew Anthony who argue that the Liberal Left has lost its way, for instance. But the Right right about everything? I don’t think so.
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I don’t trust anyone to develop good policies until and unless they are disidentified from *both* Left and Right – dis-illusioned, as it were. Andrew Anthony’s book is a good sign of disillusion, I hope (I’ve not read it yet)!
Perhaps Anthony’s book is the UK equivalent of US journalist Keith Thompson’s ‘Leaving the Left – moments in the news that made me ashamed to be a liberal’.
(It drives me nuts when people like Madeleine Bunting pipe up with the usual insinuation about vital topics being out of bounds in case they somehow give succour to the Right – recently about Robert Putnam’s findings that multiculturalism destroys social capital, for instance. As if the Left can just forget about the collapse of social capital…).
Quite where this disillusion can best lead to, I don’t yet know. Thompson has been involved with the Integral approach of US philosopher Ken Wilber, something that deliberately goes beyond the usual Left-Right schism (Geoff Mulgan even once recommended Wilber’s Integral approach to a meeting of the key Government strategists). There are various ‘Radical Middle’-type approaches at large too….
What I really don’t want to see is lots of fellow progressives simply turning from being unthinking iconoclasts on the Left, to unthinking iconoclasts on the Right (eg David Horowitz, Melanie Phillips in polemical mode).
I think we can do better than that, whilst still seeing things more like how they are – rather than through the usual ideological blinkers that many of us seem tired of.
Matthew
Public services is a classic - the choice of the issue betrays signs of a shift to the left, the style of intervention points to a shift to the right. Same could be said of the environment.
But all of these things are about shifts in the balance. The left found plenty of political wins in an era when survival values dominated (the welfare state not least among them), and the right will find plenty of political wins in the current era.
The tricky thing, which Demos has been banging on about for some time, is that this combination of changing preferences and changing attitudes to authority increases what people demand of governance at the same time as they make governance more difficult
Yes, there's been a lot of invective and debate, but most of it has been from the denizens of comment is free. Big splash in a little pond. The left in power doesn't exactly seem worried (partly because much of it sympathises with Cohen's views).
I'd argue that what's happening at the moment is part of the left's long coming to terms with the death of the industrial economy. There's a lot of baggage left over from postwar period that went with the more radical kinds of social democracy, and some of it still needs to be shaken out. This is especially true of the white left's understanding of how to relate its essentially enlightenment values to the rest of the world.
Does this debate mean that the right is, well, right? I don't think it demonstrates any great victory. Look at Cameron's painful attempts to modernise his own party - if he isn't trying to engineer a generational shift in Tory thinking, then I'm not sure exactly what he is doing. Both intellectual traditions are realigning themselves to new economic realities. The left has done it much more successfully so far, which explains why Cameron can't muster a convincing poll lead.
Matthew, Chris Dillow makes a similar point over at Stumbling and Mumbling where he says that he doesn’t want ‘conviction politicians’ thanks. His argument is that ‘conviction’ often translates as dogma.
Linked to this and Paul’s point, it seems often to be the use of the market mechanism that is a compenent of consensus in certain areas. Top-up fees are one: the Right (belatedly) likes the use of the price mechanism and greater co-payment, the Left (belatedly) likes removing financial barriers and the link between payment and earnings. Similarly, carbon credits. The (post-Thatcher) Right likes to create new markets, the Left likes to use the state to help us find ways to make collective decisions about how we live together.
I wonder if Bernard Crick has some of the answers here. His view is that politicians shouldn't be tied to particular policies and approaches, but guided by a set of political virtues that include liveliness, compromise, prudence and adaptability. Does this offer a way to combine clear vision with a flexible approach to getting there? Or is that just a bit third way?