Limited liberalism

You often hear people being spoken of in approving terms as being “socially liberal”, or indeed describing themselves as such. This seems to cover a vaguely-defined range of issues including supporting gay marriage, women’s rights, cycling and drug legalisation, opposing racial discrimination and strongly believing in man-made global warming.

All very laudable and motherhood-and-apple-pie, you might think. But, while claiming to support free speech, they are often strangely quiet when it comes to the freedoms of those who take an alternative view. If you don’t support their right-on agenda, you really don’t have a right to be heard. And they suffer from a bizarre cognitive dissonance when it comes to their attitude towards Islamic fundamentalism, which opposes all they hold dear, but of which they regard any criticism as “racist”.

They are also very selective in the kind of causes they will stand up for. I can’t remember the “socially liberal” doing much to oppose any of the bans implemented by the last Labour government – handguns, hunting with hounds, tobacco advertising, smoking in enclosed public places, not to mention the ongoing war against alcohol and constantly expanding restrictions on private motor transport.

So it seems that their vision of liberalism is actually extremely limited. Supporting freedom doesn’t add up to much if you only support the particular freedoms you happen to approve of. I always take the view that someone’s attitude towards smoking and smokers is a reliable touchstone of how liberal they actually are. Indeed, whenever I see someone proclaim themselves to be “socially liberal”, I tend to assume they are actually, in many respects, extremely illiberal.

Watching the world burn

Elections have always been seen as a means of deciding who should make up the government. But, in recent years, there has been a growing view that it doesn’t really make all that much difference. “Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in,” people say. It looks more and more like something that is done to you rather than something in which ordinary people have a say. Another saying is “it’s like choosing which colour of stick you want to be beaten with.”

We seem to be ruled by a political class that, whichever party is in power, adopts a very similar internationalist, politically correct, metropolitan, liberal, pro-global-warming standpoint that seems increasingly detached from the grass roots. So it’s not surprising that voters have been deserting the two main parties and, over the past four years, the split-the-difference LibDems too. South of the Border the main beneficiary of this trend has been UKIP.

However, there’s a tendency to regard a vote for UKIP as a howl of rage rather than an expression of any coherent sentiment, as in this generally quite perspicacious Guardian article by Matthew Goodwin, which suggests it has a “nihilistic” quality.

What Conservatives (and Labour) fail to understand is that Ukip’s appeal is as much about a diffuse but intense feeling of unease over the direction and pace of social change in modern Britain as it is about a specific and yearning desire to end immigration, leave the EU or reform Westminster. These voters do not like how Britain is changing, and they loathe politicians even more. This explains their nihilistic quality. In their hearts most Ukippers probably know that they might not get what they want. But some people just want to watch the world burn.

Surely, though, if you believe that the major parties have forfeited the right to your support through ignoring you, you are quite entitled to vote for someone else to show your disgust or teach them a lesson. And the same applies just as much to anyone voting for the Greens or the SNP. You know that, in the short term at least, your chosen party is unlikely to be able to implement much of its programme. But you will be choosing a Westminster MP who will represent your views, and who may, depending on Parliamentary arithmetic, be able to bring some influence to bear on government policy.

As US President John Quincy Adams once said. “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” So, today, if you live in Clacton or Heywood & Middleton, go out to the polling station and do just that. No vote is a wasted vote if it reflects your own beliefs.

Revolt from below?

It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog to learn that I am a strong, although not uncritical, supporter of UKIP. So I was very interested to read the new book about the party entitled Revolt on the Right by academics Robert Ford and Matthew J. Goodwin. It includes an in-depth account of the party’s somewhat tortuous rise to prominence which is put across in a generally fair and balanced way that even comes across as mildly sympathetic at times, even though I doubt whether the authors are UKIP voters. It also offers an in-depth analysis of the social profile of UKIP supporters and their motivations, and looks at the potential future opportunities for an electoral breakthrough.

However, I would say a major drawback of the book is that the authors are essentially psephologists rather than students of political thought, and they fail to give sufficient coverage of the ideological motivations of UKIP supporters. They are also too ready to lump the party in with the rest of the European “radical right”, when its origins essentially lie in a free-market, small-state outlook rather than xenophobia.

They try too hard to shoehorn all their statistics into an overarching theory that UKIP essentially appeals to poorer, older voters who feel left behind by modern socially liberal, internationalist, multicultural political trends. There is undoubtedly a substantial element of truth in that, but the party’s appeal spreads far wider, and indeed many of the local council seats they have won have been in distinctly middle-class areas.

While I agree with the view that we have far too much immigration into this country, combined with too little quality, it isn’t really a hot-button issue for me. My main motivations for supporting UKIP are opposition to the European Union, scepticism about demands to use man-made global warming as an excuse for far-reaching policy changes, and detestation of the growing climate of lifestyle bullying that has found its supreme expression in the smoking ban which has ripped the guts out of the British pub trade and particularly penalised the working class.

There is a strong feeling across all social classes that a homogenised political class has grown up in the UK that is increasingly detached from the lives and experiences of ordinary people. At times, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband can be hard to distinguish – a view set out by Janet Daley in this article, in which she says “There will really be only two contestants in the next general election: the political class and the people.” That is the feeling that UKIP is channelling with growing success.

I’ve seen Nigel Farage in the flesh at a fringe event at last year’s Tory conference, and he’s an accomplished public performer with whom I would probably agree on at least 95% of political issues. But there’s evidence of a growing faultline in UKIP between the “small-staters”, who want to see low taxes, an end to banning things and the debunking of the global warming myth, and the “right-wing populists”, who are more exercised by immigration and gay marriage and even toy with such ideas as renationalising the railways. If the party ends up going too far down the latter road it will eventually run into the same sand as the BNP and leave many people such as myself who are fed up with the self-serving LibLabCon triumvirate without a political home.

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

In the 2010 General Election, UKIP gained a 3% share of the national vote. Recently, though, they achieved 22% in the Rotherham by-election, and 28% at Eastleigh, in both of which they came second. An opinion poll published today shows their support at 17% of voters. The figures indicate a party very much on the rise. However, it it is widely suggested that much of this support will evaporate at the 2015 General Election when voters will have to make a clear choice between Conservative and Labour.

Will this really happen, though? The record of the current Tory-led government isn’t all that different from Labour. They have not reclaimed any powers from the EU, they have continued Labour’s disastrous green policies and done nothing to ensure future energy security, they have maintained Labour’s war on the motorist and they have taken Labour’s lifestyle bullying even further with the ban on tobacco displays and proposals for minimum alcohol pricing and plain packaging for tobacco products.

Yes, the Conservatives are in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and thus are restricted in what they can actually do. But from their rhetoric I don’t get the impression they really want to do anything different. So a Tory vote in 2015 will just be a vote for more of the same, whereas a vote for UKIP will send a strong signal to the political class that things cannot just go on as they did before. A few years of disastrous Milibandism might be a price worth paying for the return of decent government that is in tune with the instincts of the British people.

It’s also interesting that the Conservative Home blog recently featured a list of 20 election-winning policies for the Conservatives in 2015, most of which seemed to be lifted straight from the UKIP manifesto.

Blue-eyed boys

A recent proposal that teachers should be subjected to performance-related pay has been widely welcomed. Surely it will reward the conscientious and dedicated while weeding out the incompetent and the timeservers.

However, in reality, performance-related pay doesn’t work like that at all. Rather it tends to reward those who commit themselves to corporate objectives, who are good at ticking boxes, who toe the line and don’t rock the boat. In other words, crawlers and arselickers. It is what has been described as “blue-eyed boy syndrome”.

Many years ago, I saw someone spectacularly promoted far beyond his abilities because he was adept at saying what the top management wanted him to, and enthusiastically adopting every latest fad and buzzword, while being able to maintain the image of being a bit of a hard-talking rough diamond. He eventually crashed and burned, but for many that is the route to the absolute pinnacle of corporate life.

How can a system in which pay increases are determined by the capricious whim and prejudice of management be in any way regarded as fair? People should be paid the rate for the job, dependent on how much it takes to recruit suitably-qualified candidates, and bonuses should be handed out to everyone determined by overall corporate performance.

In my experience, the most effective workers in any organisation are those who are dedicated to their job, but plough their own furrow and have a healthy disrespect for management bullshit. Consequently they are often dismissed as “difficult” or “mavericks”. But slavish, toadying conformity never produced any business breakthrough, nor inspired any school pupil.

The Secret People

This is a classic poem by G. K. Chesterton describing how the English people have, over the centuries, succumbed to various forms of alien rule. Some of it makes rather uneasy reading nowadays, particularly the reference to “a cringing Jew”, but it still contains a profound truth about our country.

The penultimate stanza is especially relevant today:

They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.

“They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies” very precisely spears the attitude of the Cameron/Clegg/Miliband ruling class.

Over the years, I’ve heard various comments along the lines of “people will only take this for so long”. But, so far, they always have. The only glimmer of anything changing was during the 2000 fuel protest, which for a moment had Bliar really shitting himself. That was a short-lived genuine upsurge of popular feeling.

But more and more people are becoming alienated, whether by the foxhunting ban, the smoking ban, the punitive fuel duties, the constant war against the car, the alcohol duty escalator, gay marriage, metrication, open-door immigration or whatever. They may not form any particularly coherent feelings, but they will reach the conclusion that no politicians are to be trusted or will ever deliver what ordinary people want.

It will come, one day, but the timing and the reason will be unpredictable and probably, of themselves, irrational. But it will come. It will come. And our wrath will be the worst, because it has been pent up so long.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God's scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

Your duty is to keep it down

Well done to George Osborne in last week’s Autumn Statement to not only postpone the planned increase in fuel duty, but to scrap it entirely.

I suspect it has now got to the stage where fuel costs are such a critical component of the typical household budget that any further rise is politically impossible before the next general election.

In general quite a deft performance by Osborne in the face of the generally appalling economic situation. The pratfalls of the 2012 Budget were conspicuously avoided.

Outdoing Moscow and Peking

Tory MP Aidan Burley has found himself in hot water for daring to suggest that yesterday’s Olympic event was “the most leftie opening ceremony” he had ever seen. But, as Chris Snowdon points out here, surely that’s just a statement of fact. Can anyone think of one that was more so, even going back to Moscow in 1980?

The glorification of the NHS was utterly disagraceful. It seems to have become a national shibboleth and yet, if it’s so wonderful, why has no other country, even the supposedly lefty Scandinavian countries, adopted the same inefficient, monolithic, bureaucratic model?

Chris’ more general musings about the whole Olympic hysteria are also well worth reading.

Escalator scrapped!

Great news that Osborne has scrapped the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty planned for 1 August - which would have become 4p/litre at the pump once VAT was taken into account. Let us hope that this heralds the end of any duty increases so long as the pump price remains above 100p.

As pointed out by Tom Stevenson, the fall in the international oil price will hopefully presage a general economic recovery.

An Olympic-scale waste of money

He’s only saying what we knew already, but Dominic Lawson is quite right to point out here what a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money the 2012 London Olympics are going to be. Not to mention the fact that, overall, they will have a negative effect on tourism.

Some years ago, the European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) produced a study which concluded: "There appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games and considerable evidence of damage." It added that predictions to the contrary by the politicians attempting to justify the outlay of their taxpayers' money "form part of a tradition".

There’s no evidence either that they will lead to any increase in participation in sport (as if that was government’s business anyway). And if you dare to complain about the whole gravy train you risk being branded as a killjoy:

But the best of all news is for the politicians and sports bureaucrats who committed us to spending £10bn on facilities for two weeks of running and jumping: they will have the grandest seats in the stadium entirely free, and will be chauffeured there in special lanes while the rest of the capital's inhabitants are snarled up in Olympic traffic jams.

Anyone who begrudges them that is clearly a killjoy, and not participating in the Olympic spirit.