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Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
The Political Virtues
CHAPTER 1
The Broken Promise
CHAPTER 2
The Common Wealth
CHAPTER 3
The Liberal Democracy
CHAPTER 4
Power Failure
CHAPTER 5
The Open Society
EPILOGUE
Start Again
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Also by Philip Collins
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Political Virtues
A Political Home
Sir Robert Peel died a fêted man. On 10 July 1850, eight days after he fell from his horse to a sudden death, a public meeting in the court house at Bury Town Hall resolved to erect a monument as a memorial to ‘our eminent townsman’. A Testimonial Committee was appointed and £2,700 was crowd-funded, from 2,000 contributors. An exhibition was staged in February 1851 for the public to inspect the mooted statuettes, busts and architectural designs. Though the venue forbade entry to ‘Persons in Clogs’, the working people of Bury ran up the steps in their stockinged-feet, close to 15,000 of them, to see the designs. Much the same number attended the inauguration of Edward Hodges Baily’s finished statue on 8 September 1852, in the company of Sir Robert’s son, Frederick Peel, MP for Bury.
Robert Peel was held in such esteem because he was thought to have spoken plainly in the hope of improving the condition of the people. Can anybody imagine today the stockinged-footed legions rushing to the municipal hall to approve plans to commemorate a politician? Right now, nobody is putting politicians on a pedestal.
The greatest political son of my home town has stood in bronze since 1852, surveying the public space outside the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin. The statue of Peel depicts the Bury Prime Minister clad in contemporary dress, speaking to the House of Commons about the high price of bread that made life such a misery for the urban poor. On the statue’s granite pedestal, a circular bronze panel contains lines from the speech in which Peel announced his resignation as Prime Minister on 29 June 1846. ‘It may be, I shall leave a name’, the inscription reads, ‘sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abode of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow – when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice’.
These are words that speak both to and about the people. Peel was talking about the twin virtues of British democratic politics at its best; it grants power to the people and it provides them, fairly, with benefits. Peel knew that his action would be likely to split the Conservative party but he proceeded all the same. His memorial in Bury is a reminder that good politics can redeem its promise. It is far from doing so now.
Today in Britain there is a legion of people without a political home. I am one of them. I grew up in a staunchly Conservative family in Robert Peel’s town of Bury. But rebellious like Peel himself, I split from the family allegiance because the Social Democratic Party (SDP) seemed like a novel answer to Britain’s mood of decline. Even at a young age the discipline of the Tories wedded to the romance of Labour seemed to me like the perfect compound rather than the terms of the fight. When the SDP collapsed in 1988, I joined the Labour party. I did so for the same reason that most people do. I wanted to make the world better. If that sounds naive then it is deliberately so. I believed at the time, and I believe now, that good politics can be the agent of the good society and, unlike my grandfather, who always saw the Conservative party as the vehicle of progress, I found that energy in the Labour party. I soon learnt that too much of that energy was poorly directed. This was a time, the mid-1980s, when the far left had taken control of the party. My first job in politics was for Frank Field who had been deselected as MP for Birkenhead by the entryist group Socialist Organiser. The antics of the far left taught me an unforgettable political lesson. When people become convinced of their own righteousness the last thing they are capable of being is righteous. The politics were masculine and vicious. Claiming to act in the name of working people, the left achieved nothing beyond confirming its own purity. Today the same people are back. The Labour party has fallen victim to a juvenile anti-capitalism and loathing of America. A party too hospitable to conspiracy theories, chief among them anti-Semitism, is, sadly, no longer a noble institution.
The Conservative party, meanwhile, has dragged the nation into its own private feud. Fired by too pure an account of sovereignty, the party is in the process, whimsically and chaotically, of taking Britain out of the EU for reasons it can barely remember let alone define. The split instigated by Peel over the Corn Laws opened a fault line in Conservative thought between trade and protectionism, between being open to the world and being closed off. That fault line has run through all of the party’s travails over Europe and, at last, it is yielding to the temptation to raise the drawbridge. It is a deeply inadequate response to a world in which connections are more extensive and more important than ever before.
The two main parties have retreated inwards and the brand of the Liberal Democrats is fatally tarnished. They are both indulging themselves in what they really think, unconcerned that what they really think is not what the nation really needs. When neither party can honour the two virtues of British politics, the country needs new leadership and new ideas. The bronze memorial to Sir Robert Peel in Bury stands today as a reproach to a political class with nothing important to say. There is no sense of popular power and the results, measured in material progress, have ceased to flow. It is time to start again.
Three Life Stories
But in order to start again we need to understand what we have lost. To understand that we need to know how we gained it in the first place. The story of the promise of politics can be told through three family tales which start and end where Peel stands, in Bury.
In 1788, in Chamber Hall in Bury, a boy was born into the calico-printing fortune of the local mill-owner. Throughout the odyssey of this young man’s life, via Bury Grammar School, Harrow, Oxford University, the House of Commons and 10 Downing Street, he retained a distinct regional accent and was regularly disparaged for cutting his jelly with a knife. He will forever be known, and to my mind admired, for breaking the mould of British politics. Today, as well as standing guard in bronze over his home town, Sir Robert Peel lends his name to the by-pass, the health centre, a public house and the 128-foot tower which was inaugurated the day after Peel’s statue and which overlooks the town from Holcombe Hill.
Peel had great intellectual gifts and an ardent work ethic but he was lucky enough to be born into a fortune. In time, life chances became more meritocratic. By no means fully and by no means everywhere, but often enough for it to seem that effort plus ability, the meritocratic formula, could secure the good life. The second Bury story begins on the threshold of one world war and spans another. This is the tale of a man born in 1910, within sight of Walshaw Hall, the seat of the weaving entrepreneur James Kenyon, Conservative MP for Bury. This child stayed in his town through school, work and retirement. Though evidently bright enough for higher education, he left school at fifteen, to work in the textile industry whose presence in the town owed so much to Robert Peel’s father. This man worked fifty years for James Kenyon, rising from office boy to foreman. On the day he retired he had his picture in the Bury Times clutching a gold clock and shaking hands with the boss.
The name of this man was Thomas Taylor and he was my grandfather. Adamantine, conservative and thirsty for the knowledge he memorised from the encyclopaedia, he became a church warden and a school governor. Tom Taylor was a man of granite decency and he was a meritocrat. He worked inordinately hard, entering every penny he earned and spent in double ledgers in his book of accounts. My grandfather took great pride in the work that was his source of welfare, both material and spiritual. I have, fading on my desk before me as I write these words, a photograph, of me as a boy with the man who launched my family’s journey towards the place from which I am now writing these reflections.
My grandfather’s story is the platform on which the protagonist of the third tale stands. It is the beginning of my story. The security my grandfather built, in the last era in which manufacturing industry was a sure road to prosperity, he passed on to his daughter. The legacy included a devotion to the Church of England, a respect for education and a moral code for life. It also included a life-long and ardent allegiance to the Conservative party, membership of which my grandfather saw as both a signal that he had ascended the social scale and a guarantee that greater progress was possible. He regarded the Labour party’s stress on equality as proclaiming its intention to hold him back.
The year after I was born, James Kenyon & Son was taken over by the Albany Felt Company of Albany, New York. It was a sign that power had passed from our town. As a boy I played in the derelict, dangerous Peel Mill, searching for the resident tramp of our fevered imaginations. It was a palatial structure that retained its grandeur even though the clatter of looms had long gone. There is nothing there now. The dog-walkers and runners on the banks of the River Irwell would never guess, if they did not know, that a castle of the first Industrial Revolution once stood here.
My mother was never destined for Peel Mill. She spent her working life fulfilling the only ambition she ever had which was to be a primary school teacher. She taught me too and that was the start of the journey through the town’s grammar school and on to higher education that made it possible for me to leave Bury for the rest of the world. I grew up in a household that had its dinner at what I would now call lunchtime and in which tea was a meal as well as a drink. Nobody went out for dinner and, if they had, it would have happened in the middle of the day. In the vanishingly unlikely event that we had been invited out for supper, my parents would have expected a cup of cocoa and a biscuit. From there I went on a journey through the English class system, through the doors of the great British institutions, always nervous but never less than excited: Cambridge University, the House of Commons, the BBC, the City of London, 10 Downing Street, The Times.
Next to the picture of my grandfather I have on my desk a photograph of my mother, with my two boys, aged four and two at the time, in the Downing Street rose garden in 2006. My mother liked to embarrass me with the story that, the night before I was born, she dreamt of Harold Wilson, whom she could not abide. It was my fitting revenge that the daughter of Thomas Taylor, herself a life-long Conservative, should find herself at the summer party thrown by Tony Blair, a Labour Prime Minister. Mr Blair always asked what my mum thought of policies. That was because she was from Bury, a town that always picked the winner in a general election. It was a moment of great pride, even if she did regard my unaccountable decision to swap sides as enough to make Peel step down from his pedestal. There was never a day, when I knocked on the famous black door to enter Downing Street, that I did not reflect on the privilege. I feel the same when I open a copy of The Times and find my script offered to the nation under a flattering picture taken some time ago. I like to think my grandfather might have been proud of that, even if he would have been dubious about my political affiliation.
This is my story and many others could once tell a similar story of their own. It is, though, today a rarer story than it was, and that is evidence of the broken promise of British politics. It was once assumed that every succeeding generation would do materially better than the one that went before. Parents would hand on to children a world enhanced and improved. Sir Robert Peel’s two political virtues offered power and progress to the people. My grandfather found secure employment in manufacturing which, through dedicated husbandry, he turned into opportunities that my mother took and passed on to me. This was, though the connection was never conscious, the contract between the political class and the electorate it served.
The Story of Modernisation
This book tells how that contract can be reinstated. The story of politics is the story of constant modernisation. A political movement courts success only when it looks like the future arriving. Clement Attlee promised that the sacrifice of war would be repaid by the benefits of welfare. Harold Wilson pledged to make Britain comfortable in the white heat of the technological revolution. Tony Blair spoke the language of globalisation and the coming information age. All three, in their own ways, said that their politics would shape and domesticate the future. Today, in an economy in which too many people miss out, in which unmerited rewards flow freely and in which work seems to be threatened by the next wave of industrial revolution there is an urgent need for a political movement that sounds like the cavalry of the future taking the field.
I begin with a definition of what has gone awry but the main focus of the book has to be time future rather than time past. No new dispensation is possible, however, without a clear understanding of time present and, in ‘The Broken Promise’, the first chapter, I chart the terrain. Politics over the last decade has been operating under new terms and conditions. When the next generation cannot reasonably expect any improvement on the living standards of their parents, then the implicit political bargain has broken down. This is the troubling context in which Britain faces, I go on to suggest, ten pressing questions to which the current set of politicians has no answers. First, there are the economic questions of how Britain makes a living in the world, how we tackle inequalities of income and wealth, the most conspicuous of which has become the allocation of housing, and how we reassure the workforce that technology is not a mortal threat. Then there are the political questions of how we restore faith in public deliberation, the location of power and how we improve life chances by devising public services that both enhance the citizen body and respect justice between the generations. Last come the vital cultural questions of providing a home for all, ensuring that Britain remains a tolerant and open society and defining Britain’s place in the world.
The rest of the book seeks to answer those questions. It will set out the principles and the policies to design what I shall call the new common wealth of Great Britain. This is an idea with a deep heritage in the best of the various traditions of British political thought but it melds them to form something new. The common wealth will put an enterprising economy at the service of an open society to create a liberal democracy of which we can be proud.
The fundamental fact of recent British politics is that the average British worker has not had a pay rise for a decade. This has bled into a more general critique of modern capitalism and its unfair and unequal distribution of rewards. In chapter 2, ‘The Common Wealth’, I return to the origins of modern capitalism in the public obligation of the corporate enterprise. An economy in which the fruits are more evenly spread is, I argue, not only a present-day necessity, it is also a way of honouring the history of capitalism and therefore of protecting an open economy against its enemies. This will require a system of taxation which is based on principles of desert and earned income.
The next task is to manage the same recuperation for the reputation of politics. The advertised and formidable benefits of democracy are that people are granted sovereign power and that their world gets better. The two virtues are linked at the deepest level. The world improves, in part, because people feel a sense of agency. However, British politics has fallen into a rut in which neither of these two benefits are accruing. The purpose of chapter 3, ‘The Liberal Democracy’, is therefore to describe a state apparatus that can both command widespread popular assent and start, once again, to work efficiently on behalf of the citizen body. This will mean, in one of the most centralised states in the democratic world, that power will need to be deployed at a far lower level. It is often noted that the people no longer have much trust in politicians. This is true, but not as telling as it sounds. The far greater problem is that politicians have not trusted the people.
The relationship between the citizen and the state is enacted in the public services. The ways we educate our children, treat our sick or care for our needy are not just important transactions in which we exchange vital goods. The organisational choices and spending priorities that we make are ways to embody an idea of who we are. The ethos of public service which informs our public relationships with one another defines a public realm. In chapter 4, ‘Power Failure’, I set out the principles of control, capability, prevention and contribution that should govern the way we provide vital services.
We live a life in common with others when we meet in public places but to live in common with other people is also an act of imagination. When there is an identity between the country we hold in our minds and the country we hold in prospect, then that nation is likely to be content. Division is inevitable in the sense that a democracy will always be home to plural views. These views have to be settled, though, in a civil way, and that entails agreement on certain basic rules and structures. When the claims of particular identities are too strong, common life gets pulled apart. In chapter 5, ‘The Open Society’, I will describe the nation that we should want Britain to be, a conception of a country that asks neither too much nor too little of any of its citizens of many faiths and many cultures.
These five chapters seek to define and then answer the questions that will determine the next phase of Britain’s course as a nation. It sketches a new common wealth for Britain. Throughout the book there runs an assumption that the nation needs a jolt, an electric surge to galvanise its politics. It is drifting into a position that shuts it away from the world. Unsure of its place and its status, an old country is in danger of fading from view. Neither of the two main political parties has any inkling of how to stop this slow dissolve. The Conservative party has fallen into Peel’s chasm between open trade and a closed nation. The Labour party has retreated into its nostrum that all the deficiencies of public services can be met by spending the money it has no idea how it can raise.
Above and beyond the two dominant parties, a large tract of political ground lies unoccupied. A band of political orphans has been created. These are the people to whom and for whom this book purports to speak. Half the electorate say that no party speaks for them and that they would consider switching their vote if there were a credible third option available. More than that say no party speaks for them. These political orphans come from all strata of society and all age groups. They lean both to the right and to the left, though none too far. Their sense of lacking a home is itself an indictment of the recent conduct of British politics. The archaic and undignified British constitution is cracking. Power is hoarded by a distant and unresponsive centre and local outposts, despite the few recent innovations of mayoralties, remain vestigial and weak. This is a political dispensation in which neither of the two advertised virtues arrives as stated. Neither agency nor benefits are in evidence. It is surely time for us to start again.
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