Everything in Moderation

You may remember those posters: ‘I’ve never voted Tory before, but …’ The Conservatives put those up because they realised that, among undecided voters, an extraordinary number said that while they were thoroughly disillusioned with Labour, they had never voted Conservative before. Now, they said, they were on the brink of backing David Cameron. And then, again and again, they added this: ‘My grandad would roll in his grave.’

Many pollsters assume – and adjust their polls accordingly – that a disproportionate number of these undecided voters will return to their past voting behaviour rather than following the trend. This has helped to make polls more accurate in the past. The result largely depends on whether that assumption holds good this time.

So, annoyingly, this election will be determined by people fighting a tribal urge that I’ve never felt and can’t completely relate to. The best I can offer is this: once I considered myself on the centre left, and I don’t any more. And once I, too, had ‘never voted Tory’, but in the end I didn’t find it very difficult at all.

Being on the centre left was very comfortable. I found Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric jarring, I thought the Tory triumphalism of the 1980s distasteful (sometimes wrongly – I used to think that all those flags and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ were sinister, but when I finally attended a Tory conference it was more like Seaside Special), it made life a great deal easier at dinner parties. The centre left, too, seemed the right place for a social liberal. Naturally on guard for the merest hint of racism, I also believed that gay rights were among the most important issues for my generation.

Beyond this, I found the certainty of the Tories off-putting. I have always recoiled from people whose eyes shine with ideological fervour. My parents’ experience, imprisoned by fascists and communists, made me an instinctive moderate, suspicious of grand schemes and those who think they have found the key to the happiness of mankind. It’s true that such certainty could be found on the left too, and I didn’t like that either. But it seemed to suffuse the Conservative Party at that time.

But there was a problem. One I found more and more difficult to ignore. It just seemed that again and again, the Right was more, well, right. The economic policies coming out of the left ranged from the disastrous to the silly. The unions, basically a destructive force, were accorded too much respect and given too much power. The Left seemed incapable of understanding the need for a strong defence policy. So in 1992 I became a Conservative.

Some of this Tony Blair could see and put right. I liked his social liberalism, I thought him often moderate and reasonable, I shared his Atlanticism, and (I duck for cover here) I found him rather charismatic, and still do. But I am not at all surprised that his New Labour project is ending in failure. Because while he changed much about Labour, there are things he couldn’t change.

Like every Labour government, this one has spent too much. On every single occasion – honestly, every time – the party has been in office for more than nine months, there has been a huge economic crisis, made worse by its public spending. Underpinning this mistake are two wrong-headed ideas that are deeply (indeed, almost unconsciously) held on the left.

The first (understandable but incorrect) is that it is cruel to say no to requests for spending and to interest groups. The second is that for every problem there must be a government response. I am a pragmatic person. I don’t have some abstract, ideological aversion to ever spending taxpayers’ money. But surely Labour has now tested this approach to destruction.

Yet, if we abandon this spendthrift policy, we must reform public services so that they are sustainable on budgets that grow less quickly. And Labour has failed on this too. Its coalition of old and new – a gallery to which Gordon Brown was playing for more than a decade – slowed reform until Mr Blair ran out of time and the rest of us ran out of money and patience.

When Mr Cameron called himself the ‘heir to Blair’, I think this is what he meant. That the Conservative Party needed to change to face the modern world, to make itself a welcoming home for social liberals and moderates, and people who felt Tory rhetoric had been too harsh. And when it did so, it would be ready to put right what Mr Blair and Mr Brown got wrong. I hope he now gets the chance to see it through.

It’s human to dread change and fear loss

Good conservatives understand the value of tradition, but know when to welcome gay marriage or malls

6 February 2013

Years ago, before they knocked down the factory and built Brent Cross Shopping Centre, before the Brent Bridge Hotel came down and they put up suburban homes, before Mr and Mrs Underwood moved from next door to a block of flats at the end of the road, I bought my first record – ‘C Moon’ by Paul McCartney and Wings – in Hounsom’s on Watford Way, just up the road from Hendon Central Station.

It was a little shop full of records, and behind the counter were two elderly (or at least to my ten-year-old self they looked elderly) ladies. In the back the brother of one of them wore a white coat and mended television sets, occasionally popping out, waving a screwdriver, to see what was going on. The ladies helped me to choose albums, adding to my collection of Beatles records, recommending Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, selling me Nilsson Schmilsson by Harry Nilsson.

To get there you went past Woollon’s, the pharmacist, who also developed film and sold cameras, and then Peter’s, the tobacconist, where you could buy sweets to consume at the pictures next door at cheaper prices than in the cinema kiosk.

Cross over Queen’s Road and there was the Express Dairy which delivered our milk in glass bottles and sold chocolate yoghurt with a funny sort of disc-shaped hard topping. After that, Batty’s, which sold stationery. I bought fountain pens there for school. (A fountain pen was compulsory, even if for me it was torture, reducing my work to incomprehensible smudges.) Then past the undertakers, with their newspaper clippings in the window from the day they buried Nelson, and you were at Hounsom’s.

They’ve all gone now, the record shop, the sweet shop, the cinema, the lot. All except the undertakers, but I suppose we’ll always need them. What sort of conservative would I be if I didn’t miss them, if their disappearance didn’t make me just a tiny bit melancholy? Indeed what sort of human being would I be? We all have this sadness, this dread of loss, within us. One of conservatism’s greatest strengths is its appreciation of this.

The great liberal philosopher John Rawls developed his famous theory of justice by imagining the arrangements that human beings would regard as fair if we were behind a veil of ignorance. What would we agree to if we had no past and didn’t know what our future held?

I am a conservative, rather than a pure liberal, partly because I don’t believe you can arrive at a theory of fairness in this way. Rawls is asking what we would regard as fair as human beings if we weren’t one. For what makes us human is at least partly our past, our experiences, the records we bought in Hounsom’s.

And it is for this reason – even though gay rights has been one of the most important causes to me all my life – that I understand Conservative opposition to gay marriage, and can sympathise with it even while thinking it wrongheaded. Conservatives draw strength from tradition. They do not abandon it lightly. They are right not to abandon it lightly.

It was while I was thinking about the Tory split on gay marriage that I heard Desert Island Discs with Tesco’s former boss Sir Terry Leahy (or should that be Dessert Island Discs? Sorry). And Sir Terry was asked about the way his supermarket’s growth had led many small shops to go out of business. Did it make him sad?

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But it is part of progress. People aren’t made to shop in supermarkets. They choose to shop there.’ It was all there in Sir Terry’s answer, the core of the modernising Conservative case.

Batty’s and the Express Dairy may have been part of the fabric of my youth. But just as important to the tradition of this country is a restless entrepreneurial spirit and a belief in liberty. There is a tension between these things that cannot be eliminated. A society cannot be successful if it lightly discards tradition, but it cannot be successful either if it stifles liberty in the hope of halting progress.

The modernising case is that the latter is the greater danger. The practical political point for Conservatives is obvious. Look at the picture of the local Tory association chairmen who came to deliver the letter to David Cameron protesting against gay marriage. Consider their average age. There is, quite literally, not much political future in that.

But beyond the politics there is a social and economic argument to be made. Things do not stay the same, and it is poor history and poor conservatism to argue that they do. There wasn’t a Hounsom’s before the gramophone record was invented and televisions needed to be mended. And at some point before I was born, the local blacksmith must have closed down, complaining that shoppers were given parking tickets when they tethered their horse outside and that everyone was now buying saddles at Horses ‘R’ Us.

It would be impossible to prevent this change without extinguishing liberty. And absurd to try. You can’t preserve Britain by stopping us doing what Britons do.

The job of Conservatives, and I think the most important task of modernisers, is to know when to accommodate to the modern world, when to resist and when to adapt, when something is a fundamental value and when it is just a passing here-today-and-gone-tomorrow camera shop. When people say that Tony Blair was a conservative I think he was, in the one sense that he had a superb modernising instinct. He knew when change was fundamental and permanent and needed to be absorbed.

Many of the great moments of Conservatism – introducing full votes for women, for instance, or Disraeli’s expansion of the franchise or Butler’s Education Act – have come when the party has completed a reform that agitators once called for and Conservatives once barely understood. It is the Conservatives’ job to build the new community when the shopping moves out from the High Street, even while appreciating what has been lost.

In this tradition lies David Cameron’s legislation on gay marriage. It has split the Conservative Party, as of course it would. But I cannot agree with the argument that it has done so for little reason. And this is not just because I think respect for gay people is so important. It is because the core of modernising Conservatism is to reconcile the changes brought through liberty with the traditions of the nation. This measure is not peripheral. It is the core of what David Cameron means.

Labour hasn’t got a monopoly on compassion

Martin Freeman is the latest celebrity to claim wrongly that the Left has cornered the market in human decency

During the 2015 campaign, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party ran an election broadcast featuring an effective speech about his values by the actor Martin Freeman. This is my response.

8 April 2015

Dear Martin Freeman,

Do you have a moment, by any chance? I’d quite like to have a word about the party broadcast you did for Labour last week. I won’t keep you long, I promise.

Let me start with this. It was really good. It is ironic that everyone complains that politicians are just playing a role, but when an actor appears in a broadcast, everyone is delighted with its authenticity. But I think that is down to a particular quality of yours. It’s why I’ve always been a fan. One can imagine knowing Tim from The Office and wanting him as a friend.

I also want to say thank you for doing it. I thought it was really brave of you. You are successful and widely liked and it is impressive to be willing to put that at risk – to make yourself controversial and open to scrutiny – to advance a cause you believe in. So many people just moan about politicians. I admire you for being willing to do more than that.

It won’t surprise you to know, however, that I do rather take issue with what you had to say.

I am not proposing to argue with you about voting Labour. It’s not what I am intending to do myself, but there are some robust arguments for voting Labour. What I want to take issue with is something different. I’d like to persuade you to think again about the argument you made.

You begin your broadcast with the assertion that this complicated election is ‘in the end simple … It’s a choice between two completely different sets of values.’ You continue with this: ‘Now, I don’t know about you, but my values are about community, compassion, decency. That’s how I was brought up.’ So you contend that, whatever the details of the argument, in the end they’re only part of the story.

Instead, ‘There is a choice of two paths. The bottom line is what values are we choosing … Labour. They start from the right place. Community. Compassion. Fairness. I think all the best things about this country.’

Now, I don’t doubt that Labour does start from this right place. But the thing is – and I’m not quite sure how to put this correctly, so I’ll just say it – the thing is, so do I. Community, compassion, fairness, decency, I like those things too. I try to live by them, too.

I wonder if at any point while making the broadcast it occurred to you to wonder if it could really be true that Tories sit down and think: ‘Mmm, compassion, no I don’t think we’ll start there. Let’s wait until someone comes up with something unfair and then we can get motoring!’ Before letting out a sinister laugh and heading off to have tea with Voldemort.

I am pretty sure you didn’t mean this – because you appear like a self-effacing, nice, considerate person – but actually what you said was both arrogant and offensive. And I suspect these are the last things you’d wish to be.

It was arrogant because it suggested that you have succeeded in living by the values you have been brought up with. That you are fundamentally a good person. I guess deep down we all think that, whatever our failings, but you actually said it out loud. On television. As a way of distinguishing yourself from me.

It was offensive because it suggests – there is really no other way of interpreting your comments – that your superior voting choice is dictated by the fact that your parents brought you up to be decent. Whereas mine?

You are either suggesting I am not a good son, or that my parents were not good parents. Either that they tried to bring me up to be kind, like you, but failed. Or that, unlike your parents, mine didn’t much bother with moral instruction, sending me out into the world to laugh at disabled people and steal from orphans.

As I don’t think you meant this, I think what you made was a simple intellectual error. You assumed that decency and compassion lead only to one political view and that if it isn’t yours, someone reaching a different conclusion isn’t compassionate or decent.

Let me give you a few examples that show that this isn’t quite right. Take welfare. I want, desperately, to support poor people in their moment of need, but how much is the right amount? What are the right conditions?

Obviously compassion inclines one to generosity. Yet pay too much and it starts to make it more financially advantageous to be on benefits than to work. Some people won’t exploit this but others will. And how fair – that word you use – is this to those who do work, have low earnings and have to pay for it?

I apologise if this is an obvious point, but I fear it really did seem as though, watching your broadcast, I had to make it.

What about war? We are kind, decent people the two of us, so how does that leave deciding what to do about Syria? It’s not much of a guide, is it?

Or taxes? We all agree we should take money from those who can afford it, to help pay for communal services people wouldn’t be able to buy on their own. Yet if we tax too much or in the wrong way, we might slow the growth of the economy, damaging the income of the least well off.

Has it been compassionate to end up spending so much that we need to borrow a fortune? Has it been fair? Or decent? You talked about young people and how important they are, but won’t they have to pick up the bill for all the borrowing?

We all make different judgments about what works and what we think is sensible. I don’t doubt there are coalition programmes you feel have been poorly thought through or whose impact has harmed people they shouldn’t have harmed. Where the balance between keeping welfare bills low and protecting recipients has been poorly struck.

I don’t object to you arguing these points with vigour. But I do object to the idea that they arise because you are a better person than me.

The idea that the Left is kind and the Right unkind is a pervasive one but one that history doesn’t support. Some of the most grotesque mass murdering dictatorships in the world have come from the left. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot. Leftism isn’t a certificate of goodness.

Peace, love, looking after sick children, trees, the climate, poor people, family, hospitals, pensioners, I do like them all as much as you do, you know.

Daniel

No, I won’t be asking for a foreign passport

Britons are rushing to apply for dual nationality with EU countries but for me, citizenship has a more profound meaning

27 November 2018

Before the mid-1960s the front page of The Times carried classified advertisements rather than news. So it was that on 6 May 1946 appeared notice of the funeral of Maud, Duchess of Wellington, an appeal to find a travelling trunk that would fit a 1939 Vauxhall saloon, an offer to purchase typewriters ‘in any quantity’ and a small advertisement from a Dr Alfred Wiener.

The last read as follows: ‘Notice is hereby given that DR ALFRED WIENER of 45 Queens Court, Queens Way, London, W.2. is APPLYING to the Home Secretary for NATURALIZATION, and that any person who knows any reason why naturalization should not be granted should send a written and signed statement of the facts to the Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, S.W.1.’

I assume no one did give a reason, or that their reason wasn’t a good one, because shortly after this advertisement appeared my grandfather became a British citizen.

That day’s edition of The Times forms a pair with the German Reich and Prussian State Gazette of August 1939 which lists my grandfather, his wife, my mother and her sisters among those who had been stripped of their citizenship for activities deemed to have harmed the Reich (my grandfather was one of the leaders of Germany’s anti-Nazi movement).

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has produced a flood of applications for dual nationality from those who feel they might be eligible for a passport from a member nation. My wife, for instance, is the daughter of a German Jew and a Jewish Sudetenland Czech whose families fled the Nazis. Last week she, with the support of her father, submitted the forms necessary to become partly German.

She, like many others, doesn’t feel this a particularly momentous thing to do. It is merely transactional. A matter of pragmatism. With a passport from an EU member she, and should they later wish, the children, may be able to work abroad and also move more swiftly through passport control. She is entitled to it, so why not?

For others, more complicated feelings are involved. Their application is a sort of protest against Brexit and an insurance policy in case Brexit presages a less tolerant Britain or a calamitously poor one. And there are also some Jews who worry about a Corbyn government.

I can’t share these feelings. I understand and respect (and obviously, in one case, love) those who have applied for dual citizenship, but I won’t be doing so myself.

As it happens, I actually probably can’t become German. My wife can because it was her father who had been a citizen. In my case, it was my mother and that doesn’t count. Hilariously, now that I think about it, I was very put out to discover this. The Nazis took away my family’s status and now I can’t get it back. Given that I don’t want German citizenship, I am aware this fury is a little ridiculous.

But I think I could become a Pole. My father was born a Polish citizen in Lwów and then exiled by the Soviets during the war. After 1945, Lwów became part of Ukraine and Dad could never go home again but he always insisted that he had not renounced his citizenship. And right at the end of his life the Polish authorities agreed.

So, although the process and the citizenship status sounds complicated, I could try becoming a Polish citizen. But I don’t intend to attempt it.

This is not because of my feelings about Germany (I think modern Germany is extraordinarily admirable, and its creation a miracle of liberal democracy) or Poland (my father on his deathbed left few instructions but one was to encourage me to stand by the Polish people). It’s about two things.

The minor one is that I am not a pessimist about Britain. I think things will be basically all right. I worry a little about being a Jew if Corbyn gets into power, but not enough to consider fleeing. I’ve got better things to do than start filling out long forms in Polish or assembling German documents. Life’s busy enough. It took us a year to replace the kitchen bin when the spring lid stopped working.

But the more important reason is that I don’t think obtaining citizenship is just another transaction. Acquiring a foreign passport is not like acquiring a department store credit card. I believe that being a citizen is to accept a profound bond with your fellow citizens. My grandfather felt that too, actually. Losing his German citizenship was one of the great, heartbreaking tragedies of Alfred Wiener’s life because his nationality was so important to him.

In some ways I think it would be an insult to the Poles to apply to be a citizen if I didn’t really mean it.

There are some who believe that patriotic attachment is dangerous because it challenges our universal rights as human beings. I disagree. I think that attaching yourself to a community with roots and practices, traditions and institutions is an essential part of defending rights. I think that it is empty to love mankind in general if you don’t love anyone in particular. I feel this most strongly about Britain. When my mother arrived in Ellis Island, listed in the manifest as ‘stateless’, it was this country that ultimately took her in.

When my father’s exile ended, it did so in a small house on the Hendon Way. Their freedom and their Britishness were not attached to each other by some intellectual argument, but by practical necessity. I have often repeated my grandmother’s words – ‘while the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central’ – as if they were a sort of general statement of her politics, but I think she just meant it as a statement of simple truth.

My loyalty to this country cannot be divided and it isn’t for sale. It isn’t in conflict with my belief in universal liberal rights, it is its guarantor.

When I was young I suffered from asthma, and an attack would often keep me awake at night. My mother would take me to her bed and read to me. Sometimes it would be Winnie-the-Pooh but more often I would choose a book of the kings and queens of England.