David Goodhart
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest. Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
Britain may not be feeling happy and confident but it is not broken either; the Tory slogan “It can’t go on like this” seems rather silly, when it so obviously will go on roughly like this whoever is in No 10. Moreover, it has been an oddly calm recession with no hint of the summer of rage we were promised—despite the fact that the slowdown follows Britain’s biggest ever immigration wave.
Many of the pieces in this issue—including David Willetts explaining how the Tories can foster co-operation without the state, and our special section on brain science—explore how insights from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology can inform politics. The drift of the debate seems to be favouring moderate Conservative positions, so perhaps it is the political zeitgeist leading science rather than the other way round. On most big questions of the day, however, it is shocking to realise how little most of us actually know about anything. Or rather, despite all that data on the web, we know almost nothing at first hand, relying instead on our chosen interpreters to help position ourselves along a spectrum of views and values. This was brought home to me by Roddy Campbell’s piece on why climategate matters. I had believed that the temperature record was a simple thing that gave us an even simpler message about the dangers of global warming. Now I’m not sure. It is still likely that pumping all that C02 into the atmosphere will lead to warming, possibly catastrophic warming, but the record is not yet convincing and its scientific guardians must surely be neutral dullards, not activists. A proper scepticism towards the data is not only legitimate, but necessary, before we change the way we live.
David Goodhart
Power to the people: populist reformers have the ear of David Cameron
According to Jack Kennedy, the greatest gift a politician can possess is the gift of being forgiven. Barack Obama appears to enjoy a plentiful supply of that gift, as he quietly drops one election pledge after another with barely a murmur of protest. For British parliamentarians forgiveness is in short supply. But contrary to much of the gloomy commentary that has accompanied the expenses scandal of the past few weeks, and the seeming implosion of Gordon Brown’s government, the episode represents a success story for modern British democracy.
New Freedom of Information legislation exposes a parliamentary Spanish practice. The media democracy (on this occasion properly representing public opinion) howls in protest at the abuse. MPs are duly contrite and promise reform—which in the end will probably mean some variant of the Scottish system in which all expense claims are published soon after they are submitted. End of the story.
Of course, it’s not as simple as that. For a start, part of the point of FOI was to increase trust in politics. In the short term shining a light into dark corners was always likely to have the opposite effect, as is evident in the success of protest parties in yesterday’s election (transparency was also meant to improve the quality of government decisions but instead has pushed real debate further out of sight). Moreover, this won’t be the end of the story—the resignations and the expenses scandal have raised expectations of a rebooting of the whole system.
The trouble here is that there are two main schools of political reform—and they want conflicting things. The traditional, liberal reformers worry about an over-mighty executive; they want power spread about more and the legislature strengthened against the executive. Against them are the populist reformers (who have the ear of David Cameron) who want both parliament and executive to relinquish power to the people: fewer MPs; more referendums; citizen petitions, and so on. The former want to strengthen the rules of the old representative democracy, the latter want to reinforce the trend towards a more plebiscitary politics.
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Mary Fitzgerald
"Progressive Conservatism"—or just a Con?
As promised, today Catherine Fieschi, former director of Demos, hits back at Phillip Blond’s call for “progressive conservatism.” It’s an ideological con, she says; one which creates an illusion of contradiction while in fact “smuggling in a notion of progress that would sit very well with 18th century industrialists.” With the financial crisis and oncoming recession, we are experiencing a time of fear and doubt. But this does not mean we should buy into a distorted fiction—the type of which Rousseau would certainly have disapproved of.
As many Prospect readers will be aware, Phillip Blond’s cover story has provoked argument from all quarters: yesterday, Rupert Darwall accused him of failing to understand how markets operate; on Monday Kieron O’Hara accused him of misreading Adam Smith. Tomorrow, Civitas director David Green will argue that Blond is “grossly mistaken” in some of the characteristics he attributes to liberalism.
So is Red Toryism, as Fieschi suggests, nothing more than “vote-seeking fancy dress”? Or are his critics missing the point? Weigh in here.
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