Friday, April 27, 2007

The Substitution Effect

Perhaps the most overdue, yet bone-headedly obvious statement that David Cameron has yet made was, “There is such a thing as society. It just isn’t the same thing as the state”. And it would have been nice if he meant it. For decades we have lived in an odd dichotomy between two daft concepts of society. On the Left, we have those who think that the state is an infallible, all-powerful miniature of society, and the responsibilities of that society must be delegated to its wise, benevolent functionaries. In the past fifty years, the Right has swung violently between agreeing with the Left, and denying that there is any sort of collective identity beyond the clan, the village and the Dunkirk spirit.

In a strictly practical sense, the Left now accepts that many things can be done well outside the state, and even that some functions of the state are better delegated to private organisations. Yet it instinctively thinks that the state is there to direct society in every way necessary. This causes some schizophrenia in government, when NHS operations, defence research and inner-city schools are outsourced to private contractors, but citizens may not independently make up their minds over whether to hunt, smoke, leave taps running or choose the number of driven wheels on one’s car.

The Right is no better at figuring out the relationship between society and state. It instinctively believes that the only things the state is good for are building grammar schools and holding Fleet reviews, and yet its sense of pragmatism, or intellectual cowardice, has led it to run the state in essentially the same way that the Left would. It has failed to recognise, or at least to argue for, the idea that society exists and that it cannot exist alongside the ‘social’ state.

A state that forcibly takes away people’s property to fund services creates the expectation that these services will materialise, and that in exchange for their cash, citizens will not also have to help provide these services. A state dedicated to passing laws that try to think on behalf of its citizens can hardly complain when those citizens stop thinking for themselves. The ‘partnership’ between the state and citizens, charities, businesses, faiths or whatever, much beloved of politicians, is a fiction. People, quite reasonably, think it rather cheeky for the state to dip into your pocket to provide a service, then expect citizens to do the job themselves. If one's cash and liberties are taken by the state, then responsibility goes with it.

The existence of a civil society relies on there not being state provision to crowd it out. The volunteer fire services in rural Europe and the States survive and prosper because there is no state rival. Who would waste time and risk their lives if they were already being taxed to the same end? Likewise, the RNLI, the last of the great voluntary services, is only able to thrive because the state makes no attempt to muscle in on its territory. If HM Coastguard expanded into lifeboats, and we all had to pay for its new services, why would anyone give again to a superfluous private charity?

Every time a politician declares that a social problem is his responsibility, rather than a problem for society to fix, he is undermining the ability of civil society to function, and encouraging his clients to throw their problems at him. The nineteenth-century friendly societies, which provided the working class with social and medical insurance against unemployment and sickness, were killed by the introduction of national insurance in the early twentieth. A few romantic lefties like to lament the fall of these honourable, effective organisations, yet forget the fact that it was the lack of a state rival that enabled them to form in the first place.

This substitution effect has long-term consequences. Once a particular sort of self-reliance has been killed off, it is very difficult to resurrect. If the government agency that replaced the social one fails, the clamour is for the government to do more and better, rather than to retreat. People lose the ability and drive to do things for themselves, and fear the consequences of the government withdrawing.

It is obvious to most people - those who are neither hardened ideologues nor paid lackeys - that state education is failing. I left school only in 2000, and I know perfectly well that the tales of senior history students being blissfully unaware that anything much happened in 1066 are not some sort of reactionary myth. My school - now a decent comprehensive, so far as they exist - was set up a hundred and fifty years ago by an ex-India service officer, who was so impressed with the way children were taught in madrassas that he took the initiative to filch the idea and build a similar school in his home town. A century and a half on, we are far richer and education is, supposedly, one of our top political priorities. And when the government now suggests that we should do a bit more to help set up and run schools, we greet them with hoots of derision, calling it an abdication of responsibility: do-it-yourself IKEA education. ‘Do it for us!’ we wail. ‘That’s what you’re there for!’

On the contrary, it is us who have abdicated responsibility. It is tempting and easy to blame society or the state for one’s own failures. When legions of officials, legislators and commentators line up to take responsibility on behalf of society for someone’s problems or failings, it takes real strength of character to say ‘No. It’s my fault, and I won’t blame anyone else or demand that other people fix it.’

As we rely increasingly on the state to solve people’s problems and provide services for them, we implicitly expect people to fail without help, to be unable to live successfully without state intervention. Is it a coincidence that the standard of parenting has decreased in a period that saw the state increasingly nationalise and subsidise child-rearing? As anyone who has ever been a boss, a teacher, a parent or even a child will tell you, the more someone in authority expects you to screw up, skive off or laze around, the more likely you are to live down to those expectations. Funnily enough, as our expectations of citizens drop, they become increasingly incapable, commit more crime, and behave ever more badly.

In a sense, this is a problem of democracy. If seems acceptable to vote for a promised easy life rather than to achieve it, and for politicians to offer to solve everyone’s problems for them, we will always have a government that tries to take over the responsibilities of society. It is not easy to try to solve problems yourself, and it carries the risk of failing and looking a fool.

Instead, we pay the state to be caring on our behalf. We have done the very modern thing of outsourcing our compassionate duty to a superficially attractive bidder, and not giving too much of a toss whether the resulting service is any good. Handing the job over to the state is appealing. We can always sit back and throw brickbats at them, say how useless they are and how we could all do better, safe in the knowledge that we’ll never be put to the test.

It is appalling that we think this is a ‘caring society’, when we simply sub-contract our compassionate duty to state functionaries. State takeovers leave society unable to function effectively. We end up like Russia is today, desperate for someone to lead us, to do things for us, terrified of what will happen if the state takes away its expensive, destructive benevolence. We do not like being dependent on our bosses, our children, our parents, or anyone else. Why make such a vast, dreadful exception for the state?

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The Lib Dems' Hidden Problem

Unless Cameron’s Tories manage to complete their rather creepy retreading of Blair’s ascent to power with a massive swing against an entirely decrepit government, it is quite possible that the next Parliament will be hung. To wipe out Labour’s majority requires a mere nudge at the door, whereas to gain an overall majority would need a decisive swing across the whole of the country, the sort of swing only used for kicking out desperately knackered or bad governments, or for bringing in great new hopes. For all his pizzazz and self-parody modernity, Cameron does not offer the same optimism that Blair did in 1997. We now know perfectly well that a bright, posh, youngish bloke who seems nice will not turn the country into a New Jerusalem. All Cameron can offer is that he is a different, youngish posh bloke who seems nice, and one whom we haven’t learnt how to hate yet.

It is difficult to see how this could inspire the nation into the revolutionary fervour of 1997. Cameron is already having semi-hostile questions asked of him, which Blair didn’t encounter until about 2002. Their best chance is that Labour elects Gordon Brown as their next leader; the prospect of whose grim, Presbyterian sermons for another five years could inspire the nation to turn to Cameron in their droves, if not to hara-kiri. But even this is no guarantee.

There is at least a chance that for the first time since the 1920s, the Liberals will be a serious player in British politics. If Cameron enjoys anything less than a seismic shift in the nation’s political affections, and anything more than a tiny improvement on Howard’s score last time, we will see once more a government reliant on a coalition majority. The intense tribal loathing between the two main parties rules out any grand coalition, and come the next Parliament, the Liberals may well be in a position to dictate who the government will be. If this happens, of the party’s hidden contradictions will fast become apparent.

The Liberal Democrats in Westminster are not a political party in the conventional sense. To call them motley would be gratuitously nasty, but even put kindly, they are a disparate group of characters, who, for one reason or another, find no other place in politics. They stretch from those who want to soak the rich while disliking class warfare, to those who believe in property and markets but can’t abide Tory moralising. The Liberals are themselves a coalition - a coalition of outsiders in the political process.

They have managed to square their contradictions by the clever trick of remaining irrelevant for eighty years. No one particularly cares if the Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman is out of step with the party’s local activists, for the dispute has all the gravity, meaning and consequence of a primary school’s pretend election. But soon it may matter, and ironically, the same political currents that swept away the old Liberals’ power will be the ones that haunt any future return to government.

The early twentieth century was the era when modern political divisions were born, between proletarian self-interest and intellectual self-pleasuring on one hand, and bourgeois and aristocratic self-protection on the other. One side was represented by the growing Labour Party, and the Conservatives adapted themselves to represent the other. Having failed to become a true voice of class war following the extension of the franchise, the old Liberal Party was squeezed out as a major player, and the modern, home-for-the-homeless Liberals were born.

The Liberals' last gasp of peacetime power, in the early 1920s, was as a divided party, split between those who went into government under Lloyd George with Tory backing, and those who went into opposition with Asquith. Then, as now, the party was divided between those who felt an affinity with conservatism - or at least free trade - and those who inclined towards liberal socialism. Having led the country in the wartime coalition, the Liberals in 1918 split between the followers of Lloyd George, who formed a government with Tory parliamentary support and electoral collusion, and the Asquith Liberals, who went in opposition once the guns fell silent. On the other extreme from those who signed up to Lloyd George’s Tory-backed government, some of the Asquith Liberals were leftist enough to later join Labour - which, in the 1920s, was no moderate social-democratic organisation.

This split is still the natural dividing line in Liberal politics. The party is torn down the middle, between those who sympathise with moderate Conservatism and those who see themselves as the liberal wing of Labour. While a party is irrelevant, this causes no problems. It means that it can fight in different parts of the country almost as different parties, posing as nice Tories in the South West and as nice socialists in the North. But it is impossible to go into government with these splits unresolved, as Lloyd George and Asquith knew only too well.

Of course, the other two parties also have their divisions, whether over Europe, tax, or foreign policy. But in parties that genuinely struggle for power, a potential leader must fight to tame the wings of the party that oppose him. It is critical to understand this. People as different as Clare Short and Alan Milburn could sit together in Cabinet because their leader controlled his party, and would not allow subordinates’ views to override his own position. A split party needs a strong leader. The Liberals’ greatest problem is that they have never needed one, and they never will - until they get a chance of power. At that point, it becomes vital that they have one.

As a nice, kind, party of gentle dissent, all the Liberals have ever needed is a personable leader who can make the faithful feel good about themselves. Kennedy was brilliant at this, but it is not nearly enough if one has ambitions of government. No tough choices or aggressive internal politicking has ever been necessary to lead the Liberals, and the vast differences across their ranks are more usually ignored than faced. Government involves tough decisions and constant struggling to get into and stay in power. Without strong leadership, the pressures of power rip apart divided parties. The Liberals remain a big-tent party without a ringmaster; not nearly disciplined enough to have any role in government.

Can you imagine Simon Hughes or Phil Willis, both of whom are wet Attleeites, propping up a potential right-wing programme of freeing schools from council and union domination? Both think that the only problem with education is that central government has too much influence, and that their own favourite busybodies have too little. But if the leadership signs up to Cameron, they'd have to vote for it. Or the whole system collapses.

Equally, it is quite implausible to think that the liberal Liberals like Nick Clegg or David Laws would comfortably fit into a Brown-led Labour administration, intent on a Presbyterian jihad against fun, freedom, and independence. Whereas the Norman Baker Liberals - who probably fantasise about prowling around London at night, slashing the tyres of extravagant, wasteful cars - would fit in just fine. Defections are possible, trouble-stirring inevitable, if large parts of the party are dissatisfied and weakly led.

Regardless of which way it goes, if the Lib Dems are to go into coalition as a whole, one wing or other must be corralled with ruthlessness not seen in the party for a century. Or the next Parliament will be an unholy, if amusing, mess. Given their utter inexperience in ruthless, power-hungry politics - as the Kennedy debacle showed - the amusing mess seems the more likely. Their Liberals’ activists are overwhelmingly leftist, their talented frontbenchers overwhelmingly of the right. One or other is going to be disappointed, and no one’s really thought about how.

If the next Parliament is hung, the Liberal leadership will be caught between two irreconcilable forces, one in Westminster, the other in the country. Campbell’s advances so far have been towards his constituency neighbour Gordon, but it remains to be seen whether the young Turks who surround him will be willing to prop up an exhausted, failing Prime Minister. Neither is it clear how anyone from the party's right could possibly get elected as leader, if the grassroots thought a Tory tie-up was likely. A Brown-Campbell pact, followed by the desertion of the party's frontbench talent and a divisive squabble, is the likely prospect. The Liberals seem to enjoy righteous, ineffective opposition. They'd better pray they stay there, for power won't be pleasant.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

The good side of a nuclear Iran. Seriously.

If you believe the self-serving leaks from the Israeli government, or the cries of professional anti-war campaigners fearing redundancy, the West is preparing to take out as many of Iran’s nuclear facilities as it can find. Forces are massing in the Gulf, to demonstrate America’s iron will and irresistible power. Statesmen and commentators, meanwhile, are sitting back home, wondering just how thick the Iranians will have to be if they’re ever going to fall for this transparent bluff.

The West has no casus belli for a strike, and no appetite for one. It has little confidence that it could actually find all of Iran's nuclear sites. Or fully destroy the sites that it does know about. Neither does it know how long this would delay Iran’s nuclear programme. All it knows is that it would do is cause diplomatic carnage and turn the Islamic Republic’s hardliners into heroes. No one seriously thinks this is a good plan, so instead we’re going to vaguely threaten and annoy Tehran, with both sides fully aware that there isn’t much more we can do.

This is the easy and lazy option, and therefore the one that we seem to be going ahead with. But it is not the only option. Instead of harassing Iran to no particular gain, it may be both wise and possible to acknowledge its growing status as a major power, and extend it a civil hand. It is quite true that a nuclear Iran may be a threat, a high-stakes challenge, and would turn Middle East strategies upside down. But its development also offers a potential route out of Islamic extremism.

The growth of Islamic radicalism has never been a straightforward response to grievance, as the usual theory goes. Many peoples are poorer than the Islamic world is, many more oppressed, and none as angry or as sensitive. The usual scapegoat for terrorism - the Israel-Palestine impasse - would barely cause a ripple if it were in a different part of the world. Neither would any other people riot and murder hundreds - of fellow-believers, mostly - over a handful of cartoons. Yet our grievance-mongers and unthinking appeasers just cannot accept that there is something unique about Islam today. They fail to ask the vital, and knuckle-draggingly obvious question of why the Islamic world is so much tetchier than the rest of humanity.

The ‘root cause’ of terrorism is to be found in the psychology by which a minor territorial squabble became the violent, mad obsession of an entire civilisation. It is not plain injustice that does this. It is weakness - or, more specifically, the gap between its weakness and its pride. The Islamic world believes that it is by rights a great civilisation, and it is infuriated by its inability to project itself onto the world stage.

As Germany showed in the years following the Treaty of Versailles, a frustrated, proud, and humiliated civilisation is a particularly dangerous one. And Islam is sensitive, inevitably, where its wounds are. The conflicts that get Islamists seething are not those that cause the most suffering to Muslims, as the grievance-theory would dictate, but those that show the Islamic world to be powerless. Israel treats the Palestinians with indifference and contempt, and feels free to ignore them in pursing its own interests. This is deemed much worse than the massacres of hundreds of thousands in Darfur - where there is horrific suffering, but as it is largely Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter, no insult. It is insult, not pain, that the weak and angry cannot stand.

This psychology is the product of a unique piece of geopolitics. Mainly because of the need for oil supplies, the superpowers have long tried to prevent a local, Islamic hegemon developing in the Middle East. In the normal course of history, the fall of the Ottoman Empire would have left a vacuum for a new regional hegemon to develop. For understandable pragmatic reasons, various Western powers have, for the best part of a century, sought to keep the Middle East controllable and weak.

And for most of the last century, the emasculated Islamic civilisation, stripped of any symbol of power, has been clutching at anything that might be able to wield influence in its name. None did. Nasser, Saddam, and the others were all brought to heel, and once the last and most formidable was humiliatingly ejected from Kuwait, international jihadism became Islam’s new icon.

Terrorism is the worst possible way of giving a people new confidence, quite aside from its unpleasantries. All it can do is lash out again and again, or lose its power. Only states can provide a people with the benign power, the security that is so closely linked with confidence.

Cultural security is what the Islamic world needs more than anything - more than democracy, more than economic regeneration, more than death-to-infidel-pig-dogs. A culture secure in itself - in its identity and its independence - can brush off insults and cope with the imperfections of the world. A brittle civilisation, with superficial arrogance covering a soft, bewildered core of weakness, has the same attitude to ‘disrespect’ as a tooled-up South London thug. Under all the posturing, both are rather pathetic and insecure. They have to prove themselves to be tough, while those who know their own power don’t.

It is necessary for the West that the Islamic world regains the self-respect lost with the fall of the Ottomans, if we don’t fancy fighting an everlasting war against a fanatical enemy. Islam can only return to being a more normal civilisation once it the US that sense of cultural security. It needs a strong and influential state on its home turf, one that can play the role that America plays for the West, that China does for the Orient, South Africa for its continent, Brazil for Latin America, and so on.

Iran is already Islam’s natural hegemon. It is the only Islamic state in the Middle East to be largely independent and able to defend itself, and it is a real, old nation, rather than some cobbling together of oilfield and squabbling peoples. What it wants more than anything is power and recognition, and not to be treated as a tin-pot dictatorship. Which is an ambition not helped by kidnapping sailors, but then no one is suggesting that Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards are touched by strategic genius.

As things look, and regardless of what the West or anyone else does, Iran will probably become the Islamic hegemon. It may come soon, or perhaps in a decade or two. But even the most hardline anti-Iranians talk only of delaying Iran's rise, not stopping it. The strategic question for the West is whether it is worth trying to keep it contained for as long as possible, or whether it might be smarter instead to ease its rise.

If Iran is extended a civil hand and can develop at its natural rate, the worst-case threat would ultimately be no greater than if we insisted on containment. In exchange for facing this risk sooner rather than later, the West’s prize is the chance to be on civilised terms with a significant new power, and to prevent it forming links with China and Russia alone. But if Iran rises in the teeth of Western military opposition, it will create the sort of legend that keeps revolutionaries in power for decades. See Cuba for more details.

A powerful, potentially nuclear Iran is a difficult prospect, and those who say otherwise are fools. Yet for all Ahmadinejad’s vicious rhetoric, Israel is quite able to defend itself, being an advanced nuclear power by air, land and submarine. Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel from the face of the map. Our PM promises to wipe out African poverty. Politicians do occasionally say things for effect, as the shrewder observers ought to have noticed.

More worrying is the potential for a local arms race with one or more of the major Arab states, and a destabilising battle to split the Middle East around competing hegemons. But an internal struggle in the Middle East is approaching regardless of what we do. Protecting our interests in the region will require that we are on reasonable terms with the major players, and yet we seem to inexplicably keen on playing Ahmadinejad’s game. The creatures of the Enlightenment are supposed to be capable of rationality over foreign policy, rather than letting a little peasant thug dictate the relationship. What we flatteringly call a strategy is now more about saving face than promoting our own interests.