What if the Crisis Goes on Forever? And that Irish Question. What was it Again?

Forcing myself to pay attention to George Osborne’s latest budget  (‘the economy is heeling over’) I was then shocked into open-mouthed silence by the appearance on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme of Godfrey Bloom MEP, speaking out on the economy for Dad’s Army, otherwise known as UKIP. Alas for Mr Bloom, all most people hear when his name is mentioned is the phrase ‘behind the fridge’, the place where, in his view, women don’t clean enough.

 

This illustrates one of the problems of Dad’s Army, that it really lacks any polished and persuasive performers who can put forward a conservative case without tumbling straight into the enemy’s mantraps, where they lie howling that it’s all very unfair.

 

Perhaps this is because Mr Bloom is a mighty intellect, poor at communication but great at thinking. Or perhaps not.

 

He used his brief slot on the nation’s premier radio current affairs show to call repeatedly for cuts in public spending, as if he had been wound up and programmed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and had only just been allowed out and set in motion.

 

As somebody (Who was it? Not Immanuel Kant or Blaise Pascal, anyway) recently said, UKIP is really just the Thatcherite Tory Party in exile.  It is very light on social , moral and cultural conservatism, and seems to me to be neo-liberal in foreign and economic policy. Continued membership of NATO, for instance, is endorsement of neo-liberalism abroad. Various ideas borrowed from newspaper columnists have then been stuck on to the manifesto, in no particular order. If you mix together the concepts ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ and ‘Think Tank’ (themselves mutually hostile) you will get the picture.  

 

Also I really cannot see how spending cuts by themselves are a coherent policy in modern Britain. You have to reduce the demand for spending first, and that is a social and cultural matter, which may cost quiet a lot of money.  The entire economy (as economists such as David Blanchflower seem to me to imply) is now so dependent on public spending for survival that large spending cuts, though undoubtedly desirable in principle, will simply kill the patient.  He is too ill for any such treatment. You might as well bleed someone who’s suffering from blood loss.

 

The levels of spending in this country are the consequence of 50 years of leftist social policy. The family, the church, independent charity and self-reliance have been undermined to the point that they barely exist as forces, while the state, and its quasi-independent agencies, have grown enormously.  Manufacturing industry as an employer has shrivelled.  The unproductive public sector wobbles on top of the productive economy. Our ability to export has likewise atrophied.

 

How on earth an immediate radical spending cut will do good under such circumstances, I honestly don’t know. The government’s tax receipts would plunge, as large numbers of public employees stopped paying income tax because they were unemployed. And its liabilities would increase, as they had to be paid various doles and allowances instead. Result: More borrowing, plus less economic activity, as you would have taken so much purchasing power out of the economy. Aldi and Lidl might benefit. I don’t think anyone else would. We did, sort of, go through this before in the Thatcher-Howe era. But the enormous receipts from North Sea Oil (now over) served as great national cushion.

 

If this is wrong, I’d be interested to know why. Serious conservatives, with a practical intent, must recognise that the country can only be weaned slowly off the disastrous welfare dependency it now faces, and cannot instantly recover from the deindustrialisation inflicted on it by market liberals who wrongly insisted that manufacturing didn’t matter.  The reconstruction of the family, of proper education able to produce employable people, plus a long campaign to persuade people that debt is bad for them, might take 20 or 30 years to have much of an effect.

 

A large cultural and moral revolution, in short, is called for. And that won’t happen until there are what Tony Benn calls teachers, and signposts in national politics (he always says that there are two kinds of politicians, signposts and weathervanes, and I agree with him). Such people need to confront, honestly, the huge size of the problems we face, and recognise our permanently diminished status as a country.  They need to be bolstered by serious journalism, which is likewise prepared to kook our crisis in the face, admit that we have been mistaken, and by an academy which is equally thoughtful.

 

Such conditions seem to me to be very unlikely, and absolutely impossible while British political discourse is still dominated by two mobs, one of which says ‘thatcher was wrong!’;, and the other of which shouts back ‘Maggie was right!’.

 

Hence the need for a political and cultural counter-revolution, for which the undoubted collapse of the Tory Party is an essential precondition. The idea that we can, in the course of a single election, restore Britain to its former state is laughable. It will be a long, long march.

 

And during that Long, Long March, we will have to recognise that the current economic crisis is not really a temporary period through which we can pass before the tills start ringing again. It is a process by which we get used to our reduced status, itself largely the result of our long period of unrealistic, utopian folly.

 

Much more likely, we will carry on as we are, and be overtaken, in the end, by a great wave of inflation and devaluation which will sweep away almost all we have come to rely on, and leave us savagely reduced, but at least in touch with reality.

 

As to the Irish Question, it’s that old issue of how title to territory is established, again (see my recent article on Gaza and Israel). There’s no absolute objective standard (for otherwise any Irish nationalist would have to call for the restoration of the USA to the Native Americans, for example). Thus, though any patriotic person must recognise the force, justice and power of Irish patriotism, sensible and humane compromise seems wise to me.  It’s certainly better that , where two ethnic or cultural groups strive for supremacy on a piece of territory,   neither one rules over the other.  It’s also always better if violence is not rewarded, as it very much has been since 1998.

 

Irish friends of mine will privately confess that Eamon de Valera’s Free State and Republic was not generous to its Protestant minority, and that the 1937 Irish Constitution, in particular, was a sectarian document.

 

IN my turn, I certainly accept that the six-county state of Northern Ireland treated its Roman Catholic minority very unfairly. But then, as I have many times said (though nobody among my Irish nationalist critics ever remembers it ) , I think the Stormont Parliament and government were a mistake from the start. After 1922, Northern Ireland should have been fully integrated into Great Britain. The ‘Irish Dimension’ so dangerously revived by John Hume should have been closed for good. The Northern Irish Protestants should have been given the following bargain – that they should  indeed remain British, but that being British would mean that they accepted the rules of the mainland.

 

With the possibility of Dublin rule reliably excluded, they should have joined British national politics, forgetting the divisions of religion, and accepting the equality between Protestant and Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown. It is one of the striking things about Northern Ireland that the British political parties have never seriously recruited or operated there. I know there has been a cosmetic introduction of the Tory party in recent years, but it is a half-hearted and belated thing. In the Blair years it was easier to join the Labour Party in Manhattan than it was to do so in Belfast.

 

And all the petty and stupid discriminations, in employment, housing and voting, should have been got rid of. I would except the school system, as I think people are entitled to hand on their religion and culture all the more when these things are no longer keys to dominance, or badges of oppression and rebellion. And I’m a great admirer of Northern Ireland’s selective secondary schools.

 

As it happened, the period of direct rule achieved many of those things, and certainly made great progress towards them. But it was intended, by the British government, as a preliminary status to the current slow-motion handover to Dublin, not as an end in itself. So nobody will speak for it now, or draw lessons from it.

 

It is interesting that a country which was prepared to send a Task Force thousands of miles  to keep 1,800 Falklanders British (because they desired to be), abandoned efforts to keep hold of part of its own immediate national territory (despite the strong desire of many of its inhabitants to remain British), and abandoned any serious effort to integrate and befriend the dissenting minority. There was never any reason why Crown and Shamrock, or Crown and Harp,  should not be part of the same cap badge, and the same coat of arms. There are plenty of loyal British Roman Catholics. Such a missed opportunity to create what might have been an example to the world of what British tolerance could achieve.