I must confess to having been distracted by our government’s almost unhinged rush to war, which is why I have taken so long to reply to Ms Vere’s contribution.
One correspondent suggests I shouldn’t do so, and I see what he means. I, too have, been tempted to refer to various Peter Simple characters during this exchange, notably Jeremy Cardhouse MP and Dr Heinz Kiosk. Alas, I suspect these references will mystify Ms Vere, who seems uninterested in these hinterland affairs. But I promised to reply, and so I will.
First of all, I must ask Ms Vere on what she bases her assertion that Margaret Thatcher had “a hatred of ‘bring-backery’.” I was an industrial, labour and political reporter during most of the Thatcher era – 1979-1990, though I was abroad or grappling with the Cold War story, during her final years in office. I regularly saw her answer questions in the Commons, from the Gallery, I listened to her conference speeches and more than once I travelled in her aircraft on foreign visits, and was able to sit in conversation with her, with a number of other travelling journalists. I have read John Campbell’s two-volume biography of her. And I confess that, if she ever did express a dislike of ‘bring-backery’, I had not noticed it. I’d be glad of some references.
I always had the strong impression that she in fact wished (whether she achieved this is another matter) to restore a number of things which she believed Britain had lost, including a sound economy, patriotism, rigorous education and national independence. You might well describe these aims as ‘bring-backery’ if you were the sort of person who thinks all motion is forwards, and that forwards is automatically good. I do not think she was such a person. Like many of her generation (which was also my parents’ generation, so well understood by me) she had seen our country decline in many important moral and spiritual aspects, was pained by this and regretted it.
On the other hand, Mr David Cameron has said he likes Britain as it is, and is well known for his dismissal of alleged fruitcakes such as me and my friend Simon Heffer for our ‘bring-backery’, though he chose to call me a ‘maniac’, which I think a larger compliment.
Has she somehow confused Mr Cameron and Lady Thatcher? Or has she recreated Margaret Thatcher in her own ‘modern’ image?
In any case, as my more regular readers have pointed out to her, the words ‘Margaret Thatcher’ are not a magic incantation here. I am not a Thatcherite and regard her as a failure, and indeed as someone who never even attempted to reverse the Left’s moral and cultural revolution, though sometimes giving the impression she was, and certainly regretting, for instance, her failure to save the grammar schools.
I think Ms Vere’s obvious ignorance of my political position (which wouldn’t matter if she hadn’t chosen to tweet her baseless jibe about school-leaving) just shows that she is uninterested in ideas. It takes about five minutes on the web to find out what my positions are on most major subjects. That sort of dismissal of ideas is common among businessmen or businesswomen, though in my view unwise. But can it be excusable in someone who seeks to be a member of Parliament? I think not. She should at least know what it is she disagreeing with.
As for the ‘A’ list, as Ms Vere presumably knows, there was never any definitive written list that was published. If she has a copy, I should be glad to see it. But in September 2009, Jonathan Oliver wrote in the ‘Sunday Times’ that ‘The Sunday Times can disclose the eclectic mix of candidates who answered the Conservative leader's appeal for people with no previous involvement in politics to stand for parliament.
‘The 70 names who have recently been added to the approved list of Tory candidates include Rory Stewart, a Harvard professor who set up a charity in Afghanistan and once taught the princes William and Harry.
‘Other would-be MPs include Merryn Myatt, a businesswoman who presented a BBC consumer show, and Colonel Bob Stewart, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry in Bosnia.
‘The list also includes the Nigerian-born Nini Adetuberu, 29, who helps drug addicts in north London, and Charlotte Vere, chief executive of a charity helping people with mental health problems. Both women are the personification of Cameron's ideal of "caring conservatism".’
I can find no record of Ms Vere complaining about this description at the time.
She then says ‘you bandied the term around as a primary school child might say ‘she smells’; as a term of shame,’
Did I? I think not. I merely said she was ‘one of the fabled A-listers’.
She then adds : ‘…but I am not ashamed. What on earth is wrong in opening up politics to people who are not policy wonks or who haven’t cut their teeth as a Special Adviser to a government minister?’
To which I reply, nothing at all. I deplore the takeover of politics by these cloned, interchangeable careerists, among whom I number the present Prime Minister, her admired leader. Does she disapprove of his path to power?
She then adds: ‘ What on earth is wrong in encouraging those of us who have started businesses, run organisations and frankly know and understand what life is like outside the Westminster bubble? Is this somehow not Conservative?’
To which I reply, that it is not conservative, if the people involved do not have conservative opinions.
It is not conservative if they are instead conscious or unconscious bearers of conventional wisdom, socially and politically liberal, entirely at ease with mass divorce, rigour-free education, radical ultra-feminism, pandemic abortion, state subsidies for fatherless families, uncontrolled mass immigration, destruction of national sovereignty through the EU, and official multiculturalism. Not to mention the increasing invasion of private and family life by the state and by commerce, and the parcelling out of children to misnamed ‘care’ while their actual parents are pressured to abandon them while they do paid work.
The opinions of MPs and candidates are, in my view, decisive. This is not a parish council we are electing, but an allegedly sovereign Parliament, and an adversarial one at that.
Note that I do not use the capital ‘C’. The Conservative Party is now a party of the Left in all but name. It didn’t intend to become one, but it did become one, by failing to understand, challenge or reverse the Left’s programme of cultural and moral change begun by the Fabians and then redoubled by Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins, before merging with Marxist and Gramscian social thought in New Labour – itself the direct heir of ‘Euro-Communism’ and the journal ‘Marxism Today’. It is the purpose of my book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, to explain the shape of the modern left, and to explain that it has chosen a new route to Utopia, having acknowledged the failure of Bolshevism and of the 1945 statist experiment in Britain.
The Tories, who sought office rather than power, repeatedly compromised with these currents, until they found themselves governing along lines prescribed by the Left. The Tory Party’s broad acceptance of the openly egalitarian and politically-correct Equality Bill (mentioned below) is the single most striking feature of this process. But the Tory Party’s acceptance of comprehensive state education (Labour’s *real* Clause Four, its unalterable equality-of-outcome Holy Grail) is just as striking. This is why ideas matter, why their origins matter and why their history matters.
To respond to any mention of ideas with a yawn is to invite other people’s ideas to fly into your head through the wide and gaping entrance you have provided for them.
My main task in life is to point out this fact, that the Tory Party has gone over to the Left and is no longer in any way the friend of conservative, patriotic people. It never was much. It certainly isn’t now.
I responded to Ms Vere’s still unwithdrawn false allegation against me because I saw an opportunity to examine, in her, the force and mind of the modern Tory Party. The baseless charge she made against me could equally well have come from any Guardian-reading tweeter or ‘Comment is Free’ warrior.
That is why I suspect she is, unconsciously, an apostle of the beliefs which inform the BBC, the academy, the C of E hierarchy and the major parties. These beliefs are not in any way conservative. For such people, the function of the Tory party is to provide parliamentary representation and office for people whose tribal loyalties and social backgrounds keep them out of the Labour or Liberal Democrat Parties. They embrace policies to obtain office, rather than seeking office to implement policies. They have no principles not because they are unprincipled or wicked, but because they see no point in principles, and do not really understand why anyone should have any.
That is why I quoted Maynard Keynes on the way that ‘practical’ people who profess to be uninterested in theories are usually the slaves of some defunct economist, of whom they have never heard. Just as many people don’t even know they’re speaking in prose, many politicians don’t even know that they are guided by an ideology of which they have never heard, and which they have never studied. Such people don’t really choose what they say or think, and indeed make it very difficult for themselves to do so.
If Ms Vere is so opposed to feminism, as she says she is, why does she join and serve a party whose leading female minister, Theresa May, as I often point out, worked co-operatively with Harriet Harman on the Equality Bill and has (see below) publicly embraced the revolutionary idea of all-women shortlists (both these actions before the last election, in which Ms Vere stood in the Tory interest)?
Feminist is as feminist does. In any case, I am myself a feminist, in that I have always supported the rational treatment of women in marriage, property, education, work, the professions and law, and supported the abolition of unjustified barriers to them.
What we are dealing with, when we encounter Harriet Harman , is something entirely different. This is not feminism but a dogmatic pursuit of a gigantic revolution in the relations between the sexes, with enormous consequences for marriage, child-rearing and society.
It is based upon the (to me, extremely strange) idea that the fact that women become pregnant, and men do not, cannot justify any distinctions between men and women, in law, custom or morality. It also includes a belief that women are ‘excluded’ from various parts of our society solely by irrational prejudice - a belief which justifies the imposition of quotas upon employers and others to ensure that women are ‘represented’ in all occupations, trades and professions (well, almost all, my campaign for women to be 50% of all dustcart operatives has never quite taken off).
Mrs May’s adoption of this position was a very significant moment in British politics, (as is usual in such cases) widely ignored. She did so by supporting all-women shortlists for Parliamentary candidates in an interview with the Guardian on 14th December 2009. She had previously said (to the same paper on 10th November 1995, in an interview with Rebecca Smithers, to which I’m unable to provide a link, though perhaps a more adept user of the web might help) ‘I'm totally opposed to Labour's idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I've competed equally with men in my career, and I have been happy to do so in politics too.’
Here you may find Mrs May’s U-turn on the subject http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/dec/14/theresa-may-lady-in-waiting
And you will also find that she makes no attempt to explain it. She does not need to explain it to Ms Orr, who is happy to welcome a new recruit into the Guardian’s world. Mrs May has bent her neck to the new orthodoxy, and they are happy enough with that . But if she claims to be a conservative, she needs to explain her adoption of such a belief to conservatives.
And Ms Vere, the alleged critic of Harriet Harman, needs to explain her allegiance to a party in which such a person is prominent, powerful and praised. She cannot attack Ms Harman and support Mrs May. One or the other. But not both.
Ms Vere says ‘I support strong families who are able to take care of their own, socially and financially.’ But families are not just economic units that take care of their own. They are private places of nurture and independent society, where individuals are free of the state and of commerce, and where tradition, morals, manners, language, stories, lore, legend, poetry and faith are passed on from generation to generation. This cannot happen if the adults and the children are largely parted from their children by the pressures of incessant work outside the home, and when Sunday has been abolished as a religious day of rest and turned into a noisy commercialised zone of retail therapy.
Another reader has pointed out, correctly in my view, the significance of the figures Ms Vere quotes on education. They result from militant, equality-of-outcome feminism (something she claims to oppose) in education.
Ms Vere next says :’We must stop pitting the beleaguered and overworked, paragon-of-virtue stay-at-home mum versus the guilty, uncaring, self-obsessed working mum. Both are ridiculous stereotypes which should be banished. And when people like you, Peter, ‘defend’ or ‘attack’ either of these stereotypes, it encourages a hardening in attitudes.’
Do I? Can I see some examples of my doing this? Who’s doing this pitting? I know perfectly well that few mothers have any choice as to whether they go out to work. I do not condemn them, but I condemn the government, and the other influences that push them into this unwanted fate. Ms Vere should read what I actually say She might then learn what I think. But does she care?
Ms Vere says : ‘Supporting dual income households by making a contribution to childcare costs is a win for the family, and a long term win for our country. All parents probably wish that they had an extended family on their doorstep, but life’s not like that and you find new ways of broadening your net.’
The assumption behind this statement is that there are two options – one that subsidised ’childcare’ is provided, the other that grandparents will step in. But what about the third possibility – that the child’s own mother does the job?
No, families of this kind, despite usually being materially worse off than their modern rivals, must be taxed to support those in which both parents do paid work, and to offer an indirect subsidy to the employers who get the main benefit.
As I’ve said, Mr Osborne will subsidise any form of child care except that done by the child’s own mother. The family which makes a substantial sacrifice to raise its own young is actively penalised, to pay for well off families which prefer money to family life, and also to pay to impose a new and revolutionary way of life on many poor families who would rather hold to the traditional way.
This is an active policy, and if I were of Ms Vere’s persuasion I would call it 'discrimination’. What it certainly is, is a policy to encourage one way of life, and discourage another. I do not think that it could possibly be described as ‘conservative’.
Then there’s this : ‘…we should make sure that by family, we mean dads too. Children need parents – both of them – and the assumption that only the mother can be the care-giver or that dividing caring responsibilities between the both parents is oooh a bit modern, is nonsense. Right from birth, the state, the media and many others inadvertently and unintentionally leave fathers out of the conversation.’
This is, once again, a dogmatic point, coming from the farthest reaches of the Sexual Liberation Front, and its claim that men and women are interchangeable. If any father wishes, or has, to be the principal carer, good luck to him. Some have to. General Boris Gromov, of the Soviet Army, who successfully led that army’s ordered retreat from Afghanistan, was a fine father to his children, of necessity, after his wife died. No doubt there are individuals who find this both congenial and good, just as there are women who would rather drive a tank, fight fires or run a corporation than nurture the young. I wouldn’t stand in their way.
But most of us, as we voyage through life, have noticed that men are different from women, and that the generality of men are not as well-equipped, temperamentally and in other ways, to raise children, especially small children, as are the generality of women. It is a sign of the unhinged nature of modern Britain that such a statement of the obvious should need to be made. You might wish to alter this, and you would be entitled to your opinion. But to do so you must embark on a revolution. Why would a conservative pursue such an aim?
Finally, I’ll respond to this : ‘…parents in dual-income households take care of their children too! They do phonics, ride bicycles, bake cupcakes, go on trips, help with homework etc etc. The assumption that going to work results in a complete abrogation of young-raising responsibility is narrow-minded and frankly offensive.’
I make no such assumption. How could I? The great conscript army of wageslave mothers struggle home nightly to try to win back some of what they have lost in the day, and try mightily to do so. They know what they’re missing. But time once gone, especially quantity time with young children, cannot be brought back – a truth that all parents of all sorts know, as they gaze in amazement at their adult offspring and wonder where the time went and how it all happened so quickly.
It just happens to be my opinion, and that of significant numbers of other parents, notably of the various campaigns for full-time mothers which have over the past dozen years been given the brush-off by the Tories, that the presence of a full-time mother in the home is *better* than the absence of one.
I would expect an avowedly socialist or liberal party to scorn such a view. The thing that interests me is that the party which proclaims itself to be Conservative is on that side as well. Ms Vere is welcome to her funky, radical views, even if she doesn’t know they’re funky and radical. But what business has she standing for Parliament while calling herself a ‘Conservative’? That’s what this is about.
By the way, I have never mentioned the 1950s, and I don’t ’hark back’ to any era. I can remember the 1950s, and there was plenty wrong with them, as I make plain in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’. I yearn for no ‘golden age’. I just yearn for the good in preference to the bad, at all times and in all places.
Loyalty to tribe seems to me to guide Ms Vere more strongly than interest in ideas, their origin and outcome. That’s why she’s in a party that calls itself conservative and isn’t.
As for me being the ‘arbiter of conservatism’ (I am certainly not the arbiter of Conservatism) , I should have thought the test was to be found elsewhere.
I have much experience of the enemies of conservatism, and much of my view of what it is has been formed by finding out in detail what happens when conservatism, in the form of faith, tradition, patriotism, privacy, liberty, limited government and the rule of law is defeated and cast aside.
Ms Vere thinks this is all dull, irrelevant stuff, bring-backery and ‘harking back to yesteryear’, and other silly jibes that belong in G2, on ‘Woman’s Hour’ or in the New Statesman. But I also look for definitions in history and thought, particularly in Christianity, in the ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ of Edmund Burke, on the voluminous work done by such people as Patricia Morgan on the family, and of John Marks and others on education. I may not be able to define it, nor would I want to. I’ve had enough of ideological politics to last several lifetimes. But I do know what it is not, and I do know who its enemies are.
If a party fails to stand up for the rule of law, embraces egalitarianism, sneers at tradition, weakens the free family, threatens national independence and liberty, destroys good things and replaces them with worse ones, tears up our beloved countryside for gain, engages in sordid jingoism and warmongering, then it is not conservative.
There is no trades descriptions law in British politics, or who knows what would happen? But it is surely morally wrong for this collection of social and moral liberals to stand before the electorate and call themselves by that name.
By the way, I have absolutely no idea what ‘opportunity cost’ has to do with it. It doesn’t sound like a principle, or even a disposition. It sounds like the rattling of a desiccated calculating machine.
She is of course welcome to respond here at length.
