The liberalism of Tony Blair

By any standard, the Blair legacy is going to be a mixed blessing. In domestic policy, ten years of Prime Minister Blair have delivered little of real value. The one novelty for this longest ever Labour government is an economy which has at least managed to stay on the rails, whatever pitfalls lie ahead, and for this the forthcoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will no doubt claim credit. But the constitutional mayhem, the damage that has been done to individual freedom in any number of ways - from the proliferation of CCTV cameras to the official sifting of our household waste, from the effective curbs on freedom of speech and expression to the outrageous decision of Members of Parliament to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act (a rare example of a beneficial Labour political reform), all will bring lasting condemnation on the Blair years.

There is, however, a nobler side to Blairism, but it is not one which is widely recognised at home. Ten years ago Tony Blair promised us an ethical foreign policy. By and large, he has delivered, albeit that you practically have to be an American to notice. Michael Gerson of the Washington Post comments:

In the conventional wisdom, Blairism has been buried under the debris of Iraq. Yet Blair insists there is no substitute for an active internationalism. "The alternative, in the end, comes down to a combination of either hope that it [terrorism] doesn't come after us, which after 9/11 isn't very sensible, or alternately in certain parts of Europe, leave that to the Americans."

Whatever the outcome of the Iraq war, the world Blair describes is not going away. Will the next prime minister and the next U.S. president serenely accept the proliferation of terrible weapons to unstable regimes? Will they ignore the pleas of dissidents and the suffering that comes from treatable disease? Perhaps. But those leaders would find that there are moral consequences to inaction as well as to action and that retreat can lead to some nasty and dangerous places.

Predicting a legacy is a tricky thing, but Blair's is clear. Thirty years ago, Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield mockingly asked, "Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?" By this high standard, Tony Blair is a liberal.

In much the same way as a previous incumbent of 10 Downing Street, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair's premiership has not been without its blunders and absurdities. Nevertheless, a lot depends on whether or not Blair's successor has the determination to persevere with what is right when presented with so-called easy options or the opportunity to court cheap popularity. For all his faults, there may yet be cause to miss Tony Blair when he is gone.

Why we must defend Enlightenment values

We have on several occasions referred to the retreat of true liberal values in Britain and other western countries, and urged the necessity of resuscitating an authentic liberal consciousness. Nevertheless, as the word "liberal" has been progressively divorced from its true meaning, to the extent that many people consider it to be shorthand for "left wing" or "socialist", it does no harm to reinforce precisely what we mean by liberal or Enlightenment values. We are therefore delighted to read Melanie Phillips' excellent presentation on the crisis of modern liberalism in the context of its confrontation with radical Islamism. Melanie Phillips defines liberalism thus:

By liberalism I mean the commitment to a free society, founded above all on the separation of secular government from religious worship — from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law.

Melanie points out that liberalism is essentially a creed of modernity, from which freedom and democracy naturally derive. It is therefore fundamentally at odds with the Islamist programme, which in its classical form defined by the ideological founders of the Muslim Brotherhood organisation, sees western Enlightenment values as a "virus" which must be destroyed before it can infect and ultimately destroy the Islamic world. The extent to which this belief system is valid, or constitutes a threat to the West is beyond the scope of this article (but please read in full Melanie Phillips' treatment of the subject). The point is that developments in western liberalism have rendered our so-called free societies incapable of defending itself against this or any other similar threat. Melanie continues:

Why is a liberal society so reluctant to defend its own most cherished values of freedom and tolerance? The answer, I suggest, lies both in the intrinsic nature of liberalism — and also in what I would call our dominant culture of corrupted liberalism, in which true liberal values have actually been turned on their heads.

Our corrupted liberal culture has torn up the key precepts of liberalism so that it no longer knows what they are, let alone stands ready to defend them to the death. Authentic liberalism was a doctrine of social progress based on maximising the good in people’s behaviour and minimising the bad. It thus depended upon making moral distinctions between good and bad.

But these distinctions have been destroyed by a combination of hyper-individualism — which grew out of liberalism — and a form of cultural Marxism whose agenda is to destroy liberal values. Between them, these trends tore up the concepts of objectivity, authority and the Judeo-Christian moral codes underpinning western values and substituted emotion, subjectivity, and moral and cultural relativism.

All lifestyles were now deemed to have equal status. Social or moral norms were intolerable because by definition they excluded by those who lay outside them. So normative values were replaced by those of groups hitherto deemed to lie outside them. Such self-designated ‘victim’ groups became unchallengeable: they could now do no wrong, while the dominant culture could do no right. And ‘universal’ human rights law became the judicial weapon for minorities to overturn the values of the dominant culture.

Under the banner of liberal values, this actually destroyed the core precept of liberalism — the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, truth and lies.

The fact of the matter is that when Islamist and other detractors of the west argue that western liberal democracy is decadent, they are essentially correct. The bedrock liberal values on which our society is based has been progressively undermined over several decades thanks to the strange conjunction of cultural Marxism and hyper-individualism.

As Mark Steyn has pointed out, it is a mistake to identify Islamism (let alone Islam) as the real enemy. The worst enemy of western liberal societies is within:

Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb.

Western civilisation has been undermined by a failure to recognise, uphold and promote the values that underpin that civilisation. Our education system teaches a tendentious version of history that actively delegitimises the values and achievements that created this nation and others'; much of our media output does the same thing, under the spurious cover of "objectivity"; and the multiculturalist agenda decrees that since all cultures are equal, any attempt to assert or celebrate the majority culture must ipso facto be a racist and discriminatory exercise. The inversion of liberal values has resulted in the progressive weakening of the social, moral and cultural infrastructure which makes up our national immune system. We need to repair this immune system quickly if we are not to fall victim to civilisational AIDS. The need for a return to Enlightenment values is urgent and compelling.

The illusory prestige of the United Nations

More evidence of the uselessness of the United Nations as any kind of worthwhile authority in the world has been provided this week by the election of Zimbabwe to head the key United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Zimbabwe's appointment was secured largely due to the votes of other African nations.

While Zimbabwe may consider this to be a feather in its cap at a time when the Zimbabwean state and its gangster President Robert Mugabe have been under increasing pressure. Zimbabwe's egregious human rights violations, and the wanton destruction of the Zimbabwean economy are hardly an example to the world. Inflation is running at 2000%, and the country lives under the threat of widespread famine due to the collapse of agriculture following Zimbabwe's "land reform" programme, i.e. the racist expropriation of white landowners who formerly operated one of the most productive agricultural systems in what used to be known as "the breadbasket of Africa".

So much for sustainable development. Hopefully our European Greens have been taking note.

Meanwhile, it has been announced that Serbia is to assume the chairmanship of Europe's premier human rights body, the Council of Europe. While we do not underestimate the progress that has been made in political reform in Serbia over the past few years, to describe Serbia as a beacon of human rights in Europe would be optimism bordering on delusion. The new speaker of the Serbian parliament is the hardline nationalist Tomaslav Nikolic, from the Serbian Radical Party, whose leader is currently facing war crimes charges at the Hague. The resurgence of hardline nationalism in Serbia following a period since 2000 when democratic and reformist parties have been in the ascendant, is a worrying development. There are still war crimes suspects at large who are believed to be under the protection of elements of Serbia's security forces. While we do not doubt the sincerity of many politicians in Serbia in their determination to reform the country, we do not underestimate the serious difficulties that they face. It is hardly appropriate at this time for Serbia to be handed the challenge of heading the Council of Europe.

What to these two cases tell us about the effectiveness of international institutions? It tells us that too many national governments in the world regard them as opportunities for obtaining or bestowing international prestige, will little or no regard for whatever the fundamental purposes of these organisations are supposed to be. In other words, the majority of governments in the world do not take them seriously. Consequently, we should be very wary about conceding too much authority to them.

True internationalism is based on working together with people and governments of other nations for mutual advantage, and for the common good. Our true allies in the world are those who share our values and principles. We should not organise our international affairs by allowing ourselves to be directed by institutions which are dominated by those who do not share those values, as such bodies are ineffective instruments for achieving worthwhile internationalist objectives. The prestige of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and similar institutions is based largely on illusion and essentially bogus. We should not be deceived.

Moral leadership needed on welfare reform

James Bartholomew, author of the excellent book The Welfare State We're In and the blog of the same name, reports a recent talk by the American intellectual Charles Murray on the corrosive moral and spiritual effect of the welfare state on people's lives.

"[Murray] said he was not primarily concerned that the welfare state costs too much "though it does", nor that it tends to make things worse "though it does" but that it "drains" the life out of people - particularly the spiritual life and sense of meaning.

He believed that people derive a sense of meaning in their lives in one or more of the following four ways: vocation, community, family and faith. For these things to retain their meaning, it was vital that government should leave them alone.

He offered his sense of how Europeans defined the purpose of life these days. He felt they think that the idea is to have a pleasant time until you die. He felt that they no longer believe that life has a special or transcendental meaning. Their priorities seem to be holidays and shorter working hours. The idea that work can have meaning in their lives has faded. Their belief in marriage, too, has dwindled. They even are no longer so ready to put their children's interests above their own. There has been a secularisation of society. People now think they are a combination of chemicals which, after a while, would "de-activate".

Murray's proposal is that government should give cash payouts to all citizens (a portion of which must be spent on health insurance) in lieu of all welfare benefits. Murray postulates that this would change people's behaviour, by reinstating "feedback loops" - in other words the connection between an action and its consequences - which the welfare state has tended to sever.

"[A] girl would be less inclined to get pregnant out of wedlock if she knew she would get no extra money from the government. She would also be able to get money from the father because his regular money from the government would be paid to a known bank account and money could be taken from it. This would, Murray suggested, affect his behaviour, too. He would be more cautious about making women pregnant.

The idea of 'feedback loops', such as described above, is crucial to understanding how the welfare state has undermined behaviour. The welfare state has, in many ways, taken away the feedbacks which a society without state welfare used to supply."

Bartholomew comments on Murray's scheme as follows:

"I am struck first of all by how he admitted that this was a compromise. He said he was making an offer to the Left. They would be allowed to keep big spending - since his plan would continue big state spending. But it would be in a different form that would curtail many of the bad effects of state welfare.

... The ideal solution - minimal state welfare - would probably not be politically acceptable in a democracy. But reforms that would be politically acceptable would probably not be radical enough to make a 'good society'.

Melanie Phillips addresses the same issue from a different perspective. Reflecting on comments by David Cameron on what he regards as the progressive de-civilising of our society, Melanie comments:

"It is the welfare state which, more than anything else, has created the culture of incivility, irresponsibility, family breakdown and disorder of which Mr Cameron spoke.

The direct link between welfarism and the ‘me-society’, between welfare rights and the erosion of the ties of duty that should bind us together, is unmistakable.

Yet no politician, even Conservative ones, will go near this subject. For all the windy rhetoric about irresponsibility and state interference, the root cause of these problems — the welfare state — remains a political untouchable.

...Frank Field was the former poverty campaigner who famously was instructed by Tony Blair to think the unthinkable on welfare.

He duly thought the unthinkable, came up with the radical proposal for an insurance-based welfare system — and was promptly sacked from his ministerial post for his pains.

Since then, welfare reform has ground to a halt. The situation has accordingly got far worse. Many more Britons are hooked on the dependency culture as benefits were renamed tax credits and applied ever higher up the income scale.

Yet since Labour came to power, it has spent a staggering £60 billion on ‘welfare reform’.

The vast welfare bureaucracy enables the Government to intrude ever more into people’s lives, particularly in the areas of family life and child-rearing. And through providing financial incentives for lone parenthood while penalising couples, it has positively encouraged family disintegration, the single most important factor behind our culture of selfishness and disorder.

It has also provided a myriad of incentives for dishonesty. Of course, some people are genuinely ill, but through Incapacity Benefit the state is ripped off to the tune of billions of pounds each year by those who are not too disabled to work, but are simply playing the system.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Government is paying tax credits or out-of-work benefits to about 200,000 more lone parents than are living in the UK.

Almost every part of our ‘cradle to grave’ welfare provision is foundering. Through Government incompetence, our once great pensions system is leaving millions facing an impoverished old age. Our health service teeters on the edge of continual crisis.

...Even worse has been the effect of welfarism on people’s behaviour and attitudes. True, the assault on family values has come from the self-indulgent and irresponsible elites at the top of society.

But welfarism put rocket fuel behind this by making it possible for millions of women to have children without sharing the commitment with a man — and telling them that this was their right.

The crucial point was that welfarism detached behaviour from its consequences. It held that material need must be met, regardless of behaviour. It did this to avoid making the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor that was associated with Victorian callousness towards the poverty stricken.

...The Government says welfare must meet the needs of children whatever kind of household they live in. This is the principle behind child benefit, surely the most effective engine for the mass production of fatherlessness — and consequently child misery — that could ever have been devised.

If a young girl has a baby without a father on board, the state says it must be ‘non-judgmental’ about her behaviour and focus instead entirely on provision for the child. So the young lone mother gets a range of welfare benefits and a council flat.

But those benefits, which enable such girls to live what appears to them to be an independent life, provide an incentive to get pregnant — and to do so over and over again.

So our caring welfare state actually produces the truly desperate situation of young girls having babies alone and unprotected, sinking into depression or worse, and producing children who will be disadvantaged in every walk of life — and will probably go on to repeat this catastrophic pattern.

...The Government has made only the most feeble of moves towards expecting claimants to find work — by providing an endless supply of carrots, but never any stick.

Yet while thousands thus cushioned by welfare refuse to work, the Government has encouraged mass immigration to find workers who will do so — in the process driving down wages and deepening poverty.

Madness, or what?

As for public services, people should be paying into compulsory personal and social insurance schemes for pensions, health and long-term care and, in return, paying less tax to the state.

This would restore responsibility for individuals and their families, while looking after those who are truly incapable of looking after themselves, end dependency and remove the ever more intrusive control of individual lives by the state.

Instead of a welfare state which has so infantilised and demoralised us, we need a welfare society. Our culture needs to grow up at last."

Indeed it does. The damage already wrought by our comprehensive welfare state has been massive, however, and it has accelerated under the last ten years of Labour rule, which has cynically boosted the number of people dependent on the state in order to reinforce its own client constituency. The Labour vision of government is to act as pusher to a nation of welfare junkies.

Can the situation be retrieved? James Bartholomew is pessimistic:

"I have come to fear that all advanced societies are becoming more and more welfare state dependent and that people in these countries are gradually being changed more and more by these welfare states. The welfare state gives you money if you have children out of wedlock, it gives you money if you don't work, if gives you money if you are well but you pretend to be ill and it declines money it would have given you if you have saved. I agree with Charles Murray that the worst effect of the welfare state is on the character of the people it affects (mostly the less well off). I would love to see major reform but I fear that over the long term, reform will not last and that the damage done to society will continue.

If this happens around the advanced world, we are really talking about a whole civilisation in decline. Is this too gloomy? I hope so."

James Bartholomew and Melanie Phillips are correct to frame this issue in such stark terms. Our society is effectively infantilised, sentimental, decadent. We need as a society to re-learn the skills of self-reliance and personal responsibility if we are to retain our freedom. The situation is not irretrievable, but it is severe and time is short. Our political system is not currently geared up to tackle problems of this kind, because our spin-led parties are inherently incapable of taking the difficult decisions and displaying the moral leadership that is required.