Luke has been very kindly watching Sky News for me, because I’ve not got it, and has seen the Conservative Shadow Cabinet (apparently there may be two such cabinets now) having a good old laugh about one of their chaps being arrested – dunno what for, stealing a policeman’s helmet or some such jape, I imagine.
‘Are these people serious?’ asked Luke. ‘No’, I responded on Luke’s blog, ‘and let me tell you why, at inordinate length both in your beleagured comments section and then back on my own blog courtesy of a quick copy and paste.’
Luke’s review of the said Conservative’s behaviour put me immediately in mind, sad bugger that I am, of what Viscount Hailsham had to say (see p. 21-22) about the Conservative party in 1959:
‘Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life. In this they differ from Communists, Socialists, Nazis, Fascists, Social Creditors, and most members of the British Labour Party. The simplest amongst them prefer fox-hunting - the wisest, religion. To the great majority of Conservatives, religion, art, study, family, country, friends, music, fun, duty, all the joy s and riches of existence of which the poor no lees than the rich are the indefeasible free-holders, all these are higher in the scale than their handmaiden, political struggle.’
(The Conservative Case, 1959, pp 12-13; quoted in Henry Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party, 1979, p24, which is very good and should be read by loads of people, do you hear?).
For a while in the 1970s & ’80s,when the grocer’s daughter took the party took the party by the scruff of the neck, things changed. The party was wrong, but at least it was seriously wrong, and appeared to give a monkey’s about what actually happened in the country at large. Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph were ’serious’ politicians.
Now, and at national level anyway it is as much a class thing as it was in 1959, the Conservative party are reverting to type, and this is reflected in the blase attitudes to the financial meltdown and recession we’ve seen quoted in recent weeks, from Andrew Lansley on recession as good for the figure, to George Osborne on short-sellers hurting the poor as just one of those things that happens in the city, dear boy, and even to David Cameron himself on keeping his fingers crossed for really bad news when he wakes from his comfortable slumbers and has the radio turned on for him.
At local level, where I plough my lowly trade of struggle, there is less of a direct correlation between class status and the facility to see politics as a jolly good game but not as good as shooting animals and stuff.
Margaret Thatcher’s successful discursive articulation of ‘traditional’ Tory values and a right wing ideology of natural self-interest drew towards her party a swathe of what everyone had referred to as the working class, and which had to a smaller or greater extent been let down by the inability of trade unions and the narrower Labour movement of the 1970’s and ’80s to extend its remit to cater for the new challenges of de-industrialisation and the dog-eat-dog dynamics of mass unemployment.
This is still reflected in some local Conservative parties, where some Conservative councillors and activists, bred without silver spoons in their mouths, are actually quite serious about their politics – again, wrong, but at least seriously wrong.
But in others, and I broadly count my own West Lancashire patch in this with one or two councillor exceptions, the old ethos of ‘politics as plaything’ still holds considerable sway. For many Conservative councillors and activists down my way, there really is a genuine divorce between politics as it is played out in the Council chamber and on the streets around election time, and what actually happens to people’s lives because of the decisions taken during playtime. I’ve tried to set out how the effects this ‘reality gap’ here.
This isn’t a personal criticism of Conservatives - I’ve said several times previously on this blog that many local Conservatives I’ve met, and I know none of them beyond the demands of institutional courtesy, appear to be decent people within in their own terms, a genuine commitment to public service.
But perhaps that is the key. There’s public service as played out, where I am criticised for seeking to bring ‘intellectual debate’ to the Council chamber when the Chairman thinks it’s getting ate and playtime should now be over.
And then there’s public service, which is about serving the public. This was brought home to me loud and clear recently when, during a meeting with a senior Council officer, I referred myself to ‘playing the game’ in respect of a report I would want to bring to committee or some such. In my defence, I used the phrase ironically, and in the context of the constitutional rules which state how a report can or cannot be brought. The officer, who didn’t pick up on my ‘dry’ humour (it happens a lot and I’m seeking to restrain myself) reported sharply that for her/himself the matter in and (and the report) was NOT a game.
S/he was dead right, and I told her/him so, and it’s that kind of public servant we should be after, not the Conservative kind.
’Serious politicians for serious times’. Yes it’s a handy catchphrase. It’s also so much more than that.
