Blair Wins Third Way Loses - Road to the Middle Class

ON MAY 5, Tony Blair led the British Labour Party to an unprecedented third consecutive electoral victory in Britain. You would think it would be time for celebration. But the cartoonists gave him a black eye, and the newly elected Labour Party members of Parliament are blaming him for the loss of 47 seats. With a majority of 66 in the House of Commons, they want him to resign.

With 356 seats in the new Parliament Tony Blair’s Labour Party is still, behind Blair’s fading smile, a coalition of the loony left and the clients of the welfare state. It’s getting a challenge in its northern strongholds from the Liberal Democrats. With 62 seats, the Lib Dems moved left in the May 5 election.

Then there is the Conservative Party, with 197 seats, the place for reactionaries that can’t persuade themselves to capitulate to the progressive world and its cult of perpetual adolescence. The general consensus is that the Conservatives have brought themselves back to respectability from the humiliations of 1997 and 2001 when Labour piled up huge majorities.

But the fact is that a majority of Britain’s electors voted for the parties of the left. The Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash knows who they are: “liberal-minded voter[s]Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ who believe in fairness, tolerance, decency and combining social justice with individual freedom.” Never mind about violent crime, the disappearance of the working-class husband, and the emergence of a new non-working class “on the social,” (i.e. welfare). Let’s vote for “decency.”

Some people on the right are actually relieved that the Conservatives did not win. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times and Peter Oborne in The Spectator think that the time for a Conservative government is not yet ripe. They expect a rendezvous with reality for Labour some time in the next parliament, for the Labour Party has been rapidly increasing taxes, from about 37 percent of GDP back in 1997 to 42 percent right now and climbing. They have increased the public payroll by over 800,000 employees, with no increase in private sector jobs. After the economic renaissance of the Thatcher years, they have turned the clock back to feudal clientage, extending Britain’s miasma of means-tested benefits so that 40 percent of Britons now get a substantial part of their income from the state.

But will the British people ever get fed up enough to turn again to the Tories? Middle America is firmly attached to the Republican Party, but Middle Britain isn’t so sure about the Conservatives. There was never an Equal Rights Amendment in Britain to make political activists out of women like Phyllis Schlafly, never a Supreme Court to provoke a pro-life movement into being with Roe v. Wade, never a ban on school prayer to create a Christian Right. There are conservative foundations in Britain: the free market Institute for Economic Affairs, and now Civitas that advocates for a turn from the welfare state to civil society. But there is no talk radio, no Christian Right, and no Fox News.

There is plenty for the Brits to get riled up about: spiraling crime rates that exceed levels in the United States, the utter demolition of working class culture and its authentic old institutions, functional illiteracy in about a third of young Britons, out-of-control immigration, and a complete collapse of marriage in the lower classes. But nobody seems upset enough to do anything about it, except perhaps in London where the Conservatives achieved some surprising gains. London is a city where high tax rates and high crime rates are felt most acutely.

Perhaps then the only hope is that, as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke has written: “in the end, Labour governments run out of money.” When this one does, perhaps the British people will be receptive to an alternative; they might come to see that they could get more services if the government monopolies in education and health were broken up and privatized. But so many pundits are confidently predicting this turn that they are probably wrong.

One thing we can see clearly. The so-called “Third Way” politics begins and ends with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. No one can say that they didn’t try to lead their parties out of their left-wing ghettos. It took political brilliance of the first rank to take a McGovernized Democratic Party in 1992 and make it presentable to Middle America. It took equal brilliance to take Old Labour and get Middle Britain to fall in love with “New Labour” in 1997. But rank-and-file Democrats and Labourites hated it. They like their left-wing world, its utopian pieties and its rewarding government and non-profit sinecures. That is why the Labour Party is coming together this week to grease the skids for the best leader they ever had.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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