Gordon Brown versus David Miliband (is he really called that? It’s asking for trouble.) Also … “CHANGE” …

I also want to use this bit to talk about the notion of “change”, as it is commonly peddled as a panacea, by politicians and “management” “consultants”. (These latter items are a tautology, and an intelligent space-alien from planet Tharg would gasp in incomprehension at the very concept.)

David Davis

Now, for libertarians, the spectator-sport of watching socialists (who are of course the ultimate enemy – all other classifications: one-nation-Tories, Militant Islamists, modern TV-production-companies, UKIP, the EU, and whatever else, is merely a form of lateral stamp-collecting) tear up each other’s dirty linen in public is a tremendous hoot. It makes up for all the tricoteurish cackling that conservatively-minded individuals of many liberal kinds got in 1990, when the “Tories” axed their ace of trumps and put in a droid instead.

Fraser Nelson at Coffee House thinks that the pub-fight has now extended and is about to spill out into the street.

David Rubberband has either expressly confronted the PM by implication, or has made it look like he has. There are two scenarios:-

(1) Brown will at the first opportunity demote him in a “reshuffle”. This will cost, even though David Rubberband may/will bounce back some months/years down the line. this will make ZanuLaborg look even worse than it does.

(2) There will be a leadership challenge, which Brown will probably lose. If so, then I don’t think people will stand for a second PM being shoehorned in without a General Election, which ZanuLaborg will probably lose. Not by 140 seats, but enough. People forget how hard it will be to overturn entrenched inertia in the many, many Rotten Boroughs in metropolitan districts.

Either way, it’s fun. I’ve also somewhat pre-contradicted my intention to lambast those of the political/enemy class, and “management” “consultants”, who constantly repeat that magic mantra-word “CHANGE”. Rubberband himself either said it or implied it in the last 48 hours.

What I mean by what the commentariat and the Media world call ”political” change is the kind I define as being brought about by utopian vandalism. This is not the kind which markets benignly cause to occur naturally. I fear that Rubberband meant more if the kind which socialists invariably do, and always for the worse, to whatever wretched civilisation they get their infected teeth into, is almost invarariably bad, and almost all of which is unwanted and unasked for by ordinary individuals.

There would prbably be no voters for socialism, if socialists did not go about telling people that they could have other people’s stuff. Thus vast amounts of unautorised “change” would never havew taken place.

More good news about the death of green-ness

Good stuff.

Hat tip Moonbattery. We here have always sais that green-nazism was, is and for ever will be a toy-belief-system of rich socialists, who have nothing better to think about.

How socialists got rich in the first place, or whether they got to be socialists via some sort of accident after becoming rich, is the subject of another fruitful discussion, I think.

Blast from the Past: Sean Gabb on “Modern Conservatism”

From Free Life No 18, May, 1993
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/freelife/flhtm/fl18cons.htm

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Modern Conservatism
David Willetts
Penguin Books, London, 1992, 216 pp., £5.99
(ISBN 0 14 015477 9)

The Author of this book is the Consultant Director of the Conservative Research Department, and is a Member of Parliament. Both capacities tend to lower him in my view. I will try nonetheless to set aside my prejudice and to review his book solely on its merits.

This is an easier and a more productive task than I expected, for Mr Willetts has produced a very good book. Though in part a work of exposition, drawing on all the usual sources, old and new, it goes far beyond this limited purpose, and provides a synthesis that both persuades intellectually and provides a complete political agenda.

The case as stated in its opening is the familiar one. Contrary to all the imaginings of the utopian philosophers, we are fundamentally not rational beings. We cannot be perfected. We cannot be made fit for a social order based wholly on light and reason. Certainly, the modes of thought and social organisation that developed chiefly in England, and have since spread in stages throughout the world, can usually be given a powerful abstract justification. But the success – indeed, the continued existence – of these modes owes nothing to rational deliberation, and everything to an often unconscious habit. To abolish, or even to try altering these habits is to risk our enjoyment of the benefits that proceed from them. Anyone who thinks otherwise falls into demonstrable error. Anyone who proceeds from thought to action commits acts that range from the absurd to the catastrophically monstrous.

When, therefore, we come to an examine a functioning social order such as our own, our most proper attitude is one of curiosity mingled with reverence. We are not to seize on its apparent faults and reject it in favour of something else spun out of a single head. Nor, as has been most often done this century in those countries lucky enough to avoid a total reconstruction, are we to advocate sweeping reforms simply on the grounds of “modernisation” or of bringing something “into the twentieth century. We must instead try to understand the inner workings of society – to conjecture by what innumerable and infinitesimal stages the present order of things evolved to its present sophistication. This will require us to look even to those habits and institutions that rest on justifications manifestly absurd, asking whether they might not nevertheless serve a useful purpose. Then, and only then, shall we be ready to consider what deliberate changes may be necessary, and how these may best be combined with what already is. The best change is so cautious and incremental that only those directly affected notice its happening. Even the most radical, sudden change is best achieved so that within only a few years it becomes difficult to tell the old from the new.

Illustrating his case, Mr Willetts gives the usual examples of what happens when the accumulated wisdom of the past is thrown aside in some passion for immediate improvement. I will, however, give my own favourite example.

In 1911, there was an epidemic of bubonic plague in Manchuria. This was large enough to worry all the usual governments and international organisations – there were fears of a new Black Death – and so much effort was put into containment.

Now, it was soon discovered that the carriers of the fleas which in turn carried the Pasteurella pestis bacillus were marmots, large burrowing rodents who were hunted for their skins. It was also discovered that the nomadic tribesmen who had hunted marmots for centuries were largely unaffected. Mostly affected were the Chinese hunters who had just poured into Manchuria following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the lifting of all controls on movement into the region.

The reason for this difference was that the native hunters followed certain customary rules that tended to minimise the risk of infection. They never trapped marmots, but only shot them. If an animal moved sluggishly, it was left alone. if an entire colony showed signs of infection, the hunters would at once pack their tents and move on.

Only in 1894 had the causes of bubonic plague been identified. Before then, its means of transmission had been an absolute mystery. Yet here was a nation of illiterate nomads not only doing as the newest research might have advised them, but doing it by custom since time immemorial. Asked why they acted so, they gave the most bizarre mythological justifications that said nothing about the avoidance of infection. There was no talk of some divinely inspired ancestor whose teachings had avoided the anger of the gods, or whatever. All the evidence pointed to a long history of slight and unconscious adjustments to environment. As with a purely natural selection, there had been small revisions of habits. Those contributing to greater well-being had been copied and passed on to later generations as ritual.

Ignorant of epidemiology, the Chinese hunters were rational enough to sneer at these rituals, and to go about the business of catching their marmots in the most cost-effective manner. They died in their thousands, and sent the bacillus down the new railway lines towards the rest of humanity.1

Had the philosophy here illustrated been more generally received, the century now closing might not have been so filled with interesting events.

Yet, all this being said, there remains one obvious problem. As Mr Willetts asks,

[d]oes the conservative simply think that everything which exists is all right?[pp. 74-5]

There have always been pure conservatives, whose answer to this question would be a firm “yes”, who would resist all change, no matter from what or in which direction. There have been conservative defences of slavery and suttee. There are now conservative defences of trade union privilege and of the mining communities threatened by deregulation of the market in coal. In its purest form, conservatism is nothing more than a defence of whatever is, and never mind what it is. At times, indeed, it comes oddly close to the political correctness which tells us that female circumcision is acceptable wherever established among black people.

But this kind of conservatism is only important so far as it can be manipulated by others. The most impeccably conservative thinkers and politicians have been willing on occasion to turn radical. It was, for example, largely by Tory Governments in the last century that the slave trade was put down. By bribery, by threats, and sometimes by force of arms, the rest of the world was made to give up an ancient and previously almost unquestioned custom. The politicians concerned thought nothing of opening themselves to the same charge of utopian meddling as they were laying against the English jacobins and chartists.

The usual language of conservatism presupposes an ideological underpinning of the doctrine that it advances. Above, I use the phrase a “functioning social order”, and discuss the most appropriate means of achieving “such deliberate changes as may be necessary”. These are my words; but this type of wording is scattered through all the great conservative classics. Whatever may be said about the unideological nature of conservatism, it is clear that most conservatives want only to conserve certain institutions. They know how to recognise a functioning social order. They are as good as any socialist or liberal at knowing what changes are necessary. It is what I like most about Mr Willetts’ that he does not raise the usual smokescreen of “tory pragmatism”, but explicitly looks within English conservatism for the criterion by which what ought is separated from what ought not to be conserved.

His first proposed criterion is durability. If an institution has lasted for a long time in undiminished vigour, and without great and obviously attendant disadvantages, he says, the presumption ought to be that it serves a useful purpose. For modern England, this is as an effective criterion. It allows an attack on nearly everything in our national life that is wretched and in need of drastic reconstruction. Trade union privilege, to take a standard instance, though established, dates only from 1906, and has notoriously been one of the causes of our relative economic decline.

It is not, however, generally effective. The slave trade, after all, was more anciently established than the House of Lords, and had not been attended by any obvious disadvantage for the élites by whom and in whose interests social arrangements had previously been judged. If the feelings of the enslaved were now to be considered, it was not in accordance with any criterion of durability. Nor does this in itself tell us what is a functioning social order, or allow us to tell good changes from bad in an age when change, for whatever reason, becomes necessary.

Mr Willetts’ next criterion, though, is the right one. Institutions are good or bad so far as

they rely on state power. Reliance on legal enforcement is obviously not of itself wrong – any conservative understands the need for a framework of law and order – but at the very least, there has to be a presumption against intervening in arrangements reached by mutual consent. If an institution has only been able to survive by deploying such powers, then there is a real need for it to justify itself.[pp. 76-77]

To some extent, there is nothing unusual here. All Conservative politicians believe to some extent in private enterprise: it lets them bribe the lower classes without having the country decline too fast. Mr Willetts, though, has no time for this style of apologetics, or for the more aggressive corporatism that has tended to replace it. “Perhaps” he says,

the most unpleasant term in the political vocabulary is “UK Limited”.[p. 133]

His own defence of the free market is more than an argument for privatising the telephone network and deregulating the opticians. He quietly suggests a cutting back of the State far beyond anything contemplated by the Thatcher Government even in its most radical mood. He suggests a thorough application of the voluntary principle in economic affairs.

Nor does he draw any artificial distinction between the economic and the personal. He stands for a rejection of the moral paternalism within the Conservative Party that has come increasingly since 1979 to determine what we may do with our own minds and bodies.

Of course, there is no explicit mention of the liberty infringement and crime expansion schemes now run by the Home Office under the various names of the “War on Drugs” and the “protection of public morals”. That would have the Party bosses straight at this throat. He might be accused of classical liberalism – of having rejected the true tory path for the “shallow sophisms” of John Stuart Mill. Even worse, he might be denounced as a libertarian: and that would be the end of his career in politics.

Yet, while Mr Willetts can be described as a classical liberal, he is also undoubtedly a truer conservative than the sad, fawning creatures one mostly finds in Central Office or the Parliamentary Party. For all the great British conservative thinkers were also liberals. They taught reverence for the organic institutions of what happened to be the freest and most open society that had – or perhaps has – ever existed. Their speculations were on the growth and defence of such institutions as trial by jury, parliamentary government, and an unshackled press. It may be that some defended freedom because it existed by tradition. More commonly, though, they defended tradition because it embodied the freedom which they had learned to value on more rational grounds.

Their denunciation of ideology came in part from their knowing the weakness of unsupported abstract reasoning. In larger part, it came from a wish to deprive the collectivists and their radical dupes of a weapon of which they themselves had little need. But a hundred years of collectivist triumph have nearly shattered the organic liberalism of Old England. The case remains for moving cautiously, for seeking the latent wisdom or necessity in every institution proposed for reform – for not trying to jump straight to some Libertarian Alliance utopia. Even so, the true spirit of English conservatism now requires an explicit guiding ideology. And that ideology is classical liberal or libertarian. Those who deny this can quote the words of Burke and Salisbury, among others. But, more importantly, they miss the reasoning behind the words.

Though Mr Willetts, quite evidently, does not miss the reasoning here, his book is not equally good in all its sections. For example, his claim that

David Ricardo’s economics showed that government borrowing was just taxation deferred[p. 6]

is false in the given context. Ricardo was a great explainer and systematiser, and the most apparently obvious truths have been – and are – denied by conventional wisdom. But the folly of letting the government borrow money had been fully known – had even been a commonplace of political debate – since at least the 1690s: there are precise complaints scattered through the works of Swift, Bolingbroke, Junius, Adam Smith and Burke, to name only a few objectors. I shall particularly mention David Hume’s essay Of Public Credit. For if somewhat vague about that writer’s epistemology, Mr Willetts has read enough of the economic writings to quote approvingly from the essay Of Money.

Again, his denial of our present drift towards a police state is almost offensive. In case my readers should think that I am now letting prejudice have the better of me, I quote him at some length:

The list of constitutional reforms is quite considerable. The Data Protection Act of 1984 allows everyone access to information held about them on computer records, except for those concerning crime, tax and national security. There is a right for an individual to see his file and insist on changes if the material is incorrect. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 gives judicial protection to journalists’ notebooks. The Criminal Justice Act of 1988 sets out new, more rigorous rules on treatment of suspects, as well as allowing the press to challenge specific orders restricting their reporting. The Security Service Act of 1989 at last puts the security services on a statutory footing and in the words of the then Home Secretary “for the first time, provides a means of redress for a citizen who thinks that he has a cause for grievance against the service”. The Official Secrets Act, also of 1989, strips “away the criminal law from the great bulk of official information so that budget secrets, draft White Papers on health, correspondence dealing with pension decisions will no longer be subject to an Official Secrets Act.[pp. 159-61]

Anyone who has read the Acts mentioned above, and seen their impact on the case law, will take a less complacent view. In every important respect, they enlarge the power of the State. Such guarantees as they contain of just treatment are rather closer in their effect – and, I believe, in their intent – to the paper rights enjoyed in the old Soviet Bloc than to the solid protections of life, liberty and property that we used to possess under the common law.

But Mr Willetts is a member of Parliament, and, together with wrapping his liberalism in code, turning out smug, emollient drivel of this sort is part of the price that he must pay for his seat. There was a time when no honourable Englishman would have accepted such terms. But today, it is a public duty to accept them: the country cannot be wholly ruled by traitors and buffoons.

Perhaps therefore I should ignore this great blemish on his book – just as I am ignoring his now rather funny praise of John Major as a man of vision and principle.

For the same reason, I overlook his calling Winston Churchill a “transcendently great leader”[p. 18], when everyone with a candid eye for history knows that he was a bloodthirsty old windbag who would have served England far better than he did by drinking himself to death in 1910.

Now, did reading this book dispose me more kindly to the Conservative Party? For a while, it did. It had no effect on my voting intentions. I will vote Conservative nearly regardless of what corruption and misrule I must thereby endorse: the overall result has only to be better than a Labour Government. Nevertheless, for an entire half hour after reading his book I really believed again that the Party was what I thought it was back in 1978 when I first joined it.

That is a remarkable effect for a book to have in March 1993.

Sean Gabb

Notes

1. For those interest in following this case further, its full citation can be found in the notes to Chapter 4 of William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977. Back to document

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Amusing and instructive reading for a summer afternoon

David Davis

It’s about the nature of morality. there are many other previous lectures pre-embedded in the post it takes you to first.

We’ve also published stuff like this, from time to time, in our philosphical notes, at the LA archive of publications; see the list of thingies at the top centre of the LA homepage.

The world’s first music video…?

HOW MUCH IS A TRILLION?

David Davis

A few months ago, we wrote a variant of the old chestnut “How much is a billion?”. My boy ventured an question that demands an extention of the concept. (NOTE: I’m using the generally-accepted definition of a “trillion” as being one million millions, or 1E12, NOT 1E18 as was the original imperial case.)

1E12: A CUBE OF DRIED PEAS…60 metres x 60 x 60. That’s 198 feet or 10,000 peas along each and every edge, or 216,000 cubic metres, or getting on for 200,000 tons I would say. Probably fill a good-sized container ship.

31,711 years is approximately a trillion seconds. As the planet coold as it will,  Al Gore’s house in Tennessee is going to be under several dozen feet of permanently-iced tundra by then. Go and give the lying toad a hard time!

About 2.7 billion years is a trillion days, give or take. No plants (let alone any animals) no sponges even. Possibly the first photosynthetic bacteria, the ancestors of many lines iincluding chloroplasts.

One trillion US Dollars: what Gordon Brown’s stalinists waste in an average year. This is not to say that David Cameron’s less-serious and less-resolute stalinists would waste much less.

The solar wattage (reckoned as Watts per sq metre) arriving at 275 square miles of the earth’s surface at mid-day on the equator. That’s a block of land about 15 by 18 miles. The Amazon Rain Forest fixes less than 2% (2E10 or about 20 GigaWatts, per unit block of 275 sq miles) as biomass.

This 15 x 18-mile block of power (1 TeraWatt) is the same, roughly, as the “mean base load” of electrical energy being used by 340 million Western first-World homes, while 100% of them are cooking Christmas dinner in the Northern Hemisphere midwinter – that’s ALL the houses in Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Turkey and most of the Muddle East.

1E12 watts is also the gross radiated output of 18 square metres, or 21.5 square yards, of the Sun’s surface. In the UK, this is area of a moderately large sitting room, 12 feet by say 16 or 17. (about 56Gw is radiated per square metre, or the total mean amount of generated electric power normally available to the UK on a good day.)

1E12: The number of atoms in a third of a nanogram of Gold (3.27E-10 grams.) It’s about the size of a bacterium, and you MIGHT be able to see it with a good powerful optical microscope. Or maybe not.

1E12: The estimated number of different antibodies (immunoglobulins) which a human immune system is potentially capable of producing.

I may add more!

9/11′s 7th anniversary approaches, and it’s all-but-forgotten. Sean Gabb writes…

Sean Gabb

…thoughts on the 9/11 events just after the event, from a cottage in Greece.

Libertarian Alliance Showcase Publication No-18.

THE FUTURE OF THE USA. (Libertarian Alliance Foreign Policy perspectives, No-36, 2002 (from 2001))

(You may also fly forwards, to a post of 9th September 2008, here.

Light blogging at present (apologies)

See title. We are either out of the country or working hard. Gotta do what we gotta do. Please continue to stop by, for we are stoking up stuff to write about, and the storm-clouds are gathering over the head of Gordon Brown, which will provide interesting commentary-copy for us and others, and may prove problematic for Tony Blair David Cameron.

So, does Lord Carey think the “News of the World” was right that exposure of Max Mosley’s private likes and habits is “in the public interest”?

David Davis

I want humans to become better people, and I want them to want to be that thing. I want them to not have to want to read scurrilous crap, about the sexual leanings of other people, printed by “news papers”. That they want this stuff merely opens doors for supposed “moralists”, which is to say:- stalinists in disguise, to operate controls. My objective is best served by freeing education from the State’s control. Search many earlier posts about education here.

Now, I wouldn’t so sado-masochism if you paid me. (Nor ”oral” sex for that matter, whatever that strange and tautologous concept might be.) Or to be spanked, like poor old Sir Max Mosley, in a sexual context? Nah. The “News of the World” , described as a “news paper”, thinks that one person’s private delights ought to be displayed “in the public interest”. Yet, a person described as a “retired archbishop” (does he stop believing in God then, when he “retires” – a strange this for a “man of God” to do, I would have thought…retire?) thinks that such “news papers” ought to be allowed to go on supplying suppurating pus for people, robbed by the State of the ability to make informed judgements, to drink.

I’m not so sure as “Lord” Carey is.

People’s sexual and fetish habits become the property of others in a society where other people have nothing better to do than to want to know about them, for (what is called in Liverpool) “a laff”. This comes about because all other ways to stimulate the brain and mind, such as reading 1950s engineering textbooks on lathe operation, or practising with a reproduction Long-Bow, or learning how to build and drive a computer-aided 5-axis-milling-machine, have been taped off.

It is also reasonable to suppose that what someone wants to get up to in his (or her) bedroom, with or without one - or many - girls (or men) to help, and whether these are paid to help or not, is his (or her) private business. It was obvious to a child of six that a “public interest” defence by the NoW would fail.

Even in a free market, I for one would prefer that “there is no market in the gap” for stories like this, notwitstanding that I would make _no law_ to make publishing them an offence. I would, as I said, prefer that _people_ should find them both uninteresting and intrusional, such that there would be no reason for a “news paper” to publish such a thing.

The solution of course is better people. Perhaps we  libertarians will also have to dissolve them and elect another? Perhaps revolution is harder than it looks?

The interesting thing about the British “Labour” “Party”.

David Davis

The British Labouring-Party wants socialism: its credentials are fine in that regard, for they scoop money from poor-people via “tax-ation”, to be used by themselves. It is after all what socialists are for, and what they have always been for. Just look at the murdering pig Castro, and the other modern murderer Saddam Hussein. Hitler and Stalin were no different. No were the pigs Pol Pot and some robot called “ho chi Mhinh”, nor Mao and Brzhezhniev.

But now it’s faced with a real “di”-”lemma”. (Two problems at once.) It wants to stay in power, so it must get rid of Gordon Brown, or esle its Gauleiters in Westmonster will be out of their jobs at the next election, with nowhere to go since they are institutionally-unemployable. Or, if they wait till then, they’ll go down as a crowd who put in two (or more?) PMs without an election.

Their problem is their lack of Terror-Police. Now, I grant you, they’ve tried hard to instil the terror-factor in the present lot of Fuzz, but in a still-functioning liberal democracy it’s hard to make the Met look quite like the Gestapo or the KGB, even when their squads get to shoot blameless Brazilian electricians and be paid for it.

Labour can’t get out of this jam, for they have not got round, early enough as Lenin and Mao and Castro their friends did, to fixing the opposition via police terror early enough after 1997. They did try but it was too little and too late. Perhaps they thought we were all asleep and it would not be necessary (mostly true I’m afraid.)

They either have to dump an (admittedly inadequate) unlected PM and put in another (unelcted one), which ought to trigger an election which they will lose, or else they have to go on with ths one, who will lose the next election anyway (barring serious accidents.)

What a sad, sad pass for poor socialists, so right as they are, so moral and caring as they are, so correct and so messianically-driven for the common good as they are – to come to.

They are going to get thrown out, again, in a fair fight – as always is the case when one is offered. It’s tru: when people are offered socialism in a free and fair set of choices, they always reject it. So there’s hope, but the big battalions of PR firepower are still on the enemy’s side. 

ITEM:

I can’t blog as much in future. Never mind, for others will take my place, I am working on that matter. Libertarian blogging sadly comes between me and my family, not just in time matters but opinion ones also. It’s called “saving the f*****g world.”

I shall continue to blog when people are not looking. Posts may not be every day.

Sean Gabb to be interviewed by “Tyzden” tomorrow (the main Slovak weekly)

Sean Gabb

1. I shall give a two hour interview tomorrow (Saturday 26th July) to a magazine called Tyzden, which is the main weekly in Slovakia. It will run a four page spread about libertarianism. David D will link it here when it has been published.
 
2. Derek Jacobi has contributed a puff for the paperback edition of my first novel. There is no link to this review yet, but it will be posted as soon as it appears.

Blast from the Past: Sean Gabb on John Gray

http://www.seangabb.co.uk/freelife/flhtm/fl25gray.htm

From Free Life, Issue 25, May 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

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After Social Democracy: Politics, Capitalism and the Common Life
John Gray
Demos, 9 Bridewell Place, London, EC4V 6AP, 1996, 62pp, £5.95 (pbk)
ISBN 1 898309 52 3I reached the middle of this pamphlet hoping it was a cry for help. Perhaps John Gray had not become a lefty, but was in fact being held prisoner in the Demos headquarters. Perhaps the odd construction of his pamphlet was a result of the messages concealed within it. I fantasised how Mr Tame and I, alerted by these messages, could dress in black sweaters and break into Demos. We could knock out a few of the sinister, thick-set researchers, untie Dr Gray, and sweep him off to address some Hayek conference in the Bahamas.

Nice fantasy – but I found no messages. I finished the pamphlet convinced that it was all meant to be taken seriously. Its author has reached a new stage in his intellectual wanderings. He has lost not merely his old principles, but also any regard for the rules of composition and good faith.

For example, take, this:

…[M]arket institutions are not freestanding but come embedded in the matrices of particular cultures and their histories. [p.18]

And this:

…’[T]he market’ is not a freestanding institution, the expression of unrestricted freedom and human rationality in the economic realm, but instead an abstraction from an enormous miscellany of practices and institutions having deep roots in social life…. [pp.34-35]

And this:

Market institutions, like political ones, are not detachable from their histories and parent cultures. [p.35]

And this:

…[T]he neoliberal canard that markets are freestanding social relationships, embodying individual freedom and the human propensity to trade to mutual advantage. [p.42]

Or take this:

…[T]he new global freedom of financial capital so hems in national governments as to limit severely… traditional social-democratic full- employment policies. [p.13]

And this:

…[T]he power of the international currency and bond markets is now sufficient to interdict… expansionist policies. [p.25]

And this:

At the century’s end, the global mobility of capital and its power to constrain the freedom of action of sovereign states in economic policy, is vastly greater. [p.28]

And this:

Full employment cannot be promoted by aggressive deficit financing because that is now being interdicted by global bond markets…. [p.32]

And this:

…[G]lobal freedom of capital, and to an increasing degree, of labour, [Dr Gray's punctuation] restricts radically the leverage of sovereign governments in pursuing social- democratic egalitarian goals. [p.44]

These may be good points. But – as Dr Gray must have told his undergraduate students – they are not demonstrated by being thrown over and over again into a rambling stream of consciousness. All else aside, to do so invites the kind of attack that damages without needing to address any substantive issues.

The same is true with bad scholarship. Take, for example:

Macaulay’s observation that the gallows and the hangman stand at the back of James Mill’s utilitarian state… [p.31]

Now, this “observation” is not footnoted. I am not surprised, since I doubt it was ever made; and I am reasonably familiar with the three Edinburgh Review articles that Macaulay gave to the elder Mill’s Essay on Government. But I do know this famous passage in Burke:

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.[1]

Though I might have, I do not think I have overlooked something in Macaulay. I have read his entire published works more than once; and I have a memory that seldom lets me down. I simply believe that Dr Gray had Burke in mind, but could not be bothered to check.2

Enough of this, however. I have shown that Dr Gray needs more editorial assistance than Demos is able or willing to provide. But I prefer to concentrate on what he has to say, rather than on how badly he says it. His substantive faults are that he accepts every absurdity that has appeared in The Guardian, and that he systematically – and perhaps deliberately – confuses the meaning of words.

The first of these faults I will not discuss at length. The failure of demand management is the effect of much more than disobedient bond markets. Anyone who cannot now accept this never will. It is the second fault that most interests me. In an earlier work that I reviewed in these pages, I noted how Dr Gray claimed to be attacking the “New Right” but discussed only anarcho-capitalism. In many cases, he took arguments from Hayek without credit and used them against positions that, by default, he alleged were Hayekian.3 This time, he reverses the process. He takes almost every new right argument, and ascribes the lot to every member of the new right. This allows him to describe what are actually differences within a broad coalition as contradictions within a single philosophy. Thus, he can make fun of “us”:

…[T]here arose the familiar paradox of market libertarianism, in which it generated a species of authoritarian individualism resting on the political foundations of a centralist state. [p.31]

Were we governed by market libertarians, this would be more than a stale soundbite. But we are not; and for all he denounces the “unrestrained market individualism of the 1980s” [p.14], Dr Gray is unable to argue otherwise. He ignores the Financial Services Act 1986, and the companies and money laundering legislation of that decade, and the increasing size and sophistication of the welfare state, and levels of personal taxation that no Labour Government had ever dared impose. He ignores that plain fact that, whatever their rhetoric, the Thatcher and Major Governments have been far less concerned with liberating individuals than with stopping the collapse of the corporate state they inherited in 1979. To be sure, some of their measures – ending exchange control, for instance, or deregulating the spectacle market – were libertarian. But that no more makes them into libertarians than a farmer who, for marketing reasons, closes his battery and lets his hens run free becomes a vegan.

It may be pardonable for Andrew Gamble to put out this “free market and strong state” nonsense. But he has the excuse of having been a communist all his adult life. Dr Gray, however, has written for the Libertarian Alliance, and ought to be at least aware of the savage attacks its other writers have made on things like video censorship, Clause 28, the Poll Tax, gun control, the war on drugs, identity cards, and the general shredding of the Common Law. He knows that there are libertarians who believe in free markets and fear a strong state, and that there are tories who believe in a strong state and fear free markets, and that there are others who believe something in between. To obscure this, to conflate wildly different schools of thought into one, is culpable misrepresentation.

As for his repetitive talk of “freestanding institutions”, this also is delusive. If we take all his above statements – if we regard them as “freestanding” – they are plainly true. Actual markets are not separable from the societies in which they exist, but are things that arise from particular moral outlooks – these being varying degrees of respect for life, liberty and justly-acquired property. It is also true that one set of market institutions cannot be copied unchanged between societies with different moral outlooks. But this is the libertarian consensus. It is what Hayek says, and Rothbard, and both Friedmans, to name just a few. So what is Dr Gray trying to prove? That markets are inherently undesirable? He might as well use the fact that the Rhine flows west and the Danube east to disprove that water runs downhill. To argue against market reforms, it is not good enough to show that different societies have different market institutions. It is necessary to show that there are not certain regularities of human conduct that governments ignore to the disadvantage of those they rule.

Dr Gray does not show this, because it would require more ability to reason than he has lately been able to show. But he does try; and it is one of his assumptions. Look at page 48, where he deplores “those liberalisms” which

foster a legalist and constitutionalist mirage, in which the delusive certainty of legal principles is preferred to the contingencies and compromises of political practice, where a settlement among communities and ways of life, always temporary, can alone be found.

There is a tendency for these soft, Latinate words to drift through the mind without registering. But they are an argument for politicising justice – to let fewer disputes go before the judges to be decided by due process of law, and to give more discretion to people like Michael Howard. Beyond this, they show that Dr Gray has fallen into a moral nihilism that does not allow different ways of life to be compared even on instrumental grounds. For him, there are no regularities of conduct, nor universal standards of well-being. He cannot denounce female circumcision as a barbarous act, or praise limited government as a benefit to which all peoples should aspire. His view of humanity is one without any common standards of right and wrong, in which strength alone determines what rules are to be followed.

This pamphlet is formally about what social democrats should be thinking in the 1990s. All it really shows is that, having taken a stand in every other part of the political spectrum, Dr Gray is now drifting towards the “third way” national socialists. In a sense, he is already there, with his earth-worshipping mysticism. Is Demos happy about this? Are Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s happy to continue funding an organisation that is?

To conclude, After Social Democracy is in every sense a regrettable pamphlet. It succeeds only in illustrating the cultural decline that it often laments. There was a time, I believe, when an undergraduate at Oxford would have been sent down for producing something so incoherent and feeble. Today, it seems, any tenured academic there can get it published by Demos, and have it cried up as the last thing in political wisdom.

Sean Gabb

Notes

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), “Everyman” edition, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1910, pp. 74-75.

2. I believe this partly because Burke expresses so well the charge that Dr Gray is trying to make – and partly for reasons very flattering to me. I quoted the above passage in a review of another of Dr Gray’s works [Beyond the New Right: Market, Government and the Common Environment, Routledge, London, 1993, reviewed in Free Life, No.20, August 1994]. As is my custom, I sent him a copy of the review. As seems to be his custom, he ignored my invitation to reply. I now think, however, that he did read it. For I also quoted Macaulay there; and it may be that, writing in haste, Dr Gray garbled the names and quotations into the wrong order. Of course, I hope that I am wrong. Though flattering to me if true, this would be quite damning to his scholarly reputation.

3. For details, see note 1. above.

---

I like this creative solution. Comments from our blogateriat welcomed.

David Davis

Little Man, What Now? has an interesting suggestion about the British Socialist (= deliberate-education-destroyer) Government’s predicament in which it find itself. this predicament is about how to up-spin this year’s SATS results for the children of the People’s Proletariat – to make it look as if even more non-teaching means even more success than ever before for state schools.

Little Man is a very sound blog: he is much more intellectually rigorous about morality and liberalism than perhaps even we are. I wish I had his patence.

Strong and weak horses

David Davis

Interesting takes on the current anti-religious chappie, who is currently pretending to be an “Archbishop of Canterbury”. You either love Peter Hitchens or you hate him, like Marmite or Vegemite. I take no official position on any of these three.

Osama bin Laden, while he was alive, interestingly compared the natural liking, by Men, for a strong horse, with something interesting in a Sartro-Gramscian sense: it was the liking (by other men, with whom he implicitly compared our own western stalinist lefties who try to engender in us and especially our children, an institutionalised hatred for our own culture) for a weak horse.

And here’s some Peter Hitchens’ earlier stuff, on the deliberate destroying of education for the “masses” (have you every wondered why British Wireless Tele Vision “programmes” are so bad and so full of live invective?) and why it’s going on, which echoes something of my writings here from time to time, I am happy to say.

Glasgow East….Getting what they deserve…or what the stalinists decree?

David Davis

This piece from Devil’s Kitchen contains perhaps the most thoughtful and insightful comments from respondents that I have seen recently about this sad place. Here’s one in full, with which I can personally agree from experience of having to teach some of these poor, miserable, robbed youths:-

” …if you live in shit and continue to elect the people who keep you in shit simply because, historically, your family has always voted for shit, then possibly all you are going to get is… well… shit. “Yup. Exactly. And Tories and Liberals are exactly the same. I’m nearly 56, pity it took me more than 45 years to learn that for myself.I bitterly regret the day I first picked up a copy of the Guardian; and the same for the day I first watched the beeb. Long time ago now.Too late for me … but I’ve taken to talking to gangs of youngsters when I come across them hanging around on street corners. I was shocked (really) when I first discovered that almost none of them even know the names of any political party other than Labour (really). Shocked to discover that none knew anything at all of our pathetic electoral processes. Don’t you learn Civics in school? Politics? No. Don’t you do Citizenship classes? Yes. What do you do in them? Islam. Yes, seriously – I’ve been told exactly this. And I do not ask leading questions.

Then they start asking me questions, always questions. And naturally enough, I give them answers  . I’ve been as long as an hour trying to get away to get back home – but there’s always one more question.

These kids aren’t stupid. They KNOW that something’s wrong in their lives, but they don’t know enough to know what it is (LA italics). No adult ever takes them seriously, and when someone like me comes along and does take them seriously then they start asking their serious questions – give them straight unpatronising answers and they can’t get enough of it – every answer leads to more questions.

They aren’t thick – they’ve just been kept deliberately ignorant. And they know it.

7/13/2008 03:33:00 PM  

Brilliant hammerblow, Devil, well done. Here’s Peter Hitchens, on the same tack. I’ve also flagged him in a post to appear in the future, since blogs enable time-travel.

I have “nothing to add”.

David Davis

Have the Trash Who Rule Us Done Something Half-Decent?

Sean Gabb

(For those not familiar with the background to this story, the Blogmaster adds a comment:-

Since the Socialists set out to destroy British civilisation in earnest for what they thought would need only to be the last time, in May 1997, there have been carefully-disguised but also sharply-rising crime levels against the person.  In particular a recent spate of lethal stabbings of (mostly) teenagers and young men, in the citadels of New-Labour-urban-Stalinist-Soviets, such as Britain’s major cities – where their Political Writ runs most surely.

So……the government seems intent on letting citizens take back some of the burden of law-enforcement and retribution. Truly, we are heading backwards into the future. The real solution is of couorse based on only two things:-

(1) Better people, this to be ensured (but it will take some time) by abolishing all the trappings of politically-correct socialist “education strategy” in the UK,

(2) Armed people, which is to say that weapons, possibly up to and including semi-automatic firearms, may be kept by Freeholders or (nett) taxpayers.)

(3) And here’s some other stuff about crime statistics and “reporting” of same.

http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?LegType=All+Legislation&title=Criminal+Justice+and+Immigration+Act+&Year=2008&searchEnacted=0&extentMatchOnly=0&confersPower=0&blanketAmendment=0&sortAlpha=0&TYPE=QS&PageNumber=1&NavFrom=0&parentActiveTextDocId=3479635&ActiveTextDocId=3479738&filesize=6582

Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 (c. 4)
	Main body
		Part 5 Criminal law

Prospective Version

Reasonable force for purposes of self-defence etc.

(1)

This section applies where in proceedings for an offence—

(a)

an issue arises as to whether a person charged with the offence ( “D”) is entitled to rely on a defence within subsection (2), and

(b)

the question arises whether the degree of force used by D against a person ( “V”) was reasonable in the circumstances.

(2)

The defences are—

(a)

the common law defence of self-defence; and

(b)

the defences provided by section 3(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967 (c. 58) or section 3(1) of the Criminal Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1967 (c. 18 (N.I.))(use of force in prevention of crime or making arrest).

76

(3)

The question whether the degree of force used by D was reasonable in the circumstances is to be decided by reference to the circumstances as D believed them to be, and subsections (4) to (8) also apply in connection with deciding that question.

(4)

If D claims to have held a particular belief as regards the existence of any circumstances—

(a)

the reasonableness or otherwise of that belief is relevant to the question whether D genuinely held it; but

(b)

if it is determined that D did genuinely hold it, D is entitled to rely on it for the purposes of subsection (3), whether or not—

(i)

it was mistaken, or

(ii)

(if it was mistaken) the mistake was a reasonable one to have made.

Self-defence etc.

(5)

But subsection (4)(b) does not enable D to rely on any mistaken belief attributable to intoxication that was voluntarily induced.

(6)

The degree of force used by D is not to be regarded as having been reasonable in the circumstances as D believed them to be if it was disproportionate in those circumstances.

(7)

In deciding the question mentioned in subsection (3) the following considerations are to be taken into account (so far as relevant in the circumstances of the case)—

(a)

that a person acting for a legitimate purpose may not be able to weigh to a nicety the exact measure of any necessary action; and

(b)

that evidence of a person’s having only done what the person honestly and instinctively thought was necessary for a legitimate purpose constitutes strong evidence that only reasonable action was taken by that person for that purpose.

(8)

Subsection (7) is not to be read as preventing other matters from being taken into account where they are relevant to deciding the question mentioned in subsection (3).

(9)

This section is intended to clarify the operation of the existing defences mentioned in subsection (2).

(10)

In this section—

(a)

“legitimate purpose” means—

(i)

the purpose of self-defence under the common law, or

(ii)

the prevention of crime or effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of persons mentioned in the provisions referred to in subsection (2)(b);

(b)

references to self-defence include acting in defence of another person; and

(c)

references to the degree of force used are to the type and amount of force used.

GOLF: It’s the “British Open”, at the Royal Birkdale

David Davis

ITEM: I’ve just been castigated by the same chum (mentioned below) for calling it the “British Open”. it’s the “Open Championship”, and then if you beat everyone, it is indeed a bonus because you get £750,000, and it’s all yours. No team mates as in “Foot Ball” (see “Foot Ball”  wikilink below, if you don’t know what that stuff is.)

Traffic chaos in town, espec round the Royal Birkdale, where the Open is going on now. Even so, parts of it looked very exciting on the Wireless Tele Vision. (The Golf, that is: not the traffic…)

Golf, although I can’t begin even to know how to play it, seems to me a more libertarian game than “Foot Ball“. None of this “team” stuff and all that collectivist nonsense, to worry about. You just try to play better and better, and if you beat somebody else, it’s a bonus.

It is to be hoped that all our local traders will take the opportunity to make plenty of money.

Oh, and the British Police will just have to go. One made an issue of my waiting (with engine on and flasher lights going) at a pre-arranged rendezvous in Gainsborough Road to pick up my old friend, a golf fanatic, and fined me £30 (about $60 USD.) His Gestapo chum, at the junction, had let me drive down there 3 minutes before. I had the purpose of plastic yellow cones explained to me, in public, in front of 20,000 exiting visitors.

If the Police in the UK have nothing better to do than to issue parking tickets to non-criminals, then they really have served out their usefulness. I think that a “Libertarian administration” – if that is not tautological – would find better things to do with policemen, or maybe it would contract out Law & Order to real householders.

Interestingly sinister extension of “Political Correctness” into other language-denial-areas.

David Davis

The Blog of Walker comments on criticism by the Racist left, of alternative use-of-language.

Sean Gabb on Neville Chamberlain and Two Stupid Wars

Sean Gabb

Free Life Commentary,
an independent journal of comment
published on the Internet
Issue Number 99
9th April 2003
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc099.htm

Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War
Frank McDonagh
Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998, 196pp, £14.99 (pbk)
ISBN 0 7190 4382 X
Reviewed by Sean Gabb

I read through this book during my lunch break today, sat in an unusually warm and sunny Kensington park. An old man saw the cover with its bold title and rather nice line drawing of Chamberlain. “Neville Chamberlain?” He said to me with an accusing stare. “What a wanker he was.” I thought of putting the book down and starting an argument about the realities of British foreign policy before 1940. But lunch breaks for me are far too unusual for wasting on argument with someone who would only start ranting about Saddam Hussein and plastic shredders or whatever—and I get quite enough of that from the Internet. So I smiled and carried on reading.

His reaction, though, was no more than the conventional wisdom. Despite more than 30 years of revisionist scholarship, Neville Chamberlain is still seen by the world exactly as those in and around the first Churchill Government wanted him to be seen. That view is of a weak and confused man out of his depth in the snakepit of European politics. With his rolled umbrella and wing collar, he blundered round Europe in the late 1930s, deceived at every point by bad men of greater intelligence, but hoping that he could settle German demands for territory as peacefully as he might settle a strike in a Birmingham button factory. In the process, he refused to let the country re-arm sufficiently to face the inevitable conflict in defence of liberal civilisation. His name has become shorthand for weakness and self-delusion in foreign policy. “Appeaser” has become one of the ultimate insults in political debate throughout the English-speaking world; and every argument over the present war with Iraq must include some slighting reference to Neville Chamberlain and some lavish praise of Winston Churchill, his apparently more realistic and courageous antithesis.

In fact, this view of Chamberlain has largely disappeared from the scholarly literature. What we have instead is a cool understanding of the limitations of British power in a changing and increasingly hostile world. This book expresses the view briefly yet fully, and it gives useful extracts in support from contemporary documents, and contains a good bibliography for further reading. As such, it is an excellent introduction to the subject for students and for those simply interested in the approach to the greatest war ever fought by this country and the last in which it entered as a primary belligerent.

And that is all I will say about the book. I am reviewing it simply as an excuse for writing more about British foreign policy – this time from the perspective of the 1930s.

Undoubtedly, the Great War had been a disaster for this country. It was an act of stupidity to enter it, and even more stupid not to try for a negotiated settlement in 1916. It had killed nearly a million men, and left many more maimed. Its financial cost had been immense, requiring heavy taxes and a devaluation of Sterling, and a tenfold increase in the national debt. It had also distorted patterns of investment. The vast overseas portfolio built up during the previous generations had been partly liquidated and replaced by heavy indebtedness to American interests. Internally, capital had diverted into an unsustainable expansion of heavy industry—areas in which the country had for some time been losing its comparative advantage, and the products of which could no longer be readily sold in an increasingly fragmented and economically hostile world market. The years before 1914 were not some long, golden summer. But to those looking back from the years after 1918, that is how they often seemed.

But while disastrous, the Great War had not for us been a catastrophe. It was, if in various ways, for Germany, France, Russia and Turkey—but not for us. It had not been fought on our territory. Nor had it been followed by any serious challenge to the established order. Though these did not at all justify the heavy costs, it had even been attended by certain benefits. Germany and Russia and Turkey were destroyed by defeat and revolution. France was prostrate. The United States had briefly emerged as an active great power, only to return to a determined isolationism. In terms of naval supremacy and imperial security, the country was restored to something like the position it had enjoyed after Waterloo. And, while taking the German colonies was of no value, the despoiling of Turkey had given us control over the Middle East and its increasingly important oil reserves.

By 1920, it was clear that the Great War had ripped holes in the financial web that had once bound the world to the City of London. There could be no exact return to the position of 1914. But, if it had shaken the foundations of British power, the War had not undermined them. Something like the old position could still be restored. It was necessary to make a complex and difficult set of changes. At home, it was necessary to cut taxes and spending back towards the levels of 1914, and to force down the price level to the point where the gold standard could be restored at the old parity. At the same time, the over-expansion of heavy industry had to be reversed, so that labour and capital could flow into the more productive new sectors—cars, chemicals, electricals, general light engineering, and so forth.

In the Empire, it was necessary to reduce the commitment to India —returning to something like the system of indirect rule used before the Mutiny—and to shift the balance of imperial interest to the now more valuable Middle East. Outside the Empire, it was necessary to restore as much as possible of the old financial and trading system.

Any one of these required much effort and some luck to achieve. Astonishingly, most of them had been achieved after a fashion by the 1930s. The Great Depression had put an end for the moment to hard money and free trade, but caused little harm overall to the domestic economy. The unemployment and other hardships were mostly confined to the declining heavy industries. From the Midlands down, the country was enjoying a steady increase of output and living standards. Indeed, looked at from about 1935, the Great Depression seemed to serve British world interests rather well.

After 1918, the only potential challenger was the United States. Its size and wealth appeared to place it beyond all hope of competition. If it wanted to outbuild the Royal Navy, it could. However, its prevailing constitutional and moral order made a challenge unlikely. Though it might take an occasional interest outside the Americas, it was essentially isolationist. Though it might have the cash to challenge British primacy, it lacked the will. It had been tricked into the Great War to serve British interests. Now, it had largely withdrawn. The Great Depression seemed to confirm its impotence. The general collapse of its economy after 1931, and the emergence of mass unemployment—averaging, I think, around 35 million—threw it proportionately into a scale of suffering quite unknown in this country. Moreover, the election of Franklin Roosevelt had opened it to a departure from economic orthodoxy that opinion in this country rightly saw as likely to keep it in depression for as far ahead as could reasonably be seen.

All this country needed to consolidate the recovery was time – time for the new arrangements at home and abroad to take full effect. What had to be avoided at all costs was another big war. That would destroy all the cautious but solid progress made since the removal of Lloyd George from power in 1922. The Treaty of Locarno had got us out of all practical European connections after 1925—the guarantee to both France and Germany was in effect a guarantee to neither, as it justified a refusal to enter into close military relations with either. The League of Nations was a useful means of imposing British will elsewhere in the world where it was no longer convenient to act unilaterally.

By 1935, the country had never in living memory enjoyed such profound home and imperial security, or spent so little of the national income on defence. Let all this continue, and by 1960, the financial and strategic costs of the Great War would have scarred over as surely as those of the Napoleonic wars had a century before.

This is the background against which Adolf Hitler was viewed by this country’s ruling class. There is no need, I think, to argue that he was a thoroughly bad man. He turned Germany into a semi-socialist police state, and tainted with his embrace what had previously been one of the homelands of liberal civilisation. However, I share the official perception of his early years that he was no threat to this country. His published writings and speeches at the time, and his private conversations made available after his death, all point to a settled ambition. This was to expand German power deep into Eastern Europe. He wanted to gather up the Germanic fragments of the Habsburg Empire under his own rule, and to conquer large colonies of settlement for the German people in Poland and western Russia. That was the consistent purpose of his foreign policy in the east. In the west, his only declared and perceptible aim was to reach a settlement with Britain that would give him a free hand in the east.

Yes, we are told endlessly that his eastern policy was just his first step to conquering the world. Give him Poland and Western Russia and their great resources, the claim goes, and give him the lack of an enemy to the east—Soviet Russia being destroyed—and he would surely turn eventually on Britain. I suppose he might have. But he might also have died his hair green, or applied to join a kibbutz, or had an early sex change operation. In deciding what someone might have done in circumstances different from those he actually faced, we can say nothing for sure. If we want to say anything at all, we can only do so in the light of his stated or revealed intentions. For Hitler, there is no evidence that his ambitions stretched to a conquest or even a humbling of Britain.

He had a sincere, if not always well informed, admiration of Britain and the British Empire. He respected our victory in the Great War, and wanted to avoid another conflict. He did not share the desire of other German nationalists for a return of the lost German colonies. He had no interest in naval construction, and went out of his way to condemn the naval race that had poisoned Anglo-German relations after 1898. He signed a naval agreement with us in 1935, and I think this is the only treaty he ever made that he took care to observe. When the Arabs rose against us in Palestine, they sent emissaries to him in Berlin, seeking financial support. Since they were all good anti-semites, one might have thought they would reach a deal. But Hitler refused all help, declaring in effect that he would not lift a finger against white rule over the coloured races.

It is possible that victory in the east would have raised his ambitions in the west. We cannot be sure that it would not. But neither can we assume that he would have been any more successful in his invasion of Russia than he actually was after June 1941. Without facing us, he would not have had to divide his forces between France, North Africa and the Balkans. At the same time, he would not have had forces hardened in those wars, or the record of invincibility that for a while silenced his internal critics. And the Russian winters would have been no less ruinous of invaders than it had always been before. He would probably have taken Moscow and Leningrad. But I do not know how much further into the Eurasian landmass he could have reached. He would have faced much the same war of attrition with the partisans, and would probably have had to keep a vast army of occupation in the east before it could be made safe for German settlement. He might well have been able to present no threat of any kind to the west. His only contact with us might have been endless requests for loans, and complaints at our unwillingness to join his crusade against Bolshevism.

Even otherwise, he would have dominated much the same area as Stalin did after 1945, and done so at a comparative disadvantage. Most obviously, he was not the acknowledge head of an international conspiracy to spread his rule. He had no bands of committed followers stirring up trouble everywhere from China to Peru. As its name suggests, national socialism was not an ideology for export. It was an ideology of Aryan domination. Even in other Aryan countries, it had little following. Oswald Mosley made a big noise in this country for a while, but never came close to electoral significance. Under Soviet rule after 1945, the Slavs of Eastern Europe went into their factories and film studios and, for a while, worked with something like unforced gratitude for their masters. Under Hitler, they had to be coerced from the start.

Granted, his economic policies were less insanely destructive. At the same time, the expectations of his people were higher, and they had been less frightened by his tyranny out of expressing them. And he was a socialist. If he had presided over a recovery from the Great Depression, that recovery was running into trouble after 1938. Inflation could only be hidden by wage and price controls, and was evidenced instead by shortages of consumer goods—see, for example, how the German forces sent into the Czechlands in March 1939 stripped the shops in Prague bare of things like razor blades and overcoats. Not all the frenzied rhetoric in the world could have saved Hitler’s revolution from running out of steam after 1940. It was only the war that kept up a semblance of prosperity into the middle of the decade.

A German domination of the east might have involved us eventually in a cold war. But ours would have been an unexhausted, unbankrupted, unhumiliated Britain and British Empire. There would have been no American support. Neither though would there have been need of any.

There are two further points to be made against me. The first was made by a friend last week, as we sat arguing over what I have just written. Suppose, he asked, Hitler had not only failed to conquer Russia, but had lost. Suppose Stalin had all by himself beaten Hitler and conquered all the way to Germany. Would this not have been worse for us? There would have been no limit to the prestige of Communism, and every Comintern agitator throughout the world would have had a glorious time against liberal civilisation. At least in the real war, the victory was shared between us and them.

I have no answer to this point. It requires more detailed understanding than I have of the relative balance of forces in hypothetical circumstances between Russia and Germany. But while it strikes me as reasonable to say that Hitler might not have won very easily, I find it hard to believe that he could have lost to Stalin.

The second point is the atrocities committed by the Germans. These are often used as justification for going to war. Do I not care about these? My answer is that I do not think they were grounds in themselves for war. An individual has all manner of moral responsibilities, and looking to these will by no means be always in his own interest. A government, however, is a trustee of the nation to which it is accountable, and must look only to the interests of that nation. It would be wrong for our government to visit positive evils on foreigners. It would be right for it to perform such good offices for them as did not involve much cost to us. But it has neither the duty nor the right to go about the world acting as some knight errant, putting down the bad and raising the good. When we talk about the British Government, the adjective is at least as important as the noun.

It must also be said that the worst atrocities were committed towards the end of a general war, and do not seem to have been long premeditated. They happened at a time in which fear of defeat and a misplaced desire for revenge had extinguished the usual moral feeling, and in places far removed from the battlefields that most attracted western curiosity. I have no doubt that an invasion of Russia after about 1943 would have resulted in great atrocities. But I do doubt if these would have been so bloody as the ones actually on record.

Of course, we cannot be definite on what would have happened had there been no outbreak of war in 1939. But the worst I can imagine for us is no worse than did happen after 1945. And it could easily have been better.

This being so, it was not our business if Hitler wanted to tear up the 1919 settlement in the east. It involved us in dangers that can only now be demonstrated behind a mass of subjunctives. Nor, to be fair, was there anything we could have done to stop him. Our guarantee to Poland was a nonsense, bearing in mind our lack of ability to send help. Even if we had—as is often urged—intervened to stop the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, or the union with Austria, or the occupation of the Sudentenland, we probably had not the military power to enforce our will, even against a Hitler weaker than he became. Nor would there have been the public support at home or abroad to legitimise such pre-emptive actions.

And so the policy of Neville Chamberlain was neither cowardly not absurd. It reflected the realities of British power and British interests at that time. I do not accept the accusations of some American conservatives that Winston Churchill was equal to Hitler or Stalin in his infamy. They are angry that he got their country into a war from which it emerged supreme abroad but ruined in its constitutional and moral order at home. I sympathise with this complaint. But he was in every sense a better person.

Even so, did ruin this country. He did so because he never understood the true foundations of British greatness. He saw that splash of red on the map of the world, and never realised that he was looking only at the effect, not at the cause. His ambition was “to make the old dog sit up and wag its tail”. In fact, what he wanted for us before 1940, and what he did to us after, was the equivalent of making an invalid get up from his bed and dance too soon after an operation. He brought on the collapse that the Great War had only threatened. He undermined the foundations of our greatness abroad, and at home acted as the front man for a socialist revolution. For five years, he dressed and spoke and acted as if the traditional order was safe in his hand—while quietly behind his back it was taxed and regulated and smeared out of existence. “Why worry? We’ve had a Labour Government since 1940″ was the comment of one observer after the 1945 general election.

All considered, the 20^th century as it actually ran was not too bad for this country. We did not lose any big wars, or have a revolution or civil war. We did not even suffer a real economic or financial collapse. Within a few years of each of the two big wars, we had recovered our old living standards in full and were making rapid continued progress. We ended the century as the third or fourth richest and the second most powerful country in the world. We are even remarkably free in practice to live as we please. We did far better than I think we deserved. But it could have been better still. If only we had kept out of those dreadful wars and remained masters of our own fate, the whole world, I have no doubt, would have been a better place.

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