From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

In my last Editorial, I called for a Conservative defeat in the General Election, and even gloated over the prospect of one. Though my call can have had no effect - even I ignored it on the day and voted Conservative - I do feel a certain embarrassment now in deploring the scale of the defeat. I do not, however, think there is any real inconsistency. I wanted the Conservatives out, but not to see them annihilated. That they may have been is sad for the future of liberty in this country, and probably elsewhere. Allow me to explain.

What happened on the 1st May 1997 was the latest stage in one of those great shifts that every so often transform British politics. The last one began in the 1880s with the rise of socialism. For generations, politics had been about two parties, roughly equal in the wealth and status of their membership, arguing over the Constitution. As the debate shifted to the nature and extent of State control over the economy, the political structure shifted accordingly. The divisions across which the parties had once faced each other began to blur. At the same time, new divisions opened within the parties. The main victim of this shift was the Liberal party. Its continuing social strength, plus the distraction of Irish Home Rule, kept the shift from being complete until after the Great War. From then, however, the debate was over socialism. The differences between the corporatists and the free traders, between the moral liberals and statists, became of secondary importance when the socialist wolf was at the door both at home and abroad.

After 1989, the present shift began. The death of socialism deprived the anti-socialist coalition of its reason for being. There had always been a certain identity of outlook and interest between the big business corporatists and the welfarist social democrats. For a while in the 1950s and 60s, these two groups seemed to be coming together, but their union was postponed by the last gasp of the socialist threat and by arguments over the balance of economic management. Now, with these impediments out of the way, the marriage could go smoothly ahead.

At the same time, we libertarians no longer had to side with people for whom utopia was a world dominated by half a dozen joint stock limited liability companies, all run by people with degrees in things like Accountancy and Human Resources Management. Instead, we could look forward to taking our rightful place as the nucleus of an anti-statist movement undivided by arguments between "right" and "left".

This is to be the new alignment of British politics. There will be a party of the status quo, with all the initial benefits that money and respectability and foreign respect can provide. And there will be a party of freedom, with all the less immediate but more solid benefits of truth and conviction and the Internet. But, as with the last great shift, this one can be hastened or delayed by local circumstances. Then it was events in the Liberal Party. Now it is the Tories who are important.

My assumption until last May was that they would lose quite badly, but would then be forced by the logic of their position to recreate themselves as a genuinely conservative party in the English sense. If they wanted to differentiate themselves from a Labour Government certain to accept all the reforms of the previous two decades, they would have to repudiate the Major years and bring forward a new generation of leaders, under someone like Chris Patten, able and willing to speak a more libertarian language than in more than a century.

My assumption was wrong. It needed a disaster. Instead, there was a catastrophe. There is no new generation on the Tory benches - only a rump made up of the mediocre and the discredited. The present Shadow Cabinet is probably the best one available. Try as it might, it will not be able to make a clean repudiation of the past. Men who called for identity cards when in government, or refused to cut either taxes or spending, will be in no position now to start talking about small government and the rule of law. Their efforts to do so are simply regarded by the public with mixed amusement and disgust.

The realignment will come about. But it will not be as smooth and easy a process as I had hoped. In the meantime, we have a Labour Government able and apparently willing to complete the transformation of England into a social democratic police state. Whatever the final result, there are bad times just around the corner.

Sean Gabb