Old Conservative Values

Norman Tebbit in The Telegraph

It is all too easy for a blogger to respond a bit too much to the headlines of the day, so every now and again I think it useful to stand back and look at some long-term trends.


David Cameron used to speak about Britain's broken society, and even Ed Miliband makes socialist noises about society from time to time. The Lib Dems concede, too, that there are some deep-rooted problems facing any government which could not be solved by handing everything over to Brussels.
I know well enough that as a man of eighty years, if I say that many things were better in our society when I was young, those who never knew those years will condemn me as an addled old fool living in the past. Should I suggest that if a new way of organising things is clearly not working, and we might revert to the old way which did, some of the “all change is for the better” brigade will denounce me as a mindless reactionary incapable of progressive thought.

Yet the essence of Darwinism is not just that the new shall replace the old. The species that makes the wrong change in response to a changed environment suffers the same fate as that which does not change at all. For all that, there are a good many successful species which have scarcely changed at all for many millions of years.

In our human case the right approach must be the classical conservative approach. That is, when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. In recent years we have had too much gratuitous change, which has relentlessly divorced the consequences of actions from those actions themselves.

This has happened at all levels of human conduct.

Being fat used generally to be caused by eating too much. Nowadays obesity is generally a medical condition or an “epidemic”. Stealing from shops used to be theft. These days it is at worst shoplifting or a civil offence, or “a cry for help”. Sometimes no doubt it is a cry for help… but not all the time.

As we saw last summer, a crowd smashing into a shop, taking the stock and setting fire to the building may these days no longer be breaking and entering, conspiring to commit theft, violent disorder and arson so much as making “a political statement”.

Despite a rising level of expenditure on education we face a rising tide of illiteracy, innumeracy, and ignorance of science and history amongst school-leavers. Could it be that the cult of child-centred education is a failure? When bright pupils are held back less, the slow ones will follow – because they won't want to be left far behind. More to the point, if we're not stretching bright pupils in the classroom, they'll find some extracurricular activity (perhaps gang leadership) at which to excel anyway.

Why, we might well ask (as Duncan Smith has done), do we have these days hereditary unemployment in families where for two or three generations no one has ever been gainfully and legally employed?

Is it possible that we have constructed a world full of perverse incentives in which it is often the case that immediate gratification, even if not long-term benefit, is most easily achieved by anti-social behaviour? If so, might it not be a good idea to think about reverting to past ways of dealing with such things. After all, was a classroom in which corporal punishment was available, but in my experience seldom used, better or worse than one in which teachers may be physically attacked and teaching takes second place to just keeping a semblance of order?

Nor are such thoughts confined to the behaviour of the financially or socially disadvantaged. The excesses of bankers might have been more quickly changed for the better had rather more of them faced the criminal justice system. Nor can politicians escape their responsibility for creating a belief that the answer to the question, “should I do this?” is no more than “yes, if I can I get away with it”.

Perhaps my views are shaped not just by growing up in rather hard times, but by my profession as a pilot. We aviators learned the inexorable laws of aerodynamics and of the frequently fatal consequences of the pretence that they could be scoffed at, ignored, or changed. And we learned to pay heed to those who had survived longer than us in that unforgiving environment.