In my previous blog, Big Government or Small? I exposed the vacuously simplistic nature of the thinking behind the slogan ‘free markets, small government and low taxes’. I showed how the free market theories of Friedrich Hayek were distorted by his followers with disastrous results, including the banking crisis, the cladding catastrophe, gormless globalisation idiotic outsourcing and allowing important elements of our infrastructure to fall into foreign ownership.
However this spurious philosophy is a rare example of a fatuous intellectual fashion to spring from the right rather than the left..
Since WW2 the so-called-liberal left in Britain has easily been the group most prone to the espousal of shallow intellectual fashions which subsequently prove to be deeply flawed. Some of the most pernicious of these date back to the sixties, for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Perhaps it was because, as Dean Acheson told us in 1962, ‘Britain has lost an empire and had not yet found a role’. Perhaps it was because, in an increasingly secular country, belief in God gives way to belief in anything as GK Chesterton suggested. Maybe it was because growing contempt for our traditional virtues such as parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus, innocent until proven guilty and trial by jury, led them to seek novelties, however false.
A typical example of one of these early intellectual fashions was the precipitate abandonment of the steam locomotive in favour of diesel-electric units. At a time when the health and safety risks of coal mining were considered perfectly acceptable, steam locos could have been mechanically stoked and made much more efficient (as was done in France) and less polluting. The primary argument against them was that they were ‘old-fashioned’ and that Britain’s railways deserved something ‘modern’, but as usual the trendies confused modernity with excellence. The secondary argument against the locomotives was that oil was cheap and plentiful. But after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, it became markedly less plentiful and quadrupled in price.
Then there was the initiative called ‘Care in the Community’. The very concept of insanity was challenged by some, while others claimed that new psychotropic drugs could control the symptoms of it. As a result large mental hospitals – known to most as lunatic asylums – were closed down and the number of beds available for the mentally ill was halved. Result: Approximately one murder a week when a nutcase stops taking his medication and escapes from ‘secure accommodation’ wielding a machete. ( It’s usually a him.)
Now we come to the ruination of state education, driven by a 70s belief that working-class children were disadvantaged by conventional teaching and should be taught ‘skills’ rather than ‘knowledge’. The result was a generation of children who left school still struggling to read, write and count, children who had never heard of Oliver Cromwell or Michael Faraday.
Some of the founders of the original ‘skills’ brigade eventually recanted, but that doesn’t excuse the breathtaking arrogance of the clique in the first place, nor forgive the damage it inflicted – and continues to inflict – upon the education of millions of children. Happily the fight against what Michael Gove called the educational ‘blob’ is being maintained in free schools and academies such as The Michaela Community School headed by Katharine Birbalsingh.
A more recent madness is multiculturalism which holds that all all cultures are morally equal. It has brought us forced marriages, honour killings, female genital mutilation and Asian gangs that prey on young girls. Happily, the prosecution and conviction of these Asian gangs, long overdue, is now taking place.
Unfortunately the moronic metropolitan mafia is quick to find new enthusiasms such as gender reassignment and diversity – political correctness and wokery being the first cousins of the fatuous intellectual fashion. However, left-wing extremists seem to be becoming ever more doctrinaire and ever more inward-looking, making them lose all crediility.
On the other side of the political fence it’s clear that the ‘if it moves privatise it’ philosophy of the free market fundamentalists is almost as misguided as the ‘if it moves nationalise it’ neo-Marxist belief of Jeremy Corbyn. True Conservatism means… well, being conservative, taking the middle way, adopting the happy medium, doing what works without recourse to any fancy economic theory. This philosophy may not lend itself to a catchy slogan, but it is what works in real life.
Whether we’ll see a return to the more traditional view of Conservatism as formulated by Michael Oakeshott and Edmund Burke, is however, rather doubtful. These fatuous fashions are difficult to shift.
Grumpy Greybeard 