Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory

If you don’t believe me, then read his latest book (The War We Never Fought, on drugs) which arrived here yesterday and is ... well, I hardly know the words with which to praise it, although I am going to have to find some, since my own next effort is being rewritten in order to include a review of it in the chapter that also reviews The Abolition of Britain, The Abolition of Liberty, The Rage Against God and The Cameron Delusion.

In the meantime, Peter Hitchens writes:

Is State Ownership Socialist? Why? What is the logic that leads people to believe this? One of the things I have striven hard to do is to destroy the lazy view that the left is in some way wedded to state ownership, while it is in some way conservative to want the winds of the free market to whistle and howl, unobstructed, across the landscape. The left’s real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social. They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one. many leftists fondly imagine they are rebels against authority, and liberators of mankind. It is because the left’s ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers. Without these things, society becomes anarchic, chaotic, lustful and violent – unless it is very heavily policed and supervised.

Left-wingers are also convinced of their own goodness and rightness, and so do not object to acquiring the strong centralised powers, and the freedom to pry into the lives of others, which such an arrangement gives them.  Far from it. I sought for years for a clear statement of the ideas which motivate the modern left, especially the 1960s New Left, which marched alongside sex, drugs and rock and roll, and which later came to embrace the various sexual revolutions of our time, and what is called political correctness. But I came to the conclusion, in the end, that it was a negative force, not a positive one. It was based above all on the angry rejection of the ideas of Protestant Christianity. This is what distinguished it from the modest and often Christian-based reform movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, on whose shoulders the modern left perches and squawks. It arose not out of any great desire, but out of the slow but relentless decline, now a collapse, of Christianity as a moral and intellectual power in Britain.

The shape of atheism in each modern society is a mirror of the religion which has previously dominated that society. There is, I think, such a  thing as a Protestant atheist, as distinct from a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox atheist. There are even Anglican atheists (such as my late brother Christopher, Professor Richard Dawkins and the author, Philip Pullman). Much of their thinking is simply oppositional.  The nation state is opposed because it was a conservative force. The monoculture is opposed because it, too, was religious and conservative. (This leads, paradoxically, to the ecouragement or at least the appeasement of Islam).  Rigorous, authoritative education is opposed, at the moment,  because it is (or was) the education of the conservative enemy. That is why Oxford and Cambridge Universities are doomed to be comprehensivised, and so ruined,  even though they are valuable national assets. Likewise the grammar schools had to be smashed, because they reinforced the middle class, and encouraged individual liberation from poverty. The left wanted to liberate people, but only if they could be told exactly how they would be liberated, and by whom, and in what way - and if they could be persuaded to think they owed their liberation to the left. Grammar schools were the opposite of that. Why, their products might thtink they had freed themselves.

If the British revolution ever ends, it will probably become quite stern about school discipline, and very strong on a sort of crude ‘law and order’  with heavy-handed policing, ASBOs, parents made responsible for the misdeeds of their children (while simultaneously having been rendered powerless to discipline them) . Something of this kind, a sort of social counter-revolution, did take place in Stalin’s USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Even the policy on abortion was reversed (to the shock of foreign radicals, who had admired the slaughter of innocents from afar, and longed to emulate it here) , because Stalin foresaw an urgent need for cannon-fodder in the near future. The social radicals who had been powerful immediately after the revolution were pushed to one side, and in fact never fully recovered their position, as the USSR became the chief nation of a warlike and authoritarian empire, whose reactionary, chauvinistic nationalism – in the end – outdid that of 19th century Prussia.

Nationalisation of industry has never had much to do with radical leftism. Why ever should it? (Something similar could be said of the all-encompassing welfare state, pioneered by Otto von Bismarck in Imperial Germany, to try to checkmate Social Democracy, and also by enlightened business men such as the Rowntrees and Lord Leverhulme). Most continental countries nationalised railways as a matter of course, as they saw them as strategic assets which could not be left to the caprice of the market. Even the most laissez-faire countries have tended to nationalise railways in fact, if not in name, during wartime. I simply cannot see what is socialist or radical about this. As I have pointed out before here, Charles II nationalised the British post office, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity generation and supply, Eisenhower nationalised American Interstate Highways (on the absurd pretext that their main purpose was as evacuation routes in a nuclear war).  Margaret Thatcher nationalised local government. Michael Gove is currently nationalising English and Welsh schools, though the ‘academy’ scheme. Roy Jenkins nationalised the police, through compulsory force mergers and the creation of central bodies which selected and trained chief officers, and gave the Home Office more or less total operational power over them. Successive Labour and Tory governments have been nationalising the magistrates’ courts, replacing local JPs with centrally-appointed ‘District Judges’, and closing small and convenient local courthouses.

Many of these measures (though not officially described as nationalisation) are far more intrusive in the lives of individuals, and more potent menaces to freedom, than the nationalisation of the 8.45 from Guildford to London Waterloo. Yet Telegraph-reading persons get far more worked up about state-owned trains than they do about a central state police, or by state interference between parents and children. Why? Because they don’t think, that’s why. The left in Britain lost interest in nationalisation after the 1945-51 government. It did not produce the utopia that the trades unions had hoped for – there were often severe conflicts between the unions and the nationalised industries.  Meanwhile the Soviet experiment which had seemed in the days of Yuri Gagarin to have something to offer, had turned out in the end to be an unproductive mess (though in my experience the Soviet railways were quite good, and could be a pleasure to travel on,  as were those of several of the Warsaw Pact countries. The old Czech dining cars were particularly enjoyable, as were the Mitropa restaurant cars that ran between Hanover and Berlin, but I digress).

The point is that the connection between the left and nationalisation was a brief marriage of convenience, mainly driven by the temporary dominance of the unions, which ended long ago. The danger now comes from a completely different direction, as Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland made clear long ago. The problem with British political conservatism is that it is largely thought-free, never had any ideas of its own and so cannot understand the ideas or aims of its enemies. That is why, as Al Johnson rightly pointed out in Birmingham this week, the main function of Tory governments is to clear up (or try to clear up, it’s like the Augean stables now) the economic mess made by Labour. Al failed to add that, once they have finished, Labour then comes back to continue making a mess of the economy. But that’s not Labour’s main purpose. New Labour’s main purpose is the creation of the post-Christian society its leaders yearn for.  It could end up having privatised railways, just as long as it had nationalised private life.

People really should learn to distinguish between propaganda and truth, and to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself.

And:

Ben Holmes writes : ‘I really do not see the benefits of nationalisation for the rail industry. What makes this particular industry so special that Mr Hitchens would rather have this nationalised, yet would not accept the nationalisation of major energy industries such as coal? What makes him so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense? Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them. With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’

I don’t know why Mr Holmes thinks I am against the nationalisation of major energy industries. I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons. There are many questions about what form of state ownership is best; these days most governments have abandoned the responsibility of ownership, and opted for the power-without-responsibility system of tight regulation, which has virtually abolished accountability. Is this better?

I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years. I also recall that when British Gas was privatised its national monopoly structure was maintained, and a good thing too.  The Post office’s problems are largely caused by the EU’s postal directive, which have robbed Royal Mail (or whatever it is now called) of the premium services which enabled it to cross-subsidise a cheap, efficient and accessible network of letter deliveries and sub post offices. The old pre-EU GPO worked very well. It was nationalised, I think, by that dogmatic Trot, King Charles II.

He asks:  ‘What makes him (me) so confident that the poor service, lame apologies, closures at every possible turn, would cease under a government that manages public services incompetently and at enormous expense?’ I answer, in itself, nothing. I don’t imagine a nationalised railways system would be perfect, just significantly better.  But privatisation has shown that private ownership does not in any way get rid of these things, which have increased since the sell-off. Thus they are not diseases of nationalisation. In general, the problems of the railways are caused by 80 or so years during which they have been starved of investment, which has been diverted to gigantically subsidised nationalised roads and to air transport, provided with airports and air traffic control by initial state spending,  and vastly subsidised by being exempted from fuel tax. The government subsidy which is given to the railways  (much of it now diverted into the trousers of the train operating companies) allows them to continue to operate, but not to expand in response to demand (in fact they were forced to contract on the eve of a great expansion of population and transport need, by Richard Beeching’s ill-thought-out cuts), not to electrify the network properly (a task which should have been completed decades ago, and was so completed in comparable European economies).

The railways are always apologising because they have been starved in this way. Their ancient diesel engines break down. Their signalling systems are antiquated and unreliable. Their financial structure, and decades of route contraction, compel them to cram as many passengers as possible in smasller and smaller trains. Meanwhile nationalised roads are constantly lavished with funds for expansion, widening and so-called improvement - despite the known fact that their capacity is severely limited, and even with all this spending cannot keep pace with the demand it creates, which tends to do no more than shift bottlenecks about. Railways, being a far more efficient means of transporting people and especially goods, would if expanded give far better returns on investment than roads, and be much better able to keep pace with demand.  

The nationalised railways managed to preserve a level of competence in maintenance and management which seems to have eluded the new privatised or semi-privatised companies. I suspect (see Ian Jack's work on this in that fine book ‘The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain’ [a real gem of a book, also reviewed in my next volume]) that the two things may be connected. They also sustained a native industry of locomotive carriage and wagon building which is now almost entirely extinct. They also managed to maintain the track at night and on Sundays, without the levels of disruption now common. Mr Holmes adds: ‘Not to mention that due to the restricted nature of train travel, it is a far less convenient mode of transport than cars or even buses, as they only come along at certain times and you must plan your journey around them.’ Well, this isn’t a problem for the Burkean conservative, who can see nothing wrong in a transport system in which people must apply a small amount of self-discipline in return for more orderly and peaceful society, which a car-free society certainly would be. Most car journeys are irrational and unhealthy short-hops which could just as easily be done on foot or by bicycle. But car-owners, who have been compelled or cajoled by the Great Car Economy into buying or leasing these expensive monsters, quickly realise that they spend most of their time depreciating at the roadside, and feel the need to use them a lot to justify their enormous cost.

Cars in modern Britain are also fantasy objects; there’s a book to be written on TV and cinema commercials for cars, which contrive to suggest that the buyer will transform his life in some way if he owns the machine, or simply portray the car as an object of worship, or idol, self-evidently desirable. People who like cars, or think they’re normal  artefacts,  live in a sort of Clarkson reverie. Have car enthusiasts any idea how odd they seem to those who are unconvinced by the merits of the motor car? They do seem to have an unreasoning attachment to these things which even Freud might have some difficulty explaining.  I’ve yet to see a car advertisement that portrays the car’s use in this country use honestly, i.e., parked in the rain for most of its life, losing value while being of no use, and cluttering up a large area of urban space, then stuck in a traffic jam, or series of traffic jams, and then searching for ages for a parking space close to one’s destination rather than parking where a space actually is, and walking, say, half a mile to the destination. During all this time, the owner and his family are suffering chronic declining health owing to their being spared the need to take basic exercise, an apparent convenience which will end in avoidable heart disease, the driver is developing lower back problems, and the car must be fuelled by oil imported from the most appalling despotisms on earth. Not to mention what happens if there’s a crash. Which is much, much more common in cars than in trains.

Mr Holmes says: ‘With cars you can come and go as you please. You are given a greater degree of freedom. I do not believe that the railways can meet the needs of modern Britain, which requires a greater degree of precision and speed than trains will allow.’ Well, the car owner can, up to a point, come and go as he or she pleases, traffic jams, roadworks and jammed-up car parks permitting. Though if you design and subsidise a transport system around his or her needs, you leave out what I believe is the majority of the population which either does not own a car or cannot drive.  This ‘freedom’ is restricted to the car owner, and deprives the non-owner of the freedom to live without constant engine and tyre noise, or without constant dirtying of the air with petrol and diesel fumes, or without constant danger on the roads from large erratically-driven hunks of steel, glass and rubber which are as safe or unsafe (for the passenger, the pedestrian or  cyclist) as the driver who happens to be at the wheel at the time, and variable according to the driver’s temper, mental state, drink and drug tastes, and sleep patterns. To be modern isn’t necessarily to be more civilised than old-fashioned Britain was. Modern often means noisy, cheap, bland, throwaway.

Then there’s the problem of goods, which are pushed on to road by the heavy subsidies paid into maintaining and constantly extending the nationalised road system by the taxpayer, compared with the pitifully inadequate subsidies provided for  maintaining rail freight transport, and hardly ever for extending it . As for ‘precision’, the reopening of many closed railway lines, and German-style rules compelling factories and warehouses which are close to railway lines to maintain sidings permitting rail freight access, would make the railways a good deal more precise, just as sensible restrictions on the use of  heavy lorries in populated areas would make the roads less so. I cannot for the life of me work out what he means by suggesting that roads allow greater speeds than railways. I should have thought this was simply untrue.