Faithfulness Matters

Ed West writes:

Do Conservatives care about anything these days? The almost total absence of any ethical component to modern Toryism was illustrated this week by the reaction to David Cameron’s proposed pornography filter. Whatever the practicalities of the idea (and there are problems, as explained here), the reaction from self-proclaimed Right-wingers seemed to be almost unanimously that this was a nanny-state attack on personal freedom, and that it was the responsibility of parents to shield children from porn.

This is a bit like saying it’s solely the responsibility of parents to stop their children from being run over; fine, but we still try to help them out by setting speed limits. Pornography and sexually explicit material are about as ubiquitous as cars, so unless you’re going to raise your child in a dungeon, or only allow them BlackBerrys, protecting them from the internet is effectively impossible without the state’s help. Anti-sexual exploitation measures can no more be left to parents than vaccinations can be, so much does the behaviour of people affect those around them.
Thatcherites seem to have a strange idea of what the nanny state is; to my mind it refers to where authorities overestimate the risk factors involved in otherwise healthy activities, such as children’s playtime or eating. Hardcore pornography is a social evil (and illegal until the late 1990s), an altogether different thing, something that real conservatives should wish to either restrict, tax or prohibit, depending on the level of damage it inflicts on society (and how effective prohibitions are in practice).

Libertarianism has always been an aspect of British conservatism, yet without its moralising edge conservatism becomes an empty, selfish shell. So where was the Tory outrage in response to plans for bankers to have a booze-up in memorial gardens for fallen merchant seaman? Where was the Tory outrage earlier this year when the City of London Corporation announced it was to withdraw trading licences from Billingsgate fish market porters, a tradition that dated back to 1632? Labour’s Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman were there, defending tradition.

Where is the Tory opposition to lending at high interest, which Glasman has long campaigned against, and which Labour’s Stella Creasy tried to legislate against this year? And where, for that matter, is Tory opposition to the number one social scourge of all? A litre bottle of vodka costs under £10 in any respectable supermarket, yet there seems to be almost a visceral Tory opposition to raising strong drink prices, which are, historically, incredibly cheap (that marijuana is illegal and vodka legal is absurd almost beyond words).

No: if you can make money lending at 4,000 per cent, or sell an addictive and poisonous drug, or pressure an emotionally damaged teenager into becoming, in Jerry Seinfeld’s words, a public fornicator, it’s your right.

There seems to be far more ethical grassroots politics in the Labour movement right now. Not among the leadership and front bench, nor with the socially liberal elements who are the face, voice and Twitterfeed of the party. I’m more thinking of the Christian socialist side of the Labour movement which, despite the Blair/Brown government’s various equality obsessions, is actually very strong.

I’m thinking of people like Jon Kuhrt of "Faithfulness Matters", who works for a homeless charity in London, and who is running a campaign against dating agencies aimed at married people, which have now started advertising on public billboards.

Because most of the agencies are basically one-man operations, Kuhrt is trying to persuade the software and services provider, Global Personal, which creates the platform for thousands of online dating sites, to get rid of them. It’s a slightly grey area: Global Personal plays no role in these sites’ activities except providing, in their words, “dating software and customer care, including monitoring of activity within these sites to protect users”. Yet they do, as their spokeswoman conceded, make money from them and so hold some responsibility for what happens as a result.

Global Personals Ltd have said in a statement that: “It is not for us to have an opinion upon the motivations of people who choose to subscribe to any of the dating websites operating on our network; nor upon those who choose to build an online dating site using our platform, as long as they operate within the law to only involve consenting adults.”

It is not for us to have an opinion… that could be the motto of modern Toryism. Yet Kuhrt takes another view, and is trying to persuade Global Personals CEO Ross Williams to drop the married sites and “concentrate on his core business of bringing people together rather than breaking them up”. Kuhrt, a practising Christian, has told his supporters in the strongest possible terms not to write anything unpleasant, rude or aggressive to Williams, but instead to turn around a man who he thinks is essentially decent.

And he may succeed – Williams has agreed to meet Kuhrt to discuss the issue. And it’s all a bit embarrassing for the firm, as next month they’re up for a National Business Award, an award that emphasizes “excellence, innovation and ethical business” where the welcome address will be given by none other than Chancellor George Osborne.

If “there is no such thing as society” (and yes, Margaret Thatcher really did say that), then there can be no such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. There cannot be a “free” market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography. There cannot be unrestricted global movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour. American domination is no more acceptable that European federalism. The economic decadence of the 1980s is no more acceptable that the social decadence of the 1960s.

The principle of the planned economy came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberal Keynes and via Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from an ultraconservative Catholic, Colbert. The principle of the Welfare State came down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberals Lloyd George and Beveridge, and via the Conservative Governments of the Inter-War years, from an ultraconservative Protestant, Bismarck.

Those who looked to the union-busting criminality of pirate radio, which was funded by the same Oliver Smedley who went on to fund the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs, were enfranchised in time for the 1970 General Election, gave victory to what they thought were the Selsdon Tories, and went on to support first the economic and then the constitutional entrenchment of their dissolute moral and social attitudes by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Labour MPs defended Catholic schools, and thus all church-based state schools, over several successive decades. National leaders of the Social Democrats supported Christian religious instruction in the schools of Berlin. The House of Lords inflicted a cross-party defeat on Thatcher’s attempt to end such instruction here. Early Labour activists resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence. Upper and upper-middle-class people joined the early Labour Party precisely because their backgrounds and involvement in the Church of England made them familiar with the importance of State action against social evils, and they used their new party as a platform from which to defend Establishment against Liberal assaults.

Many Social Catholics in post-War Italy promoted Keynesianism and felt a strong affinity with the domestic policies of the Attlee Government, but they were also sceptical about NATO. Jakob Kaiser’s vision was of a German Christian Democracy that looked to British Labour for its inspiration in giving effect to Catholic Social Teaching, and which gave such effect by emphasising co-operatives, the public ownership of key industries, extensive social insurance, and the works councils later suggested in the SDP’s founding Limehouse Declaration and advocated by David Owen, while also seeking a United Germany as a bridge between East and West, allied neither to NATO nor to the Soviet Bloc. The witness of Bob Santamaria in Australia is also of crucial historical importance.

Cardinal Manning led the 1889 London dockers’ march serenaded by the Salvation Army band, and he played a pivotal role in settling that strike. When the Attlee Government legislated to regulate marriage, it simply presupposed that marriage could only ever be the union of one man and one woman. Catholic and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce, not least including both Thatcher’s introduction of abortion up to birth and Major’s introduction of divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract, as well as Major’s abolition of adultery and desertion as faults in divorce cases, a recognition whereby the community at large declared its disapproval of those actions even though they were not criminal offences. Methodist and other Labour MPs, including John Smith, fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling. John Smith was also among those who successfully organised, especially through the USDAW shop workers’ union, against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership.

Callaghan took a strong stand against drugs while he was Home Secretary. Mary Whitehouse voted Labour from time to time, and Lord Longford’s was a lifelong Labour allegiance. The Parliamentary Labour Party voted unanimously against the Finance Bill that abolished the recognition of marriage, as such, in the taxation system. The trade unions fought numerous battles to secure paternal authority in families and communities by securing its economic base in high-waged, high-skilled, high-status male employment. Trade union banners frequently depicted Biblical scenes and characters, as well as historic landmarks geographical and chronological, including the fallen of two World Wars. The name of Margaret Thatcher is abominated in pro-life and pro-family circles, matched only by the abomination of the name of Tony Blair.

I have been told that this affinity with the glory days of Continental Christian Democracy, which itself felt such an affinity with the glory days of British Labour, is incompatible with “the Protestant Anglophone tradition”. But, especially in Germany and in Switzerland, Christian Democracy has both deep roots in Protestant as well as Catholic thought, and huge electoral support among Protestants as well as among Catholics. And looking at those English-speaking countries (a small minority of the total) presumably meant by my interlocutors, I can see only three explicitly Protestant political movements of any note. One is in Northern Ireland, and the other two are in the United States, where one of them is white and the other is black. None of them is socially liberal, to say the least. All three are in favour of public spending generous to the point of lavishness, provided that it is on their own respective constituencies; if the price of this is the same provision for certain others, who are very often Catholics, then that price is paid, if not gladly, then at least in full. All three simply presuppose the capacity of the several layers of government to do both economically social democratic and socially conservative things, identifying that as axiomatically the whole point of governmental institutions.

It was ever thus. Those very Protestant Tories, Shaftesbury and Wilberforce, used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. But that economic and social libertinism is not the Protestant Anglophone tradition, and it ought not to present itself as such.