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   Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 181
16th February 2009
Linking url: http://www.seangabb.co.uk/flcomm/flc181.htm
Available for debate on LA Blog at
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/sean-gabb-on-carol-that
cher-golliwogs-and-jeremy-clarkson/
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Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009
by Sean Gabb

I'd like to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight to
speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard during
the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative Party. The
Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for Marc-Henri
Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others, when it looked
as if libertarians might do the same to the Conservative Party as the
Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party. Sadly, our efforts failed.
Since then, the Conservative Party has become more watchful of people
like us. It has also, I must say, made itself progressively less worth
trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that would be a
poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your party leadership
has consistently ignored my advice during the past twelve years - and
has, in consequence, been out of office during this time - there is no
point in dwelling on what might have been. We are where we are, and I
think it would be useful for me very briefly to outline my advice to a
future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be formed
within the next year or so my David Cameron. I may be wrong. It is
possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more Machiavellian man
that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to make radical changes
once in office. But I do not think he is. I think what little he is
promising to do is the very most that he will do. In any event, he is
doing nothing to acquire the mandate without which radical change would
lack legitimacy. And so this is advice that I offer to some future
government of conservatives, rather than to any prospective Conservative
Government. It may even be a government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your enemy. If
you come into government, you will be in at least the same position as
Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour Government in the
1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly conservative. The
administration, the media, the universities, big business - all were
hostile to what it was believed he wanted to do. The first Labour
Governments were in office, but not fully in power, as they were not
accepted by the people with whom and through whom they had to rule the
country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson faced the
same constraints. A future Conservative Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class has
emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians,
bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business interests.
These are people who derive income and status from an enlarged and
activist state. They have been turning this country into a
soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a Labour
Government. But their natural political home is the Labour Party. They
will accept a Conservative Government on sufferance - but only so long as
it works within a system that robs ordinary people of their wealth and
their freedom. They will never consent to what should be the Conservative
strategy of bringing about an irreversible transfer of power from the
State back into the hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try coexistence
with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out to fight and
defeat an earlier and less confident version of the Establishment - but
only on those fronts where its policies were most resisted. It won
numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost the war. For example, I
well remember the battle over abolition of the Greater London Council.
This appeared at the time a success. But I am not aware of one bureaucrat
who lost his job at the GLC who was not at once re-employed by one of the
London Boroughs or by some other agency of the State. And we know that
Ken Livingstone was eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice
from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not
impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew
more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power.
I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you
want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary
people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the
failure of the Paris Commune: ?the next attempt of the French Revolution
will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military
machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the
precondition for every real people?s revolution?.?

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the
Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try
fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you
must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You
should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should
throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the
BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the
public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its
opposition. You must shut it down - and shut it down at once. You should
do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of
the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with
health and safety and planning and child protection - I mean much of the
public sector - these should be shut down. If at the end of your first
month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are
failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in
the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save
money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from
their backs - though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the
Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of
power and personal connections that make these people effective as an
opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more
clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember to
campaign against the Thatcher "cuts". There were no cuts, except in the
rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from
the the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its
clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts - and be
prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this
approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a return to
freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor ever will,
vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the
welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country
do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free
education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the
long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain
electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be
examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in
the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point is worth
making. This is that we need to look again at our constitutional
arrangements. The British Constitution has always been a fancy dress ball
at which ordinary people were not really welcome, but which served to
protect the life, liberty and property of ordinary people. Some parts of
this fancy dress ball continue, but they no longer serve their old
purpose. They are a fig leaf for an increasingly grim administrative
despotism. I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to
admit that the Queen has spent the past half century breaking her
Coronation Oath at every opportunity. The only documents she has ever
seemed reluctant to sign are personal cheques. Conservatives need to
remember that our tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the
Cavaliers, but also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an
age where it is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have much to
say in response. I therefore thank you again for your indulgence in
having invited me and the politeness with which you have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having ignored you for twelve
years. From what you have just said, it is a good thing you were ignored.
Under David Cameron's leadership, we have a Conservative Party that is
now positively desired by the people. Your advice is and would have been
a recipe for permanent opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire for a Conservative
Government. If there were, the polls would be showing a consistent fifty
point lead or something. What we have is a Labour Government that is so
dreadful that I have trouble thinking what could be worse.

[In a private conversation before my speech, I said that the Labour Party
had turned out to be about as bad in government as the Green Party or the
British National Party or Sinn Fein.]

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups
and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The
other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep
arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown
not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run
the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to
be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying means that the country
would be without protection against obvious evils. With no child
protection services, children would be abused and murdered. Without
planning controls, the countryside would soon be covered with concrete.
Without planning controls, cities like Manchester would be far less
attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your reference to
Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You cannot approve of
this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the Establishment's propaganda. This
is to insist that we live with vast structures of oppression, or that we
must accept the evils they are alleged to curb. I say that that these
structures do not curb any evils, but instead create evils of their own.
We have, for example, seventy thousand social workers in this country.
They appear to have done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few
children who need protecting. instead, they are taking children away from
grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto
dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof.
None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws have
created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be filled. I say
let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in our system of
government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to say: As for Oliver
Cromwell, he was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. It is
partly thanks to him that we have just had around three centuries of
freedom and political stability. When you refer to his actions in
Ireland, you are repeating Fenian propaganda. What he did in Ireland has
been exaggerated by the enemies of England, and in any event was in
keeping with the customs of war universally admitted in his own time. If
you want to throw an offended fit every time an Englishman in London
praises an English hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving
to Dublin where all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring
green, and your own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the destruction of enemies.
Yet you are willing to consider keeping the welfare state. You are
nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker. Thank God the Conservative
Party no longer has any place for people like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour Government we had under
Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would be right. However, we have an
Establishment that has already given us the beginnings of a totalitarian
police state. Today, for example, the authorities will start collecting
details of every telephone call, text and e-mail sent in this country.
Children are about to have their details stuffed into a giant database
that will enable them to be monitored by the authorities until they are
adults - and probably through their entire lives. We live in a country
were privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly unfree. The
police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly worse, and it is
easy to see the end state that is desired, or total control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it will
have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and focussed
actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will fail. I am
suggesting a revolution - but this is really a counter-revolution against
what has already been proceeding for at least one generation. If we are
to beat the heirs of Marx, we must learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this radical preaching.
People do not want to hear about how they are oppressed by the
Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What they want to hear is
that taxes are too high, that the money is being wasted, and that there
are ways to protect essential public services with lower taxes. That is
why the Taxpayers' Alliance has been so much more prominent than the
Libertarian Alliance. We must have nothing to do with the ranting
lunatics of the Libertarian Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral success that I do not
share. But I am the better politician. All debate is perceived as taking
place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes. If the
Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the relevant spectrum would simply
reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers' Alliance at one extreme, and the
centre would be still less attractive than it now is. Since most people
consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest - regardless
of whether I am right - to say what I do. It makes you and your friends
moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was a
fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

[I normally like to comment on these events once I have described them. I
think, however, the above stands by itself.]

NB-Sean Gabb's book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives
Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from
http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3