Britannia Radio

March 1, 2010

Wild Colonial Boy a lesson for Tories

The Australian, 2 March 2010

The British Tories are in a state of finger-gnawing nerves. With Gordon Brown’s Labour government in terminal meltdown, the Conservatives should be on course for a landslide victory at this year’s general election.

In fact, their poll ratings have dropped dangerously into hung parliament territory.

While some believe the quirks of Britain’s electoral system may deliver the Tories victory in the end, there is no doubt that they are losing support overall.

The lesson they surely need to learn is staring them in the face in Australia. This is the remarkable rise of Tony Abbott, on the apparently improbable platform of opposing man-made global warming theory and the policies this entails.

Indeed, that Abbott is snapping at Kevin Rudd’s heels demonstrates a crucial lesson for conservatives everywhere. This is the truly astounding fact that a conservative will most likely win power by remaining unambiguously true to conservative principles.

To Tory leader David Cameron and his inner circle of liberal modernisers, such a view would be proof of a pitiable absence of political sophistication. Their strategy of ‘hope and change’ is based on their unshakeable belief that the Tories were denied power for the past 13 years because they were not progressive enough.

Accordingly, they rebranded themselves by taking left-wing, socially liberal positions and, in particular, a wholesale embrace of the environmental agenda.

Alas for the new green Tories, man-made global warming theory has gone spectacularly belly-up. More fundamentally still, Cameron has made a strategic error. He wants to tell the country it’s ‘time for a change’, but the change he has implanted in people’s minds is that the Conservatives are more similar to Labour.

At the same time, he is keen to pacify his increasingly unhappy right wing. The result has been mounting incoherence.

He appeared to retreat over his long-proposed tax advantages for marriage, then restated the policy; now he has supported a campaign to end the stereotyping of single mothers.

He endorsed a smaller state, but supported Labour’s ruinous public spending targets; he then proposed purportedly deep cuts to public spending to reduce the deficit that weren’t deep at all, before retreating to more modest economies still. He proposes allowing householders to kill burglars in cold blood, even if they are running away, yet he countenances cuts to Britain’s defence budget.

By contrast, Abbott took a clear and firm position on global warming against conventional wisdom, and called it right. He even ventured into the lethal minefield of sexual mores, telling a journalist he advised his three daughters not to give themselves away carelessly.

Abbott is scoring so well for two main reasons. First, he is expressing views that are in tune with what so many think but are too intimidated to express. He is a champion of the voiceless mainstream.

Perhaps even more crucially, everyone can see he speaks from principle, and it is no accident that this is securely rooted in his Catholic faith. He is therefore clearly a leader.

By contrast, the British Cameroons appear to be opportunists slavishly following whatever the latest focus group tells them. People need to know where they are with their leaders, even if they don’t agree with everything they say. But there is no courage or consistency in going with the flow.

Moreover, what all successful politicians instinctively understand is that most people are conservative. What Cameron crucially failed to grasp about Tony Blair was that he won power by appealing to a conservative yearning for social order and tranquillity.

So why are the British Conservatives in such a muddle? Their plight reflects a confusion besetting conservatives everywhere.

Conservatism is not an ideology but a cast of mind that seeks to defend what is valuable. That means in the West defending liberal democratic ideas and the Judeo-Christian precepts on which these depend.

With the defeat of communism, many conservatives really believed this was the ‘end of history’. Since everyone embraced the free market, they thought there was no longer anything to defend.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. The battleground had simply moved from economics to culture, with an onslaught against normative moral values, national identity and Western civilisation itself.

But British Conservatives don’t grasp that a culture war is being waged for the soul and future of the West. As a result, they have put themselves to a large extent on the wrong side of that war by jumping on to the progressive bandwagon.

Thus they support gay adoption and all-female political short lists, are nervous about discussing mass immigration or egalitarianism, and are all but silent about Islamism and the Orwellian moral inversion that tries to criminalise as ‘Islamophobia’ the legitimate concerns about radical Islam.

The great battles today are not between left and right. They are between morality and nihilism, truth and lies, justice and injustice, freedom and totalitarianism, and Judeo-Christian values and the would-be destroyers of the West both within and without.

If conservatives are not on the right side of all these touchstone issues, then what is the point of conservatives at all? Why should anyone vote for them if they are merely left-wing wannabes? If people want utopia and the repression that inevitably follows its pursuit, the party to vote for is Labour: it does it so much better.

Moreover, one of the dirty little secrets of the Left is that, far from being the voice of the downtrodden, its agenda has tremendous appeal to the rich.

Green politics in particular provides painless radicalism; it lets people believe they are acting out of high-minded conscience without causing themselves any more pain than cycling to work and recycling their rubbish.

By contrast, the decent working class and lower middle class who have no moneyed leisure for such self-indulgent frivolities are naturally conservative. And the most successful Australian politicians have understood this key fact.

The main reason for John Howard’s four election wins and 11 years as prime minister was his capture of the blue-collar vote from the Labor Party, especially voters in Sydney’s west and their counterpart in other capitals.

He did this by standing up against the Left through initiatives such as dropping multiculturalism, strengthening border protection and refusing to apologise to the Aborigines for the so-called Stolen Generations.

Now Abbott is once again appealing to the people Howard scooped up so effectively. These are the same kind of people the British Conservatives have abandoned. That’s why Abbott is on a roll while the British Tories wonder why they are floundering. They should raise their eyes from their collective navel and look 15,000 km away for the answer.

March 1, 2010

A modest proposal to help save the family

Daily Mail, 1 March 2010

Once again, the alarm is being sounded over family disintegration and the apparently unstoppable rise of lone parenthood and mass fatherlessness.

Support for marriage looks set to become an election issue. The Catholic Church is publishing a report this week urging people to consider marriage and the family when deciding where to place their vote.

The issue could not be more urgent.

Devastating new research by sociologist Geoff Dench shows that not only is one in four mothers single, but more than half of such mothers have never lived with a man at all and are choosing to live alone on state benefits. They believe they have no need for a man in their life and that their children have no need for a father.

The founding premise of the Government’s £280million sex education strategy — that young mums get pregnant through ignorance — is thus very far from the truth.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

In the light of this deeply troubling record, eyebrows were raised at the weekend by prize-winning author Hilary Mantel, who claimed that girls are ready to have babies when they are 14 years old.

With so much flailing around over the family, I have a modest proposal to help break through the confusion.

It is that the Government should introduce a Man Benefit.

Before people assume that I have confused today’s date with this time next month, let me say that my somewhat light-hearted proposal is based on a deeper point that I believe has been generally overlooked.

This is that the most important force behind elective lone parenthood is not ‘ feckless’ men, but the attitude of women and girls.

It is the way they think about their interests which drives the pattern of relationships between the sexes. And they have simply changed their opinion of where their interests lie.

Back in the mists of time before the Pill, all-women short-lists and Harriet Harman, relationships between men and women were based on a bargain between the sexes which, although never stated openly, everyone accepted as a given.

Women realised they needed the father of their children to stick around to help bring them up. In turn, men committed themselves to the mothers of their children on the basis that they could trust they were indeed the father because the woman was sexually faithful.

Today, this bargain has been all but destroyed. A number of factors have conspired to make women and girls think they can go it alone without men.

The first has been that so many women work and are therefore economically independent. Next was the sexual revolution which saw women becoming as sexually free as men.

In short order, any stigma over having babies out of wedlock was abolished. Then there was the collapse of manufacturing industry, which deprived many boys of the job prospects which once made them an attractive, marriageable proposition.

Finally, the coup de grace was administered by welfare benefits to single mothers which enabled them to live without the support of their babies’ fathers.

The result of all this was that many women and girls decided they no longer needed their children’s fathers to be part of the family unit.

This has given rise to an increasing number of women-only households where fathers have been written out of the family script for three or four generations or more.

The consequences of such family disintegration — as is now indisputable — are in general catastrophic for both individuals and for society.

This problem will not be cracked, however, unless women come to believe once again that their interests lie in attracting one man to father their children and then stick with them. Which is where my proposal of a Man Benefit comes in.

At a meeting last week of the Centre for Policy Studies to discuss Dench’s research, the veteran anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field came up with an inventive suggestion to counter the catastrophic impact of joblessness among young men at the bottom of the heap.

He suggested that the state should pay a dowry to couples who undertook to stay together, and that this dowry should be paid to the girl in such a relationship.

It seemed to me, though, that girls already have a kind of dowry in the form of Child Benefit, paid to mothers on the birth of every child — a dowry with a destructive effect.

For the great unsayable is that Child Benefit acts as a huge incentive to have children outside marriage.

When it was introduced in the Seventies, it replaced child tax allowances, which were set against the earned income of fathers. It was, therefore, hailed as a transfer of family income ‘from wallet to purse’.

This was considered a great advance, on the grounds that men were universally irresponsible and would spend any welfare money on drink, while women were entirely responsible and would spend it as intended on the needs of their children.

But the greatest need children have is for their two parents to bring them up. And what few anticipated was that, along with the impact of all the other social and economic changes, some women used Child Benefit to help junk men altogether as superfluous to requirements.

Since marriage has always helped turn young men into responsible adults, this marginalisation gave them a green light to be as irresponsible as they wanted - thus creating a vicious circle in which girls would dismiss these wastrel youths as a ‘waste of space’.

What’s needed, therefore, is to help turn men once again into an attractive, marriageable proposition.

The most important thing they need is, of course, a job — which is why the policy of pushing lone mothers out to work is actually disastrous, particularly in areas of high unemployment.

But welfare must stop reinforcing the idea that men are dispensable. The best way of underpinning marriage is probably through transferable tax allowances for married couples.

David Cameron’s renewed commitment yesterday to recognise marriage somehow in the tax system is welcome — although his suggestion that he will support unmarried couples in the benefits system is troublingly incoherent.

But in addition, my modest proposal is that men who marry for the first time might be given a state ‘dowry’ to increase their worth to women.

Such a Man Benefit would also send a powerful signal that men are not worthless creeps but are essential to family life — which would in turn help address their demoralisation and consequent irresponsible behaviour.

The undoubted expense of such measures would be more than offset by reducing the astronomical cost to this country of family breakdown.

By themselves, of course, any such financial initiatives wouldn’t stop the rot. The main drivers of family breakdown are cultural, not economic; they emanate, moreover, from the intelligentsia at the very top of society even though their worst victims are at the very bottom.

It is those limousine liberals who developed the core idea behind the recalibration of women’s interests — that equality meant women should behave in exactly the same way as men.

This would have appalled the earliest feminists, who fought for votes for women on the basis that women stood for moral constraints that would civilise the public sphere.

The irony is that, as a result of modern notions of gender equality, it is men who now need special help to restore the sexual bargain that will not just benefit the male sex but stop the degradation of women and family life that so threatens us all.

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