Monday, July 07, 2008
James Purnell
Our Secretary of State for Work & Pensions making some interesting points in a speech to Progress. I'll blame my Nu-Labour Educashun for the fact I don't have any arguements to throw at him except that he could practically be Tory leader himself."...their emptiness is grounded in the conservative intellectual tradition.
The philosopher Ted Honderich concludes his book on Conservatism by saying that, in the final analysis, it is a tradition that has nothing to say for itself. A political ideology which claims not to be an ideology and which has no faith in politics. There's not much to be done, and if there were, the state shouldn't do it.
That's why, historically, the Tory always turns up late to the party. Think of Peel in Tamworth in 1834 belatedly conceding that they might have to put up with the Great Reform Act. Peel's successors today have grudgingly accepted the minimum wage, tax credits, Bank of England independence. They have adopted the usual conservative position - committed to defending a world they would not have made.
What a strange rallying cry: stop the world. I want to get on. I can't stress enough what an inadequate response to the modern world this is. In an era in which whole industries rise and fall within a generation, in which capital traverses the globe in an instant and labour crosses borders to meet the urgent request from employers for high skills, what is the value of conservatism?
...
The modern world is not moving at the slow pace that conservatives like. The nation-state can no longer act alone. The institutions on which conservatism has based its claim to power have all required modernisation."
"...in policy areas where they are forced to act, they get it hopelessly wrong. On welfare reform, they have to do something because they are making an enormous claim. They are saying that Britain is a broken society.
When they say that what do they mean? Who do they mean? Are they talking about you? Is your world broken?
They don't want to upset you, so they pick on imaginary groups usually named after television programmes: Shameless parenting, the Jeremy Kyle generation. It's no accident that the groups they target are minorities who are easy to stigmatise - young men, ex-offenders and migrants."
"The correct position on the use of the state is an agnostic one. If it helps solve a problem, it's a good thing. If it doesn't, it's not. And there is no doubt that, in welfare, if you eschew use of the state for ideological reasons, you'll find yourself in big trouble."
"They are so obsessed with the size of the state that they will never work it out. We offer pragmatic radicalism; they offer ideological conservatism."
Labels: politics
ThePoliteArt at 2:00 PM