The Richard T. Kelly Column: What is to be Done? On political arguments in book-form
With one week to go until the culmination of a fascinating General Election, Richard T. Kelly considers the art of the political argument in book form.
Karl Marx knew many things, among them that writing is often a thankless and physically punishing vocation. Famously, after another footsore day’s toil at the British Library he wrote to Fred Engels, ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.’ Indeed, we have. And if today Marx reads rather better as a critic of capitalism’s awesomely productive capacity for self-destruction than as a prophet of socialist utopia – well, you can’t say the Grand Old Man didn’t appreciate irony.
The best of Marx upholds the high standard claimed for political writing by the poet and critic Tom Paulin, namely that polemic ‘can alter by its intensity the poise of forces and shift the huge weight of the status quo.’ And I do believe that’s what we readers expect from any book devoted to a political argument: no polemic was ever better named than Lenin’s What is to be Done?
Few political writings intended to rouse or persuade stand up quite so well. In a British context the late 1700s-early 1800s was our golden age of political pamphleteering and white-hot journalism: the era of Hazlitt and Cobbett. Often we hark back to it, hanker after its revival. In 1989 Chatto & Windus published a series of pamphlets called Counterblasts, under the banner ‘Writing for a Change.’ Being a politics-mad sixth-former at that time, I bought the first set of ten in a fancy slipcase, but I soon suffered buyer’s remorse. While Counterblasts offered good writers and worthy topics – John Lloyd on Kinnock, Jonathan Raban on Thatcher, Paul Foot on wanting the Brits out of Ireland – few of the pamphlets resonate today in point of argument or elan. In the main they were modest, hopeful, written from a position of Labour support, patiently waiting for Labour’s fortunes to turn.
Now, I write as a general election is nigh, and I trust you’ll all be casting a vote on May 6, hoping for fair weather that day and thereafter. I wonder, though, how dynamised you’re feeling about the electoral process, the possible outcomes, the choices available? Do you have a sense of a war of ideas raging out there, of titanic issues at stake? Or is it a case of trying to tease a cigarette paper in-between the parties? The differences are certainly there, in the party manifestoes and the much-vaunted leaders’ debates on TV. But for those of us who fancy a longer mull over matters, wouldn’t our deliberations be enriched by some fiery polemical writing, from all quarters and factions?
Recent precedents are not many or varied. Margaret Thatcher had plenty of ideas (and scholarly admirers) but no need of books to buttress her arguments. In 1996 Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle authored The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? At the time, ‘revolution’ was considered a bit rich for what Blair had in mind; and that subtitle has turned retrospective in the minds of many voters, not entirely happily. In 2005, after the nation’s great schism over our joining of the effort to oust Saddam Hussein, John Harris spoke for hordes of disillusioned Labour voters with So Now Who Do We Vote For? The answer of which he heard a lot was ‘The Liberal Democrats’, a choice that seems to persist.
But where have the Conservative Party been in the midst of these arguments? ‘Lost’ would be one way of putting it. Still, their revival under David Cameron has seemingly found a standard-bearing intellectual in Phillip Blond, whose Red Tory is out now, and carries the subtitle How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. That ‘We’ makes this repair sound like a national team effort, but, be assured, Blond believes you must first vote Conservative. He is a former theology lecturer animated by the cause of ‘progressive Conservatism.’ His mission has been blessed by Cameron: evidently part of the Tory leader’s work of ‘decontaminating the brand’ – an effort that, by current estimation, has gone too far for parts of his party but not quite far enough for the persuadable electorate.
As far as I can see, Phillip Blond is clear on what he doesn’t like and holds the Left responsible for: stagnant post-war British statism, a tendency to stifling bureaucracy, also the ‘permissiveness’ of the late 1960s, which Blond reckons to have been a seedbed of careless individualism and a pox on all the good work of the family unit. This critique helps Blond segue to what he dislikes about Thatcherite conservatism: selfishness, the triumph of an untrammelled market, its gift to the monopolising tendencies of business. Blond does not believe that ‘laissez-faire’ can possibly yield a common good. He is for what Edmund Burke called the ‘little platoons’ of society, he espouses a civic-minded, community-oriented, ‘localist’ Conservatism, and freely admits that his work is inspired by regret for ‘the loss of a British culture of virtue.’ That all sounds Tory to me, if not exactly Red. It’s also quite familiar, but then in our age (one of repackaging, it seems to me, rather than a radical ‘moment’) polemic struggles to be truly, shockingly, profoundly novel.
There is one aspect of Blond, though, that I find rather distinctive for our present day. He’s religious – a socially improving Anglican, rather than the sort of Conservative who regards the Church of England as what is doled out to them at the font by dint of being born English. There’s an old saw that the split between Left and Right may be perceived most sharply in that the Left considers man a spiritual work in progress, a conceivably perfectable creature; whereas the Right see mankind as long since fallen from grace, material with which one can only do one’s best. It seems to me, though, that Phillip Blond has something evangelical about him, an interest in perfection. And in common with Tony Blair, clearly, he ‘does God.’
Whatever the pro and contra of his position, I welcome Phillip Blond’s entry to the theatre of ideas, and any and all debate he will inspire. As Norman Mailer told an interviewer in earnest a few years back (and Mailer, let us not forget, defined his own politics as ‘Left Conservative’): ‘Oh, that a Marx would rise among us, a new one. Doesn’t mean that they have to be right…’
April 29th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
As ever, an insightful and interesting piece but you left out the 2005 republican pamphlet from Alasdair Gray & Adam Tomkins on “How we should rule ourselves”. one of the more genuinely polemical recent examples of the genre that I can recall….