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Explosive issue of right versus left Samuel Brittan Financial Times 14/07/06 More years ago than I like to remember I wrote a book entitled Left or Right: the Bogus Dilemma. It did not have many readers as most commentators thought that the message was sufficiently conveyed by the title. In fact, the book did not argue, as some thought, for the banning of the terms left and right. Attempts at linguistic prohibition are rarely sensible and seldom successful; indeed these concepts have a limited use in some areas. But their employment as a universal yardstick for assessing politics and politicians is harmful. The terms originated in the French Assembly of 1789 when the supporters of the old order sat on the right, those who wanted to abolish the monarchy (and ultimately decapitate the King) sat on the left and the more moderate revolutionaries sat in the centre of the semi-circular chamber. A classification of political attitudes in terms of this old French seating plan is highly anachronistic. Yet it continues. There are, indeed, some weak linkages. Recent American studies show that those who favour a strong military policy are likely to be against judicial restraint on presidential powers, to be strongly attached to religion, against modern sexual attitudes, tough on crime and in favour of lower taxes. But why should people’s beliefs about sex predict their beliefs about the size of the military? And what does religion have to do with tax? There is little logical relationship between these attitudes, which have come together through historical accident. In the early 19th century, for example, free market doctrines were the province of radical liberals on the left while conservatives espoused – as some of them still do – agricultural protection and a large economic role for the state. The issue is far more than semantic. Politicians still take up some attitudes and fear to take up others because of their supposed position on some left-right spectrum. In the early postwar years those who thought that British foreign policy kowtowed too much to the US (as it did and does) were assumed to be in favour of the nationalisation of steel and Labour’s Clause 4 commitment to state ownership in general, because these were supposed to be leftwing attitudes. Unfortunately, in the UK we have had a recent prominent example of the harm that is done by such classifications. In his Mansion House speech to the City of London on June 29, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, spoke up in favour of “retaining our independent nuclear deterrent”. These five words were all he uttered. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has studied the matter in an unprejudiced way and concluded that British safety depends on an atomic weapon in some sense independent of the US. In this he is one step ahead of the House of Commons all party defence committee, which in an extensive study of the subject said in its recent report that it did not have sufficient information to form a judgment and complained that the Ministry of Defence, which refused to co-operate in the inquiry, was not delivering on its pledge to encourage a full debate on the issue. But what struck me was the spin that was put on Mr Brown’s words. This was that he was trying to distance himself from the Labour left. This is really absurd. Is Mr Brown to the left on economic and social issues? If this means that he has attempted to redistribute income in favour of poor children then I am on the left as well. If it means that he has promoted in-work credits to encourage people back into work then, again, I am on his side. Indeed, I would go much further. Much of the complexity and weaknesses of his efforts derive from too much conditionality; and we could usefully move towards a less interventionist basic income for all. The chancellor himself seems to regard being on the left as favouring a strong role for government. As I have tried many times to point out, many kinds of intervention that may be sensible individually, when added together can produce a control-freak state, which helps to explain why his productivity drive has been so disappointing. But it is not necessary in this context to carry the inquest on his personality or politics any further. If people are worried, rightly or wrongly, that he is in some sense a socialist, why should his favouring of the nuclear deterrent make him any less so? If anything it makes him a bomb-carrying socialist. This is all too absurd for words. Just as Mr Brown is using the nuclear issue to show that he is not far out on the left, so David Cameron is using his professed sympathy for “hoodies” to show how far towards the centre he has moved the Conservatives. Is it not time that the whole army of speech writers, spin doctors and their clients grew up? Personally I can see little case for a separate British nuclear weapon in a world plagued by the threat of nuclear proliferation. I may be wrong but will not change my view for fear of being thought out on the left.
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