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Please spare us this 'vision thing' Samuel Brittan Financial Times 23/11/07 Before the recent fuss about missing personal data and Northern Rock, the main criticism of Gordon Brown inside the Labour party was that he had not yet set out a vision of where he wanted to take the country. Those following the debate were not slow to recall the confession of President George Bush senior that he was not very good at "this vision thing". Yet he comes out very favourably compared with his son, the present president, who has all too much vision of the wrong kind. You might expect Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal Democrat court historian, to have been all in favour of vision. In fact, he was very cautious. After praising the visions of Roosevelt, Jefferson, Lincoln and one or two others, he warned that visions were not necessarily good things. Hitler and Stalin had visions. Indeed, Hitler had a vision of a Reich that would last 1,000 years. Bush junior had a vision of Iraq transformed under American sponsorship into a Jeffersonian democracy acting as a beacon to the Islamic world. By contrast, "Bush the elder was a moderate as president and he did not harm the republic". The Bible has a lot to say about vision. For instance: "Man does not live by bread alone" and "Where there is no vision the people perish". But nowhere does it say that the vision must come from political rulers. That task was most often given to the prophets. There is undoubtedly a place for both role models and preachers. But these are not necessarily functions of government. Harold Macmillan once said that if people were looking for a moral lead they should look to the archbishops rather than to politicians. The main jobs of governments are first and foremost to promote the internal and external security of their populations and second to provide those services that are best provided collectively rather than by private enterprise or by voluntary means. Third, and more controversially, they should carefully try to distribute income and property to those who have been handed a bad deal by the luck of heredity and the market. There is a fourth task: from time to time bringing up to date the laws by which citizens regulate their relations with each other. But there is no reason this task should fall to the central organ known as "the government". It could equally fall to a separately elected legislature, as it does to some extent in the US. These tasks may seem prosaic compared with an oratorical summons to some utopian uplands. But how rarely are they performed successfully. The formulation in the US Declaration of Independence that governments are instituted to secure the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" may seem more inspiring. But as long as adults are left to pursue their happiness in their own way there is no inconsistency. American political speechwriters are nearly all prepared to go into vision mode at the drop of a hat. One of their stock formulas is known in the trade as "I Sees". It goes like this: "I see an America bold and free... "I see an America where the strong help the weak... "I see an America respected the world over..." And so on, according to taste. The idea is to come out with vague and noble sentiments with which no one can disagree, but which do not commit anyone to specific action. There are also increasingly fashionable corporate visions usually known as "mission statements" that help to keep speechwriters in employment, but which remind me of Adam Smith's statement: "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." There are exceptions to most generalisations, including my scepticism about visions. There are certain morally intense moments in the life of a nation, such as the US after the battle of Gettysburg or the UK in the 1940 Battle of Britain, when it is helpful to have an idealistic statement of the cause for which all the sacrifices are being made; and we are fortunate if there is a Lincoln or a Churchill who can put the appropriate sentiments into elevated prose. Thucydides, the Greek historian, lived at a time when it was professionally respectable to put into the mouth of a leading political actor words appropriate to a defining occasion. Hence Pericles' funeral speech after the defeat of the Persians at the battle of Thermopylae. It is a far cry from these rare examples to the mundane "vision" which a modern politician can extract any day from an aide. It is time to come back to the problems of Gordon Brown. He seems to me to have two overriding passions. One is an urge to better the condition of the poorest countries, whose inhabitants subsist on a couple of dollars a day and lack the elementary decencies of hygiene and elementary schooling. The other is to eliminate child poverty in the UK. Both these objectives are admirable, however much one may want to argue with him over the means. Beyond that he is a conventional politician trying to compromise between the needs of competent government and the tricks of the political trade. There is nothing to gain from getting a speechwriter to wrap all this up in some cloudy and unconvincing "vision".
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