“English popularity, like an English summer, consists of two fine days and a thunderstorm.” So warned the great Lord Salisbury.
But popularity seems to have gone to Nigel Farage’s head. Like a gambler on a winning streak, he has ordered a round of drinks.
The disagreeable truth that we shall all end up paying for these drinks is not mentioned. Farage and his chums would rather we did not think about the huge bill which will be presented to us on the morning after the binge.
“Whatever Labour gives you, I will give you more,” is Farage’s new cry.
Here is a man so open-handed he is going to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
As my colleague Harry Phibbs pointed out yesterday morning, that promise is grotesquely irresponsible. It has, however, one advantage from the point of view of the Conservative Party.
Kemi Badenoch is the only senior figure who has dared to denounce Farage’s policy as unserious.
She should follow this up with a series of speeches in which she explains why the Welfare State cannot be the answer to every human need, and often saps the energy and initiative required to meet those needs.
That last sentence will be regarded as a glimpse of the obvious by millions of voters who know perfectly well that if one waits for the state to provide something, one may wait a long time, and receive at the end an inferior service.
There used to be a small number of Labour MPs who for ideological reasons lived in council houses, and perhaps some still do.
But most people who need somewhere to live would rather not go on a council waiting list. The assumption is that only those who cannot afford to get their own place would choose to do so, and that in any case these houses should be reserved for those who need them.
This example may prompt an angry disquisition from some well-meaning commentator about the need to build more council houses, at the end of which the pundit may enjoy the pleasant feeling of having come to the defence of the poor.
Whenever some ill is detected, the cry goes up that “something must be done”, and that it must be done by someone else, i.e. the state. Badenoch in her speeches needs to take issue with this mentality.
My contention is not, by the way, that the state should do nothing. Nor do I propose the wholesale dismantling of what the state at present does. I am not some revolutionary who believes that happiness proceeds from blowing things up.
Nor am I a utopian, who supposes we can create a perfect world of private enterprises and associations which together meet every human need.
But I do hold, as a matter of observation, that if you need to get something done, you are generally better off doing it yourself, or paying someone to do it, or getting a group of donors and volunteers together, than applying to a vast bureaucracy to get it done.
Established bureaucracies tend to be unresponsive. They feel fully stretched by their existing commitments, and dismayed by the thought of taking on extra ones.
And even supposing the state were capable of meeting our every need, would this be any life for a free people? Would we not find ourselves reduced, as de Tocqueville noted, to a flock of docile and industrious sheep?
It is immoral and evasive to suppose that by paying for bureaucrats to act on our behalf we can purchase personal irresponsibility. As the late T.E. Utley, blind sage of the Daily Telegraph, remarked in Capitalism: the Moral Case, an essay published by the Conservative Research Department in 1980 and recently quoted in The Spectator, “the notion that compassion is something which can be delegated to the state is one of the cruellest fallacies of collectivism“.
If only Utley were available to write the speeches. Perhaps Badenoch could take on one of his descendants.
The press, of course, would not understand the speeches, and would examine them for phrases which could be fitted into whatever the story was supposed on that particular day to be.
But the speeches could be watched on YouTube by anyone who wished to understand directly from Badenoch why she is different from, and preferable to, Farage.
Policies for reform of the Welfare State will have to be announced by the Conservatives, but not immediately. For when one offers a policy, one is liable to find it judged against an illusory idea of perfection.
The rationalist assumption is that with the right policies, the Welfare State can be perfected. It can’t, for it is staffed by human beings who are subject to the normal human imperfections.
If Badenoch is to have the slightest chance of avoiding being taken for yet another solution-mongering technocrat, she needs first to address the nation in a more philosophical tone.
She will be mocked, but if she persists she may in time convince people that she is wiser than her saloon-bar competitor, or indeed than the poor, overwhelmed leader of the Labour Party.
When I interviewed Badenoch for ConHome in 2017, not long after she had been elected an MP, she cheerfully avowed that she is “not really left-leaning on anything”, and on being asked who her heroes are, named Airey Neave and Margaret Thatcher:
“The escape from Colditz is I think probably the coolest thing any British politician has ever done.”
Neave and Thatcher at crucial moments showed audacity.
Badenoch must now have the audacity to deliver a series of speeches about her political philosophy which will be greeted in some quarters with derision, but which will show that far from being a cheap imitation of Farage, she is better and wiser than him.
