On the Radar

Ever since William Hague went, baseball cap in hand, to beg for the votes of London’s multiracial, metropolitan young at the Notting Hill carnival in 1997, we’ve been told that a new, trendy and socially liberal brand of Conservatism was on its way.

It wasn’t a surprise, therefore, to see Cristina Odone, deputy editor of the New Statesman and regular Observer columnist, hailing the emergence of ‘Cowboy (and Cowgirl)’ Conservatives. ‘They’re young and hip and breeze into town to shake things up, get things done – all without showing any deference to government or bigwigs,’ reported a breathless Odone. With no time for the archetypal Tory, young Conservatives ‘look across the Atlantic to find their icon – the Lone Ranger – and their attitude’.

They are personified, according to Odone, by Rachel Whetstone, Michael Howard’s young political secretary and a member of the fabled Notting Hill set: ‘These young men and women don’t buy into the Tory pillars of family, church and a homogeneous little England. These youngsters know about divorced parents, working mums and Sundays spent shopping rather than worshipping, so they are left cold by Tory talk of a better yesterday or back to basics.’

And while British ‘Cowboy Conservatives’ do not share the desire of America’s young rightwingers to ‘ban abortion, stop gun control (and) ditch the UN’, Odone cites a new book, The Right Nation, by The Economist’s John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, which finds that young conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, ‘share a more tolerant approach to homosexuality, divorce and a multiracial society’.

Now that the rest of Britain is embarking on the 21st century, it’s good to find that young Conservatives have at least entered the second half of the 20th, when divorce and homosexuality were legalised and racial discrimination legislated against. But, as the ‘Cowboy Conservatives’ allegedly attempt to file down some of their party’s rougher edges, the grown-ups are still setting the course and the path is familiar. William Hague soon dropped his liberal garb when it became more expedient to shore up the Tory base by resisting the abolition of section 28, crying ‘save the pound’, and darkly warning that England was in danger of becoming ‘a foreign land’.

Then, of course, there is Rachel Whetstone’s boss. Michael Howard is busily ditching the modernisers in his shadow cabinet as he desperately attempts to plug the flow of Tory voters to the UK Independence party. The Tory leader’s none too subtle attacks on that hoary old codeword, ‘political correctness’, and promises to get tough on immigration and abolish the Human Rights Act suggest that, if she wants to stay true to her alleged libertarian beliefs, it might be time for ‘Cowgirl’ Whetstone to saddle up in search of pastures new.

Whatever impact Ralph Nader, the independent ‘leftwing’ candidate, may or may not have had on this month’s US presidential election – in 2000 he ensured the election of George Bush and the defeat of Al Gore – let us treasure for a moment the wise words of George Monbiot. Writing in the Guardian before this year’s election, Monbiot decried others on the left – ranging from The Nation magazine to Noam Chomsky – who, having supported Nader in 2000, now urged support for John Kerry because of the pressing need to evict Bush from the White House. Monbiot posited the choice as between ‘two deeply unimpressive men’ and argued: ‘a vote for Kerry is not just a vote against George Bush. It is a vote for the survival of the system which made Bush happen … The point is that if you want to change a system, you have to start now, rather than in some endlessly deferred future. And the better Nader does, the faster the campaign for change will grow.’

Monbiot failed to note, however, the scale to which, in his crusade to ‘change the system’, Nader has received help from some rather surprising quarters. Like, for example, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Harper Collins, which published Nader’s latest book, The Good Fight, as the supposedly anti-corporate candidate officially kicked off his presidential bid. Or Dick Armey, the archconservative former leader of the Republicans in the US House of Representatives, whose political organisation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, strangely showed a great deal of interest in assisting Nader onto the ballots in swing states. Then, of course, there’s the one in ten of Nader’s major donors who, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, also donated to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Change the system? Don’t make us laugh.

Now, here’s an object lesson in lobbying of a rather less smooth kind than that practised by some of our public affairs friends. TV cook Clarissa Dixon-Wright was among those of the hunting fraternity who rallied outside parliament last month. ‘We have been good for so long,’ she whimpered. ‘We have obeyed the (Countryside) Alliance and kept the laws, but this bribed sewer of second-rate minds which calls itself the House of Commons has not come out to find the truth. They do not want the truth and they are trying to make criminals out of the last law-abiding part of the British Isles.’

The ‘truth’ is, however, somewhat more complicated. MORI polling shows that, in the countryside itself, there has been a fairly constant majority of just under two to one in favour of banning hunting. Moreover, while 45 percent of rural respondents told MORI that they had hunting with hounds in their local areas, 89 percent disagreed with the statement: ‘Hunting with dogs is an important part of my social life.’ The ‘truth’ is that for the past seven years, the clearly expressed will of the people – both urban and rural – to ban blood sports has been frustrated not by the House of Commons, but by the unelected, unrepresentative House of Lords. Expect more wailing from the likes of Clarissa Dixon-Wright, Otis Ferry and their ilk. They’re simply not used to not getting their own way.

And, finally, to our ‘most surprised man of the month’ award. Richard Perle, super-hawk and former chair of the Defence Policy Board (who like many of his fellow neo-cons didn’t make it to Vietnam) told the American Enterprise Institute in September 2003: ‘A year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.’ It’s that kind of prescience and foresight that has no doubt contributed to the well-planned and efficiently executed postwar occupation of Iraq.