The phrase ‘compassionate Conservatism’ is at best a non-sensical oxymoron and at worst patronising, as in ‘We’re well off but we feel your pain’. George W Bush used it to blatant electoral advantage in his first bid for the White House, labelling himself a ‘ComCon’, as the Wall Street Journal called it. The original thinking behind the slogan was for the government to fund churches to deliver anti-poverty programmes. But the policy soon became mired in controversy and branded no more than a gimmick.
To be fair, Jesse Norman and Janan Ganesh, the authors of a new pamphlet, Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, Why We Need It, from the Cameroonian thinktank Policy Exchange, take pains to distance themselves from the US experience. But in attempting to describe their own view of what the phrase means, their overriding desire to prove they have come up with something new and interesting leads them to make a number of serious logical errors.
They begin with the premise that the state is failing. Using some dodgy economics, they say that, because a lot of what the state does is highly people-intensive, productivity gains cannot be achieved and the system must collapse from its own contradictions, citing recent figures which show that NHS productivity is falling. But the experience of the NHS in the last decade points to an entirely different conclusion. Productivity used to be higher; indeed the highest in Europe, but that didn’t mean the service was acceptable, because it was severely rationed due to lack of resources. More money has raised standards for the patient; the challenge now is to raise productivity again to improve things even further. That’s what the latest reforms are about.
Back to the book, and after embarking on a quasi-philosophical discussion of the relationship between citizen and state, Norman and Ganesh then come to their fundamental point. We need a more ‘connected society’, they say, where people are linked to each other more strongly through horizontal bonds, and have a greater sense of identity, culture, belonging and motivation through shared experiences of ‘intermediate institutions’ such as clubs, associations and even operating in the same markets.
So far, so good. But they go on to say that the state prevents this from happening by ‘disrupting the voluntary bonds between people, linking them upwards to government rather than sideways to each other,’ with a clear implication that the institutions required to make up the fabric of their connected society are being crowded out by the state.
Wrong again. The authors ignore the blindingly obvious point that what brings many people together in this country, among other things, is our state institutions. Whether it’s a general fondness for the NHS or other national establishments, or a specific affection for the school or hospital in their community, or the sense of identity that comes from a public sector workplace, to imply that the state acts against a sense of identity that comes from institutions is simply wrong.
What comes next is even more absurd. The authors propose a ‘state audit’ that would ‘force us to reconsider limits of personal and local responsibility’. There are strong hints that this could include cutting healthcare to people who are ill because of their lifestyles, and giving communities more responsibility for their own education and welfare policies, even though they admit that this ‘inevitably means different outcomes for different people’.
And so we have it. Cameroonian ComCon is no more than a pathological distrust of the state to the point of encouraging people to opt-out of it and never mind the consequences. I feel we’ve been here before.