Reload Original PagePrint PageEmail Page Schools Need Freeing From The Right As Well As The Left The

e Spectator Knowledge can be successfully transmitted and received only by those who recognise its value. If our governments have regarded education as valuable, however, it is usually as a means to some political goal unconnected with knowledge. As a result, our school system, once the best in the world, is now no better than the average developed country for numeracy and literacy. Many on the left see schooling as a form of social engineering, the purpose of which is to produce a classless society. Equality is the real value, and when knowledge gets in the way (as it often does) it must be downgraded or set aside. Many on the right look to education for the skills that the country needs in order to maintain our economic position in a competitive world. On this view, those children who show no aptitude in hard subjects, or who take up too much classroom time to achieve too little, should not be allowed to hold back the ones whose skills and energies we all supposedly depend upon. Those two visions have fought each other in the world of politics, and descended from there into the classroom. Teachers meanwhile have been forced to take a back seat, spectators of a quarrel that can only damage the thing that is most important to them, which is the future of the children in their care. The abolition of the 11-plus examination and the destruction of state grammar schools, the amalgamation of the CSE and O-level examinations, the flight from hard subjects at both GCSE and A-level, and the expansion of the curriculum into areas where opinion rather than knowledge sets the standard: all those changes were motivated by the commitment to equality. Until recently very few reforms stemmed from the desire to support the high-fliers, or to improve the countrys standing in the hard sciences. And right-wingers will say that our standards have declined because the left has triumphed. In Kingsley Amiss words, more means worse. But one thought should now be obvious, which is that ideological conflicts have undermined the real motive on which education depends. This has nothing to do with social engineering, of the leftist or the rightist kind. Education depends on the love of knowledge and the desire to impart it. The ones who suffer most from the refusal to recognise that simple truth are the children. Our country is

full of people who know things, and children who want to learn things. A successful education system brings the two together, so that knowledge can pass between them. That is how the system grew during the 18th and 19th centuries, and why it was, until the politicians got wind of it, one of our national treasures. The conclusion to draw is that schools should be liberated from the politicians and given back to the people. The school is a paradigm of the little platoon extolled by Edmund Burke. It ought to be a place of free co-operation, in which each member has a shared commitment to the collective purpose. It should be a place of teams and clubs and experiments, of choirs and bands and play-acting, of exploration, debate and inquiry. All those things occur naturally when adults with knowledge come into proximity with children eager for a share of it. It is in the classroom that the relation of trust between teacher and pupil is established, and it is when the school can set its timetable, its budget and its educational goals that an ethos of commitment will emerge. Of course, it has been acknowledged for two centuries that schools must account for their results to the state which is the highest legal authority. But accountability to the state does not mean control by the state. Schools thrive in the way that other enterprises thrive, by assuming responsibility for their activities and planting in their members the seeds of a shared commitment. For this reason we should surely welcome the present governments policy of creating schools outside the control of local authorities. A free school can settle its own curriculum and contracts of employment. It can open the way for those with unused knowledge to impart it in the classroom, and for volunteers to help with extra-curricular activity. Anyone can apply to set up such a school, provided they have sufficient educational and financial expertise in their team, and the willingness to make a substantial time commitment. Parents, local businesses and volunteers can all join in the enterprise, whose goal is to rescue children from disadvantage and once again to open the channels through which the social and intellectual capital of one generation can flow into the brains and bodies of the next. The educationists complain that these free schools provide a free education to the middle classes, and that they do so by withdrawing the more able children from the state schools on which the poorer social strata depend. You still hear this kind of complaint from the Labour front benches, including from the mouth of education spokesman Tristram Hunt who, as the Oxford-educated son of a

lord, can just about maintain the fiction that he is not middle class. But it has no relation to the realities. Free schools take in children of all abilities and backgrounds. I have visited Greenwich Free School, which is in a deprived area, with 30 per cent of pupils on free school meals and the characteristic ethnic mix of an inner London borough. I encountered the same atmosphere of co-operation between pupils and teachers. To set up a free school in such an area, with the goal of taking children of all abilities, is to take an undeniable risk, and it is too early to say whether the risk has paid off. Nevertheless, the venture has the support of parents in the neighbourhood, with seven applicants for every place. And touring the school with two little girls who wanted me to see into every classroom, I felt the vibrations of their manifest joy that this place with real lessons, real teachers and real after-school activities had come to rescue them. And lets be clear: in our inner cities, rescue is what education means. My guides bombarded me with questions about my own career. The ability to present oneself freely and engagingly to a person with useful information is part of what these two children had learned. They had absorbed from their school its fundamental meaning, which is that we live and prosper by taking responsibility for our lives. For too long our education system has been opposed to that fundamental principle, regimenting the classroom, the curriculum and the ethos of our schools according to a frankly antiquated idea of social progress. When schools have become locked into goals that are both futile and unachievable, it is surely time to liberate them, to give them back to the parents, teachers and children whose property they are.

Reload Original PagePrint PageEmail Page Stand Up For The Real Meaning Of Freedom The Spectator When pressed for a statement of their beliefs, conservatives give ironical or evasive answers: beliefs are what the others have, the ones who have confounded politics with religion, as socialists and anarchists do. This is unfortunate, because conservatism is a genuine, if unsystematic, philosophy, and it deserves to be stated, especially at a time like the present, when the future of our nation is in doubt.

Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the invisible hand of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them. Only in English-speaking countries do political parties describe themselves as conservative. Why is this? It is surely because English-speakers are heirs to a political system that has been built from below, by the free association of individuals and the workings of the common law. Hence we envisage politics as a means to conserve society rather than a means to impose or create it. From the French revolution to the European Union, continental government has conceived itself in top-down terms, as an association of wise, powerful or expert figures, who are in the business of creating social order through regulation and dictated law. The common law does not impose order but grows from it. If government is necessary, in the conservative view, it is in order to resolve the conflicts that arise when things are, for whatever reason, unsettled. If you see things in that way, then you are likely to believe in conserving civil society, by accommodating necessary change. New Labour sought to weaken our society externally and to divide it internally by its unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of EU supranational authority, internally by indiscriminate immigration, class warfare and the reform, which usually meant the politicisation, of our hallowed institutions. Conservatism, by contrast, aims at a cohesive society governed by laws of its own and by the institutions that have arisen over time in response to its changing needs and circumstances. Such a society depends upon a common loyalty and a territorial law, and these cannot be achieved or retained without borders. But we find ourselves bound by a treaty devised by utopian internationalists in circumstances that have long ago disappeared. The EU treaty obliges its member states to permit the free movement of peoples, regardless of their desires or their national interest. With its open welfare system, its universal language, its relative wealth and its carefully defended freedoms, our country is the preferred destination of Europes new wave of migrants. At the top of every conservatives agenda, therefore, is the question of immigration: how to limit it, and how to ensure that

the newcomers integrate into a civil society in which free association, freedom of opinion, and respect for the law are all axiomatic. Conservatives recognise that the right to vote out our rulers and to change our law is the premise of democratic politics. Whenever possible, they believe, our law should be made in Westminster, or in the common-law courts of our kingdom, not by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels nor by courts of European judges. Until recently the conservative emphasis on civil society has led to an equal emphasis on the family as its heart. This emphasis has been thrown into disarray by the sexual revolution, by widespread divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, and by recent moves to accommodate the homosexual lifestyle. And those changes have to be absorbed and normalised. Ours is a tolerant society in which liberty is extended to a variety of religions, world views, and forms of domestic life. But liberty is threatened by licence: liberty is founded on personal responsibility and a respect for others, whereas licence is a way of exploiting others for purely personal gain. Liberty therefore depends on the values that protect individuals from chaotic personal lives and which cherish the integrity of the home in the face of the many threats to it. Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. For conservatives, environmental politics needs to be rescued from the phony expertise of the scaremongers. But it must also be rescued from the religion of Progress, which urges us to pursue growth at all costs and to turn our beloved country into an array of concrete platforms linked by high-speed railways and surveyed from every hilltop by eerie wind-farms. Those beliefs are difficult to act upon now. Through quangos and official bodies, the state has been amplified under New Labour to the point of swallowing private initiatives and distorting the long-established charitable instinct of our citizens. Regulations make it difficult for people to associate, and the nonsensical rulings of the European courts constantly tell us that, by living according to our lights, we are trampling on somebodys human rights. Conservatives believe in rights but rights that are paid for by duties, and which reconcile people rather than divide them. Left-wing thinkers often caricature the conservative position as one that advocates the free market at all costs, introducing competition and the profit

motive even into the most sacred precincts of communal life. Adam Smith and David Hume made clear, however, that the market, which is the only known solution to the problem of economic co-ordination, itself depends upon the kind of moral order that arises from below, as people take responsibility for their lives, learn to honour their agreements and live in justice and charity with their neighbours. Our rights are also freedoms, and freedom makes sense only among people who are accountable to their neighbours for its misuse. This means that, for conservatives, the effort to reclaim civil society from the state must continue unceasingly. One by one, our freedoms are being eroded: free speech by the Islamists, free association by the European Court of Human Rights, the freedom to make our own laws and to control our own borders by the European Union. We conservatives value our freedom not because it is an abstract possession of the abstract individual, but because it is a concrete and historical achievement, the result of civil discipline over centuries, and the sign of our undemonstrative respect for the law of the land.

Reload Original PagePrint PageEmail Page Finding Scrutopia In The Czech Republic The Spectator Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I dont know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere. And Sophie and the children feel the same. We borrow the old cottage in the Moravian Sudetenland from which to explore a landscape wiped away by war. Since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, their fields have gradually reforested themselves. The lanes between the crops, in which every intersection was marked by a stone Calvary or a shrine to a patron saint, are now overgrown, the lovely statuary stolen for some bourgeois garden. And the churches, though still functioning thanks to an influx of Polish priests, have a neglected air, their colourful festivals no longer honoured, their

old congregations remembered only in the German-language gravestones. Yet here as elsewhere the death of one way of life is the birth of another, and the depopulated landscape offers to the new generation of Czechs a perfect place for camping, fishing, swimming in lakes, cycling in family groups, and in general reattaching themselves to their many-times stolen country. The contest over territory is a major stimulus to art, literature and music. To it we owe the great flowering of a national culture in the music of Janek, in the writings of Haek and apek, and in the little theatres that united the Czechs between the wars in a spirit of self-satire. This spirit still exists in Brno, thanks to the Theatre of the Goose on a String, run by the indefatigable Petr Oslzl, who kept the thing going throughout the years of communist normalisation, and who still sees it as the means of showing that nothing can ever be normalised if Czechs are involved. We spend a happy evening recalling our underground days, and wondering whether the Goose should mount a satire of the drunken President Zeman, or whether he is already satire enough. Back home to discover that the chickens have not been eaten, the horses have not been kicked, and the house is still standing. There is also a dog another concession to the children and their incorrigible belief that there is always room for improvement. It is a border collie, a puppy, with an innate need to run after other animals and try to herd them into a corner. The horses ignore her, the cows turn on her menacingly, and the chickens fly squawking around the yard. Only with the fish are her efforts rewarded, since she runs around the edge of the pond as I feed them, and seems convinced that the fish are retained within its banks by her heroic efforts. The best thing about summer is the Proms, and this year especially on account of Daniel Barenboims wonderful performance of Wagners Ring cycle. I have studied this stupendous work for most of my adult life, ever more convinced of its greatness and of the truth of its underlying vision. And in the passionate and deferential account given by Barenboim and his star-studded cast there could be no doubt about this. It was all the more persuasive for the absence of a producer, so that conductor and singers could devote themselves to the story, unimpeded by ludicrous sets. Why is it that we are now condemned to experience this work produced by one of the greatest imaginations that has ever existed, through the shrivelled imaginations of producers who know how to sneer at our ideals but have never understood why we need them?

One downside of the family holiday is that we miss the Proms performance of David Matthewss A Vision of the Sea. David celebrated his 70th birthday this year, and has established himself through constant hard work and ever-renewed inspiration as a leading exponent of symphonic form. He has continued to write beautiful music inspired by beautiful things in the teeth of the orthodox view that to be modern is to be challenging, disturbing, defiant, transgressive etc., etc. The modernist advocacy of the defiant gesture has been far more productive of clichs and banalities than the attempt to go on writing as Beethoven wrote, from the heart, to the heart. That attempt is till honoured in Britain, and the Proms bore witness to it with a brilliant performance by Vadim Repin of James MacMillans melodious Violin Concerto. Would that the art establishment could learn from our composers that originality is not everything, and in any case not to be achieved by producing your own version of Duchamps urinal.

Articles - Politics and society

Should the English also have a right to decide on Scottish independence, asks Roger Scruton. BBC News Magazine 23.2.2014 In all the complex changes leading to the Scottish bid for independence the English have never been consulted. The process has been conducted as though we had no right to an opinion in the matter. It was all about Scotland, and how to respond to Scottish nationalism. As an Englishman I naturally ask why my interests in the matter have never been taken into account. When the Czechs and the Slovaks achieved their amicable divorce it was by mutual agreement between elected politicians. What is so different about Scotland, that it decides everything for itself? The Union of England and Scotland was formally declared in the Act of Union of 1707. But it had been an emerging reality throughout the preceding century. In the conditions and conflicts of those days it was impossible for the two nations to regard themselves as fundamentally distinct. They shared an island, a religion, a language, and a monarch. And both had espoused the Protestant cause. It's true there was a border between them. And things on one side of the border were not always replicated on the other. Scots law was, and remains, a separate

system from the English. Styles of dress, architecture, popular entertainment and speech were for a long time quite distinct, in part because of the striking difference in climate. And, since the Reformation, organised religion has taken a very different form in the two countries, the lowland Scots opting for the Calvinist and Presbyterian version, and remaining largely hostile to the elaborate episcopal offices that appealed to the English. But the differences were less important than the history and geography that held the two nations together. It is true that the union was resented by the highlanders, many of whom had retained their Catholic faith, their Gaelic language and their loyalty to the deposed Stuart kings. The cruel suppression of the Jacobite rebellions, the forbidding of the tartan, the persecution of Catholics and the expulsion of the crofters from their homes - all these things are well known, and don't cast credit either on the English or on the lowlanders who principally benefited from the union. Nevertheless during the years of empire building, merchants from both countries combined to reap the benefits of British naval power, and to explore the far corners of the earth in search of profit. And in their wake they brought the imperial government that they shared. Moreover, empire building had to be backed up by military force. The Napoleonic wars sealed the union between the Scots and the English, who happily adopted Great Britain as the name of their united country. Neither people could have survived the wars of the 20th Century had they not fought side by side and with total commitment to the union. As a result of those wars, however, the empire was lost and an entirely new political landscape emerged from beneath the smoke. It is no longer possible for us to see the union as it was seen throughout the course of the 19th Century - as something natural and unquestionable. The enterprise that joined us has vanished, so too (we hope) have the military threats. Each nation is, for the time being at least, wrapped in its own internal problems. It can be said the Scots are still reeling from the effect of Margaret Thatcher's radical economic policies and her introduction of the poll tax. They are bound to ask themselves whether they have had a fair share of the prosperity that is visible nearly everywhere in the south of England. And the English tend to blame the migrations that threaten to overwhelm them on a succession of Labour governments. By allowing mass immigration into England, and refusing to confront the European Union's commitment to the free movement of peoples, the governments of Blair and Brown seriously undermined the English sense of identity. At the same time, through the creation of a Scottish parliament, they gave a new identity to the Scots. The effect of the Scottish Parliament, however, was not only to ensure that the Scots would govern themselves, but also to make it more likely that they would continue to govern the English. The Labour Party did not want to lose those Scottish MPs, since it was thanks to them, and to the Scottish vote, that the Labour Party had achieved such a large majority in Westminster. Scots were

disproportionately represented in the cabinets of both Blair and Brown. Tony Blair was born and partly educated in Scotland, and owed his position in the Labour hierarchy in part to the networks that had grown in that country. Elections to the Scottish Parliament show that the Scots have shifted their allegiance from Labour to the SNP. But they still want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence they vote to place Labour politicians, whom they don't particularly want at home, in Westminster. As a result of this the English, who have voted Conservative more often than Labour in post-war elections, have to accept a block vote of Labour members of parliament sent to Westminster by the Scots. The process that brought this about was one in which the Scots themselves were given the final say, in a referendum from which the English were excluded. In other words the process of devolution can be seen as a piece of gerrymandering, the effect of which has been to secure a Labour bias in the Westminster Parliament, while allowing the Scots to govern themselves in whatever way they choose. And the process continues. In response to Alex Salmond's bid for independence the people of Scotland have been granted another referendum. But again the people of England have been deprived of a say. Why is this? Are we part of the union or not? Or are the politicians afraid that we would vote the wrong way? And what is the wrong way? What way should we English vote, given that the present arrangement gives two votes to the Scots for every vote given to the English? Should we not vote for our independence, given that we risk being governed from a country that already regulates its own affairs, and has no clear commitment to ours? The Scottish economy is subsidised by the English. But this does not mean that England would be better off without Scotland. You give subsidies to your dependants because you depend on them. Subsidies are also investments, which have returns in the long run that may more than justify the cost. On the other hand, it could be that the Scottish economy has suffered from the union overall. Boswell attributes to Dr Johnson the remark that "the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England". Johnson's purpose was to ridicule the romantic adulation of the Scottish landscape, which was all the rage at the time, except perhaps among those who had to live there. But he touched, without intending it, on the principal cause of Scotland's economic problems, which is the loss of human capital. Educated Scots have constantly taken Dr Johnson's high road to England, carrying with them their knowledge and their energy, and investing it outside the borders of their homeland. In just the way that the EU today is siphoning away the young middle class from Poland and the Czech Republic, so has our union served to deprive the Scots of some of the people their economy most needs. The security that we have enjoyed in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union has brought with it a certain complacency in the matter of defence. During the Cold War the Scottish landmass was absolutely fundamental to our strategy.

Our nuclear deterrent is housed in Scottish waters, and the Scottish airbases were constantly called upon to deter Soviet violations of our airspace. Scottish regiments are at the forefront of our campaigns today, and without them we would be much less capable of defending ourselves in a serious crisis. In my opinion defence is the sole reason for thinking that the breakup of the union might be bad for both our countries. The union would have to be replaced by a strong and committed alliance. But I think this would happen, just as the colonial administration of America transformed itself, in time, into the Western alliance, which brings the British and the Americans together and fighting side by side in every major crisis. Suppose then we English were finally allowed a say in the matter, which way would I vote? I have no doubt about it. I would vote for English independence, as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our countries. It was thanks to independence that the Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the old country, and to come to our aid in two world wars. Independence is what real friendship requires. And the same is true for those, like the Scots and the English, who live side by side.

Articles - Religion

Peter Watson The Age of Nothing Reviewed by Roger Scruton The Independent February 14, 2014 Peter Watson has written an intriguing and challenging book, which surveys the response of modern Western societies and their intellectuals to the decline of religion. To introduce the reader to the main currents of post-religious thinking, from Nietzsche, who started it with a bang, to Rorty, who tried to end it with a whimper, is no mean achievement. Hardly an important school of thought is missing: all the 'isms' that have contended for attention during the 20th century are there, and Watson's interest in what they have to say is unflagging. I recommend this book to anyone who needs to know what the loss of religious faith has meant to the high culture of our civilisation and what, if anything, we might do about it. Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra in the early 1880s, but it was only after the philosopher's death at the end of the century that its influence began to be felt. By the time of the First World War, Zarathustra had become the most popular work of philosophy in Germany, the book most frequently carried into the trenches by literate soldiers, and one printed for distribution to the German troops in a special durable edition of 150,000 copies. Today Nietzsche is at the heart of the university curriculum in the humanities, not simply on account of

Zarathustra's slogan that God is dead, but more importantly because of Nietzsche's view that 'there are no truths, only interpretations'. With the death of God, Nietzsche thought, comes the loss of the objective world: all that remains is our own perspective, and we must make of it what we can. From this it was a small step to the philosophy of the Superman, who would spend life expressing his 'will to power', through weight-lifting, rudeness and who knows? the occasional life-affirming murder. Watson has a lot of time for Nietzsche, while acknowledging that his influence is due more to his gifts as a writer than his capacity for argument. He moves on through the whole range of literature in French, German and English, taking in the post-impressionist and modernist painters along the way, and discovering in all those whom he discusses some interesting and idiosyncratic reaction to the news of God's death. The range of Watson's knowledge is amazing. There are things missing that might have been there, of course: music is conspicuously absent, which is a pity, since it was Wagner and not Nietzsche who first made the death of God central to the understanding of our condition, and it was the modernist composers Schoenberg and Stravinsky in particular who tried hardest to breathe life into the corpse. But there is a limit to what you can expect from a book like this, which covers a whole century of intellectual endeavour as lightly as it can. The loss of God has been experienced in many ways: as a challenge to place humanity on the empty pedestal from which God had fallen; as a call to give up on the grand narratives and rest content with our nothingness; as an invitation to therapy, drug-taking, artistic exhibitionism or some other way of making the Self into the centre of attention. All those come under Watson's eager microscope. In the end, however, he concludes that there is only one available stand-in for God and that is the intense moments of experience. Many writers have touched on these moments, presenting epiphanies in which the world is replete with a meaning that needs no God to explain it. That, Watson implies in his somewhat rambling conclusion, is all that we have. The sacred moment is described in many ways and with many artistic embellishments. In Rilke it is an exchange of kisses between the earth and the observing consciousness; in Virginia Woolf it is a long sweet languish in a bubble bath of refined susceptibilities; in Lawrence and Nietzsche it is a Dionysiac encounter with life; in Proust it is a door into a space where the unseen eyes of Mother keep their unceasing vigil. And all those accounts are intriguing and suggestive. But they describe experiences that somehow fall short of what we are looking for, and Watson never really tells us why. According to Watson the most important influence in shaping this search for the sacred moment was not Nietzsche or Proust but Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology. Husserl is widely referred to, but not widely read, since he wrote in an inspissated jargon that doesn't translate easily out of German, or into it for that matter. But Watson is right to acknowledge him, since he was part of a highly influential movement of thought in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. Husserl turned the attention of philosophy towards the structure of consciousness. He held that the concrete, contingent and immediate experience has precedence over the abstract generalities of science, since experience is the reality against which theories are tested. This idea was given literary form by Robert Musil and Karl Kraus; it was given philosophical form by Martin Heidegger, who should be credited with the extraordinary achievement of writing worse than Husserl. And the sections on Musil and Heidegger are among

Watson's best. However, the God-hungry atheism of the mid-twentieth century has a slightly quaint air today. The life-cult of D.H. Lawrence, the socialist progressivism of H.G. Wells, the nave optimism of John Dewey, the existentialist nihilism of Heidegger and Sartre all such religion substitutes have lost their appeal, and we find ourselves, perhaps for the first time, with a gloves-off encounter between the evangelical atheists, who tell us that religious belief is both nonsensical and wicked, and the defenders of intelligent design, who look around for the scraps that the Almighty left behind from his long picnic among us. What do we make of this new controversy? Watson gives a well-informed account of it, but he has no comfort to offer, other than those moments of meaning into which we stare and from which the face of God has vanished. Or has it?

Articles - Politics and society

Bernard Williams, Essays and Reviews, 1959-2002 Reviewed by Roger Scruton The Telegraph February 16, 2014 This collection of reviews from a lifelong involvement in the intellectual life, show the late Sir Bernard Williams at his engaging best: lucid, cultivated, and entirely serious in his determination to extract the essence from the matter he is discussing. Williams's style of relentless interrogation, which permits neither vagueness nor evasion, invariably deepens the reader's understanding not only of the question at issue but also of the intellectual networks in which it is embedded. Despite his busy life as professor in prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic, Provost of King's College Cambridge, and vociferous member of the old Labour establishment, and despite his own immensely important contribution to the subject in books that are on the shelves of all professional philosophers, Williams found time to study and review the works of his contemporaries, leaving all of them, it seems to me, with serious criticisms to answer, and at least one of them (Richard Rorty) with no hope of doing so. Reading these essays was a wonderful intellectual journey, back across the years of my own intellectual formation, revisiting the philosophical monuments of our time in the company of their acutest critic. Many of the significant post-war figures are called into the witness box: Austin, Ayer, Rawls, Nozick, Nagel, Rorty, Chomsky, Parfit, Skinner, and many more, there to be cross-examined with consummate skill. Williams's aim is not to score points, but to discover what these people are saying, why they are saying it and whether we should be saying it too. For readers without a philosophical training some of the essays will be uphill work. But they are never more difficult than the subject requires, and are written with a lightness of touch and a lack of solemnity that are a joy in themselves. Williams's great and in my view unmatched talent as a philosopher was to

perceive and expose the hidden assumptions in every argument he came across, while understanding the goal that the argument is seeking to achieve. He brilliantly unsettles Thomas Nagel's attempt to find a perspective beyond the reach of relativistic ways of thinking; he elegantly confronts Hilary Putnam with the possibility that his defence of 'internal realism' is the defence of nothing in particular, or everything in general, depending how you look at it; he neatly ties Derek Parfit in a contradiction between his sceptical idea of personal identity and his thoughts about 'a life worth living'. In these and a hundred other ways, he touches the monuments of analytical philosophy and they spring to life with shocked expressions that suggest that, after all, they may not be immortal. But where did he stand himself? What exactly was Williams's position on the philosophical issues of the day? It is possible to think, though this would not be fair, that Williams was too clever to have a position, since he was able, as no other thinker was able, to see through every position on offer. I tend rather to the view that Williams, like Hume, was a minimalist. He saw the impossibility of the systems and the grand narratives, and yet at the same time wanted to uphold our ordinary ways of thinking. He shared the trust in scientific advance and liberal morality that had shaped the post-war consensus. And he remained committed to the egalitarian agenda of the old Labour Party a commitment that infected all his discussions of political philosophy, several of which appear in this book. I like to think that it is not only because I am a conservative that I find Williams's treatment of political philosophy unconvincing. In his discussions of Rawls, whose books on justice and political liberalism have done so much to establish the agenda of the subject, Williams is uncharacteristically reticent. He assumes with Rawls that the question of justice is a question of how the goods available in society are to be distributed, and like Rawls never asks the question 'by whom?' Like so many socialists he assumes that goods come into the world unencumbered by any claims of ownership. He is hastily dismissive of Nozick's attempt to remind us that, in our ordinary dealings with each other, justice is not about patterns of distribution but about who has honoured his agreements and who has cheated whom. This intellectual favouritism goes with a tendency to sneer at 'the other side'. The word 'conservative' appears in Williams's essays as a term of abuse, and is always connected sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly with the worst tendencies of capitalist exploitation. And he never misses a chance (as in his review of Paul Johnson's Intellectuals) to give vent to his underlying belief that conservatives just don't get it. Like John Stuart Mill, Williams deeply believed that, when it comes to politics, the conservatives are 'the stupider party'. He was, perhaps, the last fully self-confident representative of a very English class of intellectual snob, whose principal concern (in the eyes of its critics) was to destroy the social and intellectual privileges that it had enjoyed before the next generation of upstarts could get hold of them. As one of those upstarts I was bound to feel somewhat peeved. The imaginative power of Williams's mind was wonderfully revealed in his late work, Shame and Necessity, in which he brought moral philosophy and Greek literature into relation with each other, and cast the kind of light on both that Nietzsche had cast in The Birth of Tragedy. Those who think that analytical philosophers are all logic-chopping philistines should take a look at that book or, failing that, they should immerse themselves in the penultimate essay in this collection, on 'Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics', which conveys Williams's deep awareness of what matters in music, and how. In these reviews

and essays Williams achieves something that philosophy always promises but seldom delivers: a view from the perspective of reason, on a cultural landscape where reason is only one of the landmarks. Reload Original PagePrint PageEmail Page Stand Up For The Real Meaning Of Conservatism Articles - Politics and society Stand up for the real meaning of conservatism The Spectator 4.1.2014 When pressed for a statement of their beliefs, conservatives give ironical or evasive answers: beliefs are what the others have, the ones who have confounded politics with religion, as socialists and anarchists do. This is unfortunate, because conservatism is a genuine, if unsystematic, philosophy, and it deserves to be stated, especially at a time like the present, when the future of our nation is in doubt. Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the 'invisible hand' of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them. Only in English-speaking countries do political parties describe themselves as 'conservative'. Why is this? It is surely because English-speakers are heirs to a political system that has been built from below, by the free association of individuals and the workings of the common law. Hence we envisage politics as a means to conserve society rather than a means to impose or create it. From the French revolution to the European Union, continental government has conceived itself in 'top-down' terms, as an association of wise, powerful or expert figures, who are in the business of creating social order through regulation and dictated law. The common law does not impose order but grows from it. If government is necessary, in the conservative view, it is in order to resolve the conflicts that arise when things are, for whatever reason, unsettled. If you see things in that way, then you are likely to believe in conserving civil society, by accommodating necessary change. New Labour sought to weaken our society externally and to divide it internally by its unquestioning acceptance of the primacy of EU supranational authority, internally by indiscriminate immigration, class warfare and the 'reform', which usually meant the politicisation, of our hallowed institutions. Conservatism, by contrast, aims at a

cohesive society governed by laws of its own and by the institutions that have arisen over time in response to its changing needs and circumstances. Such a society depends upon a common loyalty and a territorial law, and these cannot be achieved or retained without borders. But we find ourselves bound by a treaty devised by utopian internationalists in circumstances that have long ago disappeared. The EU treaty obliges its member states to permit the 'free movement of peoples', regardless of their desires or their national interest. With its open welfare system, its universal language, its relative wealth and its carefully defended freedoms, our country is the preferred destination of Europe's new wave of migrants. At the top of every conservative's agenda, therefore, is the question of immigration: how to limit it, and how to ensure that the newcomers integrate into a civil society in which free association, freedom of opinion, and respect for the law are all axiomatic. Conservatives recognise that the right to vote out our rulers and to change our law is the premise of democratic politics. Whenever possible, they believe, our law should be made in Westminster, or in the common-law courts of our kingdom, not by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels nor by courts of European judges. Until recently the conservative emphasis on civil society has led to an equal emphasis on the family as its heart. This emphasis has been thrown into disarray by the sexual revolution, by widespread divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, and by recent moves to accommodate the homosexual lifestyle. And those changes have to be absorbed and normalised. Ours is a tolerant society in which liberty is extended to a variety of religions, world views, and forms of domestic life. But liberty is threatened by licence: liberty is founded on personal responsibility and a respect for others, whereas licence is a way of exploiting others for purely personal gain. Liberty therefore depends on the values that protect individuals from chaotic personal lives and which cherish the integrity of the home in the face of the many threats to it. Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on. For conservatives, environmental politics needs to be rescued from the phony expertise of the scaremongers. But it must also be rescued from the religion of Progress, which urges us to pursue growth at all costs and to turn our beloved country into an array of concrete platforms linked by high-speed railways and surveyed from every hilltop by eerie wind-farms. Those beliefs are difficult to act upon now. Through quangos and official bodies, the state has been amplified under New Labour to the point of swallowing private initiatives and distorting the long-established charitable instinct of our citizens. Regulations make it difficult for people to associate, and the nonsensical rulings of the European courts constantly tell us that, by living according to our lights, we are trampling on somebody's 'human rights'. Conservatives believe in rights but rights that are paid for by duties, and which reconcile people rather than divide them.

Left-wing thinkers often caricature the conservative position as one that advocates the free market at all costs, introducing competition and the profit motive even into the most sacred precincts of communal life. Adam Smith and David Hume made clear, however, that the market, which is the only known solution to the problem of economic co-ordination, itself depends upon the kind of moral order that arises from below, as people take responsibility for their lives, learn to honour their agreements and live in justice and charity with their neighbours. Our rights are also freedoms, and freedom makes sense only among people who are accountable to their neighbours for its misuse. This means that, for conservatives, the effort to reclaim civil society from the state must continue unceasingly. One by one, our freedoms are being eroded: free speech by the Islamists, free association by the European Court of Human Rights, the freedom to make our own laws and to control our own borders by the European Union. We conservatives value our freedom not because it is an abstract possession of the abstract individual, but because it is a concrete and historical achievement, the result of civil discipline over centuries, and the sign of our undemonstrative respect for the law of the land. Reload Original PagePrint PageEmail Page Poverty, The Market And The State Poverty, the market and the state Prospect Magazine 26.11.2013 Almost any thinking citizen, asked if we should seek to end poverty in our country, would answer yes. What political goal could be more clearly desirable? And yet, when asked to define what poverty consists in, or why, on some given definition, poverty is bad, many people find themselves stumped for an answer. The word conjures images of Victor Hugo's Paris or Charles Dickens's London, in which poverty was a condition just this side of the grave. The 19th-century poor were fending off death with their last resourcesby begging, crime, prostitution and the sale of their children. But people described as poor today are usually in no such straitscertainly not in the United Kingdom. Of course, there are people elsewhere who are less fortunate than the poorest Briton; but for poverty to be a serious matter of domestic policy it must be a condition that can be identified here, in the United Kingdom. And, looking at the condition of the poorest among us, we find little to compare with the absolute

lack of resources that inspired the indignation of Hugo, Dickens, Mayhew, Marx, Dostoevsky or Proudhon in the 19th century. This does not mean that no-one in Britain today is poor. For the standards against which poverty is measured depend upon the norms to which we aspire. Faced with the question, how many knights does a retired sovereign need, King Lear responded: "O reason not the need! Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest things superfluous," thus setting out on the long, hard path by which he learned what real poverty is. How poor we are depends on how poor we feel; and while we could have been comfortable in Victorian England despite lacking a car, a properly equipped kitchen, a telephone and a source of information, such as a computer, it is unlikely that we could dispense with those resources today. What we need depends on the life that surrounds us. That life has been created by others, and by the powers, assets and luxuries that they take for granted. For this reason, campaigners have tended to follow Peter Townshend in embracing a relative definition of poverty, without attempting to define a threshold in absolute terms. Thus the last Labour Government defined the "poverty line" as 60 per cent of the median income. Using a related measure, the Child Poverty Action Group (which Townshend created) tells us that 3.7m British children are now living in poverty. The choice of children as the test case reflects the assumption that they are the first victims of poverty, since the lack of resources will affect their prospects for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, when you take into consideration the purchasing power of the median income today, and calculate what can actually be obtained by someone who disposes of 60 per cent of it, you will recognise that all but the very wealthiest of 19th-century Britons lived below today's poverty line. By the standard adopted by the last government, I was brought up in povertyin a household without a car or a refrigerator, with only the rare holiday in a B&B in Monmouth, and with a restricted diet of which baked beans were the most reliable component. And yet, by the standards of those days, we were comfortable and, thanks to our local grammar school and the system of government grants, I enjoyed the best available education, my parents not paying a penny for my schooling right up to the day when I received my doctorate, by which time I was a fellow of a Cambridge college. I look back on my childhood with gratitudetowards my parents, and also towards the benign welfare state of those days, which enabled them to offer their children opportunities that they themselves had not enjoyed. Illness, when it came, did not lead, as it so often led in the past, to destitution and bankruptcy. Thanks to the National Health Service, serious illness was a cost that our family could bear. I would say that, for my parents' generation, and

also for mine, things were getting rapidly better and that whatever the policies were that produced this effect, they must have been the right ones. But Peter Townshend's work Poverty in the United Kingdom, published in 1979, gave quite a different impression. Townshend shifted attention from poverty to something called "relative deprivation", meaning the comparative inability to enjoy the fruits of surrounding affluence. He concluded that 15m Britons (a quarter of the total) lived on or near the margins of poverty. Reading this in 1979, at a time when I was beginning to enjoy the fruits of my parents' sacrifices, I could not restrain a measure of indignation on their behalf. They would have fiercely rebutted the description of themselves as poor, and would have added a few non-conformist imprecations against those who measure the value of life in terms of gadgets and holidays. It is true that standards of poverty must change to reflect changes in our way of life. But this does not mean that they are relative: it does not mean that to be poor is to be poor in comparison with others. Defining poverty in Townshend's way implies that poverty will never go away. When my neighbours have two cars each, expensive holidays in the Caribbean and mortgage-free homes in comfortable suburban locations, I am pretty likely to experience a twinge of "relative deprivation" at the sight of them. We might all get richer and richer, but my "relative deprivation" will stay just the same. It is as though nothing has improved since Dickens's day, and the whole effort of creating a welfare state, with social housing and guaranteed pensions, was wasted. I don't think Townshend himself intended any such conclusion to be drawn. But in my view he greatly confused the issue by both defining poverty in a way that makes it inescapable, and at the same time suggesting that the reason why the poor are poor is because the rich are richa conclusion that in fact follows by logic from his definition. Townshend's analysis encourages what to me are the two greatest obstacles to thinking clearly about poverty: first, the zero-sum fallacy, which says that costs and benefits balance, so that one person's loss is caused by another person's gain, and secondly the use of that fallacy to stir up resentment towards the successful. The zero-sum fallacy is a permanent temptation; so too is resentment towards those who are better off than we are. And the two temptations are connected. I might cope with the difference between me and my rich neighbour, if I think he has prospered at my expense. For then I might feel justified in expropriating him. Many political parties and movements exploit this feeling, notably the

Communists and the Nazis in the years of crisis following the First World War. Of course, it is sometimes true that people are deprived of goods unfairly. It is all too often true that people enrich themselves at others' expense. But this should not prevent us from turning a critical eye on the beliefs that this is always so, and that inequality is the cause of poverty. Defenders of the free economy will argue to the contrary, that market transactions are, in the normal case, positive sum games: transactions entered freely benefit both parties, since otherwise the parties would not agree to them. The result may be an unequal distribution of rewards. However, inequality is neither the aim nor the norm, but simply the unintended by-product of our free agreements. This does not mean that inequality is simply to be accepted. For inequality breeds resentment, and resentment must be overcome if there is to be social harmony. Wealthy people may be aware of this and anxious to do something about it. They may give to charity, devote some part of their resources to helping others, and in general display an appropriate measure of sympathy for those less fortunate than themselves. In particular they may set up enterprises that offer employment, and so give to others a stake in their own success. That is how it has usually been in America, and it is one reason why, in my experience, Americans, however disadvantaged, are pleased by others' good fortune believing that, in some way, they might have a share in it. In European countries, however, it is not normal for people to be pleased by the good fortune of others. We are often afraid to reveal our wealth, our power or our success in worldly things, for fear of the aggression that this will attract. Nietzsche attributed ressentiment, as he called it, to a deep fault in our civilisation, manifested equally in the Christian religion, in democracy and in the socialist programmes of his day. Max Scheler, defending Christianity against Nietzsche's charge, was more eager to attribute resentment to bourgeois morality, which measures everything in terms of material possessions. Socialism, for Scheler, was just the latest form that this morality had taken. And there is no doubt that resentment has played an important role in the attitude to inequality that prevails today. To be honest, I see no solution to widespread resentment other than the traditional American oneto put your wealth to use, and to give as many people as possible an interest in your using it successfully. However, things have changed in ways that threaten the old American model. There has been, both before and after the financial crisis of 2008, a sudden and

escalating rise in the disparity between incomes at the top end of the scale and those at the bottom. This has happened all across the developed world, and in America in particular. Joseph Stiglitz has argued, in The Price of Inequality, that the top percentile of Americans has increased in wealth not only while those lower down the scale have either remained static or fallen into poverty, but more importantly that the wealth of those at the top has been increased at the cost of those beneath them. If this were true, then any policy to relieve poverty must also address the problem of inequality, achieving some redistribution of wealth at the expense of those who currently possess it. Whether this is so is a question that all policy-makers must address, and I return to it below. From those thoughts I draw the following preliminary conclusions: 1. Absolute poverty is an evil, and any policy that alleviates or removes it should be promoted, even if the result of that policy is an unequal distribution of wealth. 2. Poverty can be defined in absolute terms, even if the standard changes. For human society evolves, and with it the needs of its members. 3. Poverty defined in comparative termsrelative povertyis simply another name for inequality. 4. By confounding the two concepts of poverty, we run to gether two quite different political goals: the relief of poverty, on the one hand, and the creation of an equal society on the other, where equality is measured in terms of material assets. While the relief of poverty is a goal shared by all political factions, the creation of an equal society is a special concern of socialists, and is seldom seen as either possible or desirable by their opponents. 5. From this it follows that the relief of poverty, when poverty is defined in Townshend's way, looks like a uniquely socialist project. We conservatives are condemned outright, as the heartless people for whom the poor are of no account. So how should conservatives respond? There may be good reasons for wanting an equal, or a more equal society. But the easiest way to produce an equal society is to deprive everyone of everything, as Pol Pot did in Cambodiaa triumph of the egalitarian idea, but no victory over poverty. Nor was Pol Pot an exception among communist leaders. The evidence from the 20th century is overwhelming, that the single-minded pursuit of equality leads to widespread immiseration, and the concentration of power and resources in the hands of the few. Conversely, a radically unequal society, such as some people believe is

emerging today, may concentrate power and resources in the hands of the few, by creating rents on the social productin other words, positions that permit people to extract wealth without producing it. This too could throw people into poverty, though there is no evidence that it has done so to the extent or on the scale of the communist experiments. But it raises the question of what kind of inequality, and what amount of it, is acceptable. Now, it could be, as defenders of the market argue, that wealth creation depends upon the free use of private property, and it could also be that the result will be an increase in wealth for everybody, as well as substantial inequalities between those at the top and those at the bottom. And it could be that the resulting inequality is an evil, to be remedied by some form of redistribution. But if it is an evil, it is an evil of a different kind from that of poverty, and one that must be remedied in another way. And we should be careful, in our desire to create a more equal society, that we do not destroy the motives of the wealth-creators; for without them we shall all be poor. Even left-liberals recognise the dangers here. John Rawls, in his definition of the just society set out in A Theory of Justice, incorporates the "difference principle", according to which inequalities are permissible, provided they benefit the worst off. Conservatives would probably add that they are permissible anyway, and who are you to forbid them? But they would certainly agree with Rawls, that the egalitarian project may be just as great a threat to the poor as to the rich. Nor does history tell us otherwise. Indeed, it seems to me that the most important lesson that we can learn from recent history is that putting equality at the top of the agenda does nothing to eliminate poverty, and may indeed make poverty more widespread. So long as we frame the question in Townshend's terms, using idioms like "relative deprivation", we obscure the fundamental fact, which is that, in developed countries, everybody has been getting richer, so thatuntil the recent downturnabsolute poverty was getting rarer. That is true, even by reasonable updated standards of what poverty consists in. And it is an achievement for which we should be grateful. The welfare state has made an important contribution to this achievement. But in the conservative view, it would not have been possible without rights of property and security of contract the two institutions that enable us to engage in economic activity without the permission or the control of the state. Like many people of conservative leanings I am therefore suspicious of laws that rewrite contracts for the benefit of the weaker party, since such laws violate both

the right of property and freedom of contract. They also have unintended consequences that place burdens on the rest of us. Thus the UK Rent Act of 1968, which granted security of tenure to existing tenants at controlled rents, and which seemed at the time to be a measure that would rectify exploitation and grant security to the poorest of the poor, had the effect of killing the rental market, so that poor people who did not yet have a roof over their heads were no longer able to find one. This legislation substantially increased the burden on the poorer members of the community, by forcing them either to take out a mortgage, often at a rate that they could not afford, or to join the waiting list for social housing. Likewise more recent legislation imposing a minimum wage, which has benefited those already in employment, has also killed off the job market at the bottom of the scale. New employment is only offered at a rate that employers can afford, not at the rate that will be dictated to them afterwards by government. The existence of a minimum wage means that, necessarily, jobs are not available to the pooresti.e., to those prepared to work for less. But employment, however poorly paid, is a fundamental step in the escape from poverty. For it enables you to exercise your skills and present yourself in the job market. It is the first rung on the upward ladder. Hence the minimum wage has created a new class of the poor. In general I am suspicious of any policy that is based on the redistribution of existing assets. My reasons are these: first such policies penalise economic success and therefore discourage those who have the gift for wealth creation. This can only depress the overall level of wealth, and therefore reduce the funds to be distributed. Secondly, the assets are redistributed, as a rule, to the existing poor, as in the two examples that I have given, but do not alleviate poverty in the long run. On the contrary, they tend to destroy opportunities, create new burdens of homelessness or unemployment, and deter the investments necessary for economic growth. A conservative policy for the relief of poverty would aim to relieve poverty as it arises, not by creating a new class of poor to replace the old one, but by ensuring, if possible, that those who fall into poverty have the opportunities and the will to get out of it. One encouraging initiative has been the Gramin bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh and subsequently imitated around the globe. The policy of offering small loans, together with a potential share in the bank, in order to capitalise home-grown businesses, transformed the rural economy of

Bangladesh and lifted many villagers out of poverty by putting their products on the wider market. Of course it was a private act of charity that capitalised the initiative; but the bank soon proved self-supporting and, while not insulated from fraud, continues to operate in its original setting with evident benefits to the poor. The model could surely be adapted and refined to become a template for policy here in Britain. Moreover, it suggests a principle. We help the poor by freeing the channels through which opportunities come to them. Old fashioned banking was closed to those who could offer no security for a loan, and therefore it did nothing to support the economic activity of the truly impoverished. It was one part of the poverty trap, which prevented those who had fallen into penury from working themselves out of it. The welfare system would then step in to provide for them, so ensuring that they remained dependent on handouts from the state. This was the first step towards the culture of dependency, with all its well-known adverse social and psychological consequences. Likewise, the mortgage market was in recent memory closed to the poor, who could give no security for a loan. The emergence of the sub-prime mortgage created opportunities for home ownership among people who would not previously have been able to enjoy such a thing. Sure, the sub-prime market played a part in the recent Wall Street crash. But that was because banks were trading in debts that they could not guarantee and treating speculative returns as solid assets. Again, it might be possible to work out a way of refining this particular financial instrument so as to make it available to the poor without jeopardising the goal of giving them the opportunity to acquire a secure capital asset. Indeed, in their original conception, the building societies and friendly societies of Victorian Britain aimed at just such a result: offering mortgages to poor people who thereby acquired an interest in a shared capital venture. Those charitable societies were built on the knowledge that people can raise themselves out of poverty, and that the best way to help them is to provide networks of mutual support. We are all aware of the extent to which banks have exploited the loan market, risking capital that they did not possess for quick returns, and rewarding their directors and managers with vast bonuses while putting their shareholders at risk, often relying on the state to step in to save them when the crisis came. What is to be done in response to thisand it is only one part of a larger problem concerning how to regulate financial transactions without extinguishing themis a difficult question. Because it has affected the bottom

end of the mortgage market in America the sub-prime crisis has thrown many people into poverty and homelessness who were previously working their way up into the middle class. However, this does not imply that sub-prime mortgages are essentially precarious, or that the regulations could not be put in place that would once again make them available and reliable for those who cannot give collateral guarantees for a loan. Any reform of the financial system ought, in my view, to have this goal as a priority. The labour market could be freed, were the penalties to be lifted from those who seek to offer employment. For example, there are many people who could make use of domestic help and whose earning capacity would be increased if they did not have the burden of managing their households. But the majority of such people cannot afford to pay a salary out of post-tax income. By allowing them to claim their employees' wages against tax, and by lifting the burden of national insurance, a vast area of employment opportunities at the bottom of the market would be opened. This would not reduce government revenues, since tax would be collected on the employees' wages and there would be a corresponding reduction in benefit payments. The result would, indeed, represent a fiscal saving, while again placing the feet of the beneficiaries on the upward ladder. Moreover this policy would cause poor people to work side by side with members of the middle class, who are as likely to be caring and responsible as their employees. The employers would be motivated to help with such matters as the education of children, and the management of the legal and other burdens that lay such a heavy shadow across the lives of the poor. In general a conservative policy will be favourable to the rich, not because they are rich, but because they have the proven ability to create wealth. And it will aim to distribute that wealth without penalising the activities that create it. It will not, in the normal case, redistribute wealth directly. Instead it will attempt to create the opportunities that people need, in order to create wealth for themselves. That this is psychologically more beneficial than welfare dependency is, I think, one of the lessons to be learned from the work of Charles Murray (Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980) and James Q Wilson (The Moral Sense). It is also more economically efficient, since it encourages the poor to produce economic value and not just to receive it. Murray and Wilson present overwhelming evidence from the American case, that the poverty trap exists, that it locks its victims into failure and discouragement, and that it is accompanied by every kind of anti-social behaviour as its victims beat fruitlessly against the walls that contain them. Yet the policies that produce this trap continue to be espoused, wherever poverty is redefined as inequality. For then

the only remedy proposed is forcible redistribution, the immediate effect of which is to depress the economy and to create new classes of the poor. But this returns me to the question of inequality. As I suggested above, if inequalities, or extremes of inequality, are evils, then they are evils of another kind from poverty. Poverty is overcome when everyone has sufficient for a decent human lifeand how much that is depends in part on the surrounding conditions. But inequality is overcome when everyone has the same. It is not because it produces poverty that inequality is an evil, for it does not do so. If it is an evil it is an evil of another kindfor example the evil of providing rents on the social product that place enormous power in the hands of people who have no motive to use that power responsibly, and who might use it in ways that threaten the prosperity and the savings of the rest of us. This we have seen in the corporate sector. But what is the remedy? Stiglitz opts for massive redistributive taxation, up to 70 per cent at the top income level, and a heavy estate tax. But there is no evidence from the European case that such measures do anything to overcome poverty, even if they make it more difficult to be rich. On the contrary, they penalise wealth creation, lead to a flight of capital and also make people less likely to save, opting to spend their money during their lifetime. My own view is that we should strive to limit the opportunities for rentseeking by returning powers to shareholders and investors, and restricting the capacity of banks to trade in "unreal estate". The desire to punish the rich is understandable; but it is no part of a policy to help the poor. There is one class of poor people, however, that it is increasingly difficult to help, not because the free economy cannot extend its benefits in their direction, but because social changes have removed the protection on which they depend. I am thinking of the elderly, and in particular of those who are too frail to work. The dissolution of the extended family and the increasing tendency to exhaust the equity of the family home before the death of its older residents, have led to more and more elderly people falling into a poverty trap from which they cannot emerge by their own devices, since they have none. Until now the focus of government policy, in response to the campaigns of the Child Poverty Action Group, has been on children. In my view it would be better directed to the old, for many of whom there is no other source of help. Pension funds, as we know, are in crisis, on account of the unexpected longevity of their beneficiaries. State pensions too can provide funds only by borrowing from an uncertain future. Stopgap measures, such as the winter fuel allowance, barely touch the surface of the problem. It is significant that, when Bismarck first introduced a welfare state into Germany, it was the situation of the elderly

that most concerned him, with the right to a publicly funded pension the first among the provisions that he introduced. And I cannot help feeling that this is the correct emphasis for a conservative. We should recognise that there is a collective duty on all of us, to help those who can no longer help themselves. For the rest, however, policy should have a completely different focus not to look after them, but to provide the opportunities that they need in order to escape from the poverty trap. For the majority of able-bodied people this trap has been enhanced by government policy and not cured by it, and the principal reason for this is the fallacious belief that equality, not wealth, is the thing that will rid us of the poor.