Our institutions are now collapsing and the hard Left is celebrating

Sanctimonious cant about the Queen and Paradise Papers is a legitimate form of argument for Labour

It’s the humbug I find hard to stomach, the unmistakable stench of hypocrisy whenever a financial “scandal” breaks. The air has been full of it since the production of the so-called Paradise Papers revealed to the world what it already knew: rich people avail themselves of legitimate tax vehicles offshore to limit their liabilities.

We knew because this is a re-run of the phoney furore that followed the leak of documents from a Panama law firm just two years ago. Then, you may recall, the former prime minister David Cameron was dragged through the mud because his father managed an investment fund based in the Central American republic. This time, an even bigger fish has been netted by the indefatigable trawlers for truth: the Queen, no less. The Duchy of Lancaster invested some of the Monarch’s money in the Cayman Islands, of which she happens to be head of state. For this the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and member of the Privy Council demanded an apology even though nothing illegal, or even untoward, had happened. What is going on here?

The charge is being led by a shadow chancellor who receives an income from a pension fund managed in Guernsey and a Labour Party that rents its London headquarters from a tax exempt property unit trust fund based in Jersey. Cheerleaders include the Guardian newspaper, whose high dudgeon did not extend to its own use of a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to purchase the media group Emap in 2008. And what about the BBC, which paid many of its stars through private companies to limit their tax liabilities? It chose to highlight the Queen’s perfectly legitimate use of an offshore trust while only half-heartedly informing us that the performers in a BBC sitcom called Mrs Brown’s Boys (no, me neither) used some convoluted method of receiving their salaries via Mauritius, as one does.

Most of us, I imagine, would be embarrassed to be caught out saying one thing while doing another; but for those on the Left, sanctimonious cant is a perfectly legitimate form of political argument. To them, the ends always justify the means. They are impervious to criticism because they consider themselves defenders of the greater good and believe they possess a higher morality. Conservatives, by contrast, are more realistic about human nature and look upon grandiose schemes for social transformation with scepticism. While the Left believes that the state should control and distribute incomes, the Right recognises that people want to keep their own money and are entitled to use legitimate means to do so.

The social philosopher Thomas Sowell captured this dichotomy in his 1987 work A Conflict of Visions. Those predominantly on the political Left “tend to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable handovers from the past… Costs are regrettable [in achieving an ideal world], but by no means decisive”. On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution we know how true that is.

While the Left sees social conventions and restraints as barriers to human fulfilment, Conservatives believe society can only be conducted within the framework of existing institutions and the rule of law. Yet, bit by bit, these institutions are being dismantled and the public’s faith in them undermined. Involving the Crown in a thoroughly tendentious “revelation” of alleged financial impropriety is the latest and most egregious example of this tendency.

It matters because this country is defined by its institutions. When attempts are made to define Britishness, politicians invariable cite nebulous concepts like “fair play” and “tolerance”. But these are universal. What makes us unique are the institutions currently collapsing around our heads: Parliament, the police, the judiciary, the Church, the banks, the Civil Service, the BBC and, yes, the Press though it has never been held in especially high regard.

Rarely a day passes without one or more of these institutions being assailed by some fresh crisis, with Parliament currently mired in a swamp of moral and sexual misdemeanour or worse. Add in a Government that cannot even be sure it will muster enough support for its own policies and which ignores votes in the Commons, then the legitimacy of the executive is undermined, too.

This is contributing to a collapse in public trust for the very institutions that hold the nation together. Social attitudes surveys show less than a quarter of Britons have any faith in national government and less than a fifth in Parliament. These are unprecedentedly low figures in modern times. The Crown had been relatively immune from this malaise, hence the Left’s delight in drawing the Queen into a spurious row.

It is not only institutional anchors that are being uprooted: people are confronted with the cultural upheaval brought about by high immigration, the erosion of societal and gender norms, rapid technological change which threatens their jobs and a constant drip-feed of egalitarian clap-trap telling them that unfairness can be eradicated. It all feeds into the populist narrative and sense of foreboding promoted by Jeremy Corbyn. This needs to be countered by the Conservatives, not pandered to.

On this page yesterday William Hague wrote that, historically, things are not that bad. He, after all, was leader of the Tories when they were reduced to 160 seats in the Commons and seemed washed up. But with due deference to Lord Hague, I think things are a lot worse. The Labour government of Tony Blair was at least identifiably mainstream even if the diminution of our institutions did begin on its watch.

The prospect of a hard-left administration taking control of Britain were Theresa May to fall, as well she might, is of a different order of magnitude to what happened in 1997. Moreover, as a new Telegraph poll shows, the country is losing confidence in the Government’s ability to get a good – or any – Brexit deal, which is hardly surprising given the circumstances. At this moment in our history we need someone to stand up for the values and institutions that made the country great and which it will need to sustain it outside the EU. It is getting late in the day.