Britain is forgetting what it means to be a free country
By downgrading freedom as a value, we’re choosing a false promise of ‘stability’ over dynamism and growth
Helicopter parenting is, just perhaps, falling out of vogue. We can now see that protecting children from failure and stopping them from taking any decisions for themselves leaves them more prone to fearfulness, less able to deal with adversity, and fundamentally less capable of getting on with life.
Unfortunately, its adult counterpart, helicopter politics, is as popular as ever. In this style of politics, no harm, no societal difficulty, no injustice is, in principle, beyond the reach of the state. Political debate is about how, not whether, the government can solve your problems. It’s therapeutic politics – politics as medicine or as parenting. What it’s not is politics for grown-ups.
If you doubt me, just look at some recent ideas from the Government. Wages too low? Simple – boost the minimum wage by fiat. Not enough houses? Simple – make tenant eviction largely illegal. Don’t like smoking? Ban it. Childcare too expensive? Subsidise it. No problem is too small. Today, Parliament will debate pet theft and make it illegal “to induce a cat to accompany you”.
It’s easy, fun, and necessary, to knock this nanny statism. But it isn’t enough in itself. We have a nanny state, not just because most voters want it, but because most politicians do, too. State action gives power and influence to government MPS and a sense of purpose to the opposition.
That’s true whichever way round the parties are. After all, every wing of the Tory party seems to have some problem it wants the government to solve – “hate” on social media, taxing “unhealthy” food, regulating cyclists, the list is endless. All politicians nowadays see it as their job to get government to do things. For if that is not their job, what is?
Well, one element of that job always was, and still should be, to police the government: to stop it expanding its power and encroaching on the people’s rights – rights that they owned, not rights given them by the state.
The whole handling of the pandemic shows how feeble this conception now is. I have to laugh when I hear people argue that being a member of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a barrier to domestic tyranny: did they not notice that, when raison d’état demanded it in 2020, the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, just when they might have been useful, turned out to be no more than worthless bits of paper?
At the root of all this, I fear, is a fundamental downgrading of freedom as a value. Freedom used to be fundamental to Britain’s view of itself. Now even the Conservative Party barely uses the word.
Yet you can’t long remain a free society if you don’t believe in freedom. And it’s no good just saying you believe in it: you have to live it. Sometimes that means politicians deciding “we would rather live with this injustice or this social problem than expand the state to deal with it”. When was the last time you heard anyone say that? And that’s the problem.
I am not arguing for a libertarian nightwatchman state. There is never going to be a majority for anything like that in modern British politics. But we have to change the direction of travel.
At some point since the war – and I think I am aware of it happening in my lifetime – we moved from seeing ourselves as a society in which free individuals accepted government rules in certain areas for the common good, to one in which the state and society are almost the same thing, in which the state can in principle do anything, but allows citizens autonomy in certain areas, always provisionally, and always subject to overriding state purpose.
We moved from one to the other because we valued stability over dynamism. For a free society is dynamic. Free people won’t do what the great and good think they should do. They don’t necessarily want to live in allocated social housing, have their education from state-approved curricula, or travel only where and when the trains go. They won’t be told what to say and think. They want to experiment and try different things. They are eccentric in the best sense of the word.
People like this are inconvenient not just for government but very often for fellow citizens. Yet it is through the eccentric and the entrepreneur that progress happens. Squeeze them through tax, regulation and disapproval, and the ideas and effort that spark growth go away. And that is what is happening.
Politicians of both parties say they want “stability”. That is certainly the mood of the times. Yet the people who most want and need stability are children. When they grow up they want, or should want, something else. And so should this country.
We need not stability but dynamism, we need creative destruction, we need an end to unprofitable businesses and the creation of profitable new ones, we need new homes, new roads, new airports, new more productive agriculture, and above all new ideas.
If we are to get them we need to end helicopter politics. And politicians, at least those on the Right, need to start saying to voters “Now it’s over to you. You fix it.”