Adversarial politics is dead. What is left is a managerialist wrangle

The West has created a form of social organisation that almost everyone in the world regards as heaven on earth. The only people who would see that observation as sarcastic or absurd are those who have lived all their lives under this miraculous order and take it for granted. What draws migrants to the Western democracies in numbers that even benevolent nations find alarming is the miraculous combination of free enterprise and welfare provision. The first offers a hope of self-advancement and the second promises protection from destitution. So you get a chance to succeed by your own efforts, coupled with a guarantee of support if you fail. As a popular political formula this has to be one of the greatest achievements in human history.

In its fully developed form it is a quite recent invention, having emerged in Europe in the second half of the last century after two world wars which prompted enormous sympathy and respect for the sacrifices of ordinary people. The conscience of the governing classes has dictated ever since that decent levels of sustenance, opportunity and living conditions for everyone are the proper business of the state. Needless to say, what looks like paradise to much of the world’s poor and persecuted – a place where you can either make your own way and win, or be rescued by benign agencies if you lose – looks less than idyllic at the practical end. As we get into the second century of this experiment it is clear that maintaining this complex balance of contradictory objectives is a political dilemma of enormous magnitude. How do you protect the vulnerable without undermining self-reliance? And how do we decide who is genuinely vulnerable? Everybody wants a fair society but what does “fairness” actually mean: that everybody gets an equal share however much or little they contribute? Should we protect people from the consequences of failure even if that involves penalising those who have made more of an effort?

But you know all this. These are the questions that dominate – or underpin – every important political argument of our time. They are the inevitable consequence of the compromise that all advanced democracies have agreed (more or less) to be the morally acceptable way to run a country. It is becoming clear now that there can be no permanent resolution of these conflicts precisely because they reflect the contradictions and ambivalence of human nature.

Electorates change their minds – often abruptly – about whether compassion should take precedence over competition, or whether meritocracy is more valuable than equality. And so do individuals – sometimes quite suddenly as a result of a formative life experience. This may be exasperating for politicians who are trying to appeal to an electorate, but it is essential for the survival of the species.

The capacity to see things quite differently – to reorder your priorities or even to judge events by new standards – is one of the most valuable attributes of human intelligence. It most often occurs in individuals simply as a function of growing older, but societies as a whole can pass through such transformations of vision. The politicians of the day just have to adjust. The most successful ones are those who make those adjustments fastest and most convincingly. Those who sense in good time that the mood of their own traditional supporters is changing can make history; Tony Blair is the most recent example.

This brings me to the great debate of the moment over the future of the Conservative party. There is a strong sense now that it has lost touch with what it stood for in its most recent Golden Age under Margaret Thatcher: not only that it has given up on small-state, low-tax government but more profoundly that it has abandoned core beliefs in the private virtues of individual responsibility and personal motivation. The will to defend and promote initiative and enterprise has been abandoned for the sake of the easier road to mass popularity: a comforting reassurance that the state will offer ready-made solutions to every problem. This mentality reached its apotheosis during lockdown when the Government actually took over paying the wages of a great proportion of the workforce who were confined to their homes. (I can still scarcely believe, having written that sentence, which I know to be true, that this actually happened.)

So quite astonishingly we found ourselves at the logical conclusion of the Big State philosophy. The idea that government intervention had to be the solution to everything had consequences that were, at the same time, both horrifying and addictive. Given the economic nightmare that has followed and the “difficult decisions” the present Conservative leadership is having to make to escape from it, it is almost certainly true that a lesson has been learnt. Never again will the state try to replace actual remunerated employment with printed money. But it cannot simply switch instantly to advocating self-reliance and individual initiative when only minutes ago it was telling people to put communal values above everything else.

Thanks to the pandemic (or rather, to the official response to it) we have reached the absolutely quintessential problem of modern politics: how can free market economics, which provides not just real wealth, but the motivation for innovation and achievement, be reconciled with the social democratic values of community and shared responsibility? Forget about Left and Right. That is pretty much over now. What most people want – those who have always lived here and the massed numbers who want to join them – is some sort of settlement that encompasses both those things. Every generation of political leaders will have to concoct a new variant of the mix, but there won’t ever be the possibility of a pure adversarial contest between ideological opposites. Maybe there never was.

Western democracies all combine free-ish markets with welfarism. The only remaining debate is how much of each is necessary

The will to defend and promote initiative has been abandoned for the sake of mass popularity