My career in student politics lasted approximately 2 minutes. Recollected, hazily, over a distance of 25 years, it went like this:
GH to Conservative stallholder at fresher’s fair, eagerly: Is this where I join the FCS?
Student hack (horrified): Oh no, we don’t have anything like that here!
So I never did join the FCS. Unlike, I suspect, many of blogistan’s more venerable residents. Now Tim Hames is doing a radio history for the BBC. I am not sure how to read this. Are people like us now history? Or has Hames persuaded someone in the commissioning department that the FCS generation is about to come to power, as a generation of 70s New Lefties did under Blair, in heavy disguise, but with their ideals intact?
That would be a lovely thought, but there is a problem with that theory. Part of the reason the Tory Party was in such an appalling mess by the 90s was the foolhardy destruction of the FCS which drove out of the party a generation. Old Labour, in the 70s, on the other hand, clasped the New Lefties to its bosom: paid for fraternal trips to Cuba and Bulgaria, gave them speechwriting and policy jobs, helped them in the Long March Through The Institutions that was achieved by the turn of the century. The New Left base is strong. The New Right are even now outcasts. They (we?) are not close to power, unless I am much mistaken. Not even in alliance with the RCP…
Still Hames’ piece is full of delightful quirks. I liked in particular his treatment of Marc Glendenning, whom he insisted on giving the full grandeur of Marc-Henri, “a philosopher-king among politicians”. I did not meet Marc until quite recently, and though I have thought of him up to now as a conspicuously pleasant and interesting chap, I will look at him now in a whole new light. Would bended knee be appropriate, I wonder?
“Radical libertarianism captivated the youth wing of the Tory party, the Federation of Conservative Students.
“Some of the most prominent of them believed in taking the philosophy of personal freedom to what they saw as its logical conclusion, arguing for the legalisation of heroin and a free market in sexual services.”
…which is a good reason why libertarians should never, ever be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
They’re as irresponsible as Leftists.
So overtly selling sex (except when it is called “marrying a rich guy”) and controlling your own body chemistry (is Scotch ok?) makes you irresponsible? You really do not like the idea of self-ownership.
Considering where you are, you mean “we” do you not?
Dale,
I’m not a libertarian, not even close to being one. I only come here for the excellent arguments.
Perry,
Radical libertarians are little different from socialists in that they’re quite willing to implement change, regardless of long-term outcomes, as long as the change is part of their theory.
In other words, they’re driven by philosophy, not by what works — and by “works”, I mean established customs which have served civilization well for a long time.
“Control of your own body” sounds wonderful — except that allowing unbridled licentiousness doesn’t result in anything other than tragedy, in the long run.
And this is the problem when talking to smart people like yourself (and, to be honest, more than a few Lefties). Just because you have an IQ of 170 and a fine sense of rationalism which allows for non-destructive decisions, doesn’t mean that everyone is similarly endowed.
Most people, in fact, given the freedom of choice between restraint and licence will choose licence almost every time. Limits are needed, boundaries are needed.
Yeah, I know, this sounds so paternalistic, and you’ll be able to throw many extreme examples of such nannyism in my face. Hey, I have to drive ten miles just to buy a bottle of single malt, even though beer and wine are sold in the supermarket on the corner, so I know how this kind of thing can be abused.
But the alternative is far worse. Better for society that I drive those ten miles to buy Scotch than to have it piped into every house in the city, if you get my point.
My jeer at Lefties is that they never let nonsense like history and practicality affect their policies. As long as the theory is pure, all else is subordinate.
Unfortunately, many Libertarians are the same.
If there’s no license, you can be pretty sure there’s no liberty either. Freedom only to do what’s good, wise, or fitting to your station in life is not recognisably freedom at all. That, of course, was the problem with the original conception of philosopher-kings.
For myself I have no certainty that any ruler will deign me to be worthy of any rights or freedoms denied to others, let alone those I might wish to have, and so my preference for universal liberties is founded as much on prudential considerations, as KdT’s (understandable) conservative desire to keep the rabble from getting out of hand. It’s just that I realise I might be the rabble, and my preferences deemed out of hand.
Again, we’re down to the margins of practicality against principle on the edge of the libertarian/conservative divide. And I think I would, more often than not, side with the conservatives.
IIRC, Euan Gray was also another who often argued on the side of practicality.
I disagree. There’s a conflict of principles here, which KdT acknowledges.
The difference between libertarians and conservatives is definitely not one of practicality. Conservatives aren’t trying to offer as much freedom as posssible in the real world – that’s actually my position. Euan Gray’s critique was frequently founded in considerations of practical politics (how do you, indeed can you, get there from here), and I often agreed with him about the nature of those constraints. But, my preference is for more freedom, because I see freedom as a good in itself, not as substance to be delivered in the right quantities to produce or maintain a nominally harmonious (i.e. stable) society of predertermined form.
Guy, I think you have hit on a reason why the Tories ran out of ideological self confidence and sheer brio in the 1990s: a whole generation, including folk known to me like Mark Henri-Glendenning, etc, were driven out of the party by Norman Tebbit (how ironic is that!) in the mid-80s. Such folk either went off into media, think tanks, policy advocacy, the eurosceptic movement, or just cleared off into the City, etc. The Pattenite wets won, and of course many young and ambitious folk were attracted, wrongly, to the promise of NuLabour. Of course the she shine wore off that pretty quickly.
I find Kim’s comments mystifying. After all, Kim is a bit of a libertarian himself, at least when it comes to owning a fearesome collection of guns. And what is wrong with criticising the usefess War on Drugs, which has achieved the same in terms of loss of liberties, creation of corruption etc, as 1920s Prohibition?
The other thing which strikes me as not quite right on KdT’s comments is that laws about what you can do to your own body – re drugs and so on – are not “established customs which have served civilization well for a long time”, but (relatively) recent innovations which have overturned established customs.
Johnathan,
Some of my philosophy intersects with libertarianism, but that does not make me a libertarian.
Owning guns is not a “libertarian” principle — it is a necessary precaution against tyranny, and in the protection of The People, the individual benefits are a welcome side benefit thereof.
Where people get me wrong is that where I side with the principle of the State qua State, they automatically think that I espouse the Nanny State (which I hate as much as or more than any libertarian).
In fact, I side with the concept of the Daddy State: where The People are given (very) broad and non-intrusive guidelines on how to live their lives, but when the guidelines are transgressed, they get their pee-pees severely whacked.
In more acceptable politial terminology, the Daddy State is embodied in the U.S. Constitution, of which I am a fervent supporter and fanatical constructionist. The Constitution actually limits the central government (but does not argue against it — that would be libertarian), while saying to The People: “Anything not specifically prohibited, is allowed.”
Yes, it’s been degraded over the years; but that’s the nature of society, isn’t it?
Bishop,
That’s not quite true. While the laws against, for example, drug addiction are of fairly recent vintage, there has always been social censure against such excess, because Society, rightly, recognizes that wholesale self-indulgence on such a scale is not beneficial to society as a whole.
Our problem is that as morality has declined over the years, the State has stepped into the vacuum and become the social arbiter. And the ham-fisted State as moral arbiter is about as dreadful a situation as one can imagine — or not have to imagine, in garden spots like San Francisco or London.
This is not a new argument — I think Socrates made some allusion to it a few years ago — but that simply underlines the continuum of the problem.
“If there’s no license, you can be pretty sure there’s no liberty either.”
Precisely. So, to use my analogy above, I don’t agree with State-sponsored Prohibition — we all know how that turned out — but neither do I agree that beer should be piped into houses like water.
Moderation in all things, Guy. The problem, which we wrestle with constantly, is: who defines “moderation”?
Libertarians argue that it’s best left to the individual; socialists argue that it’s best left to the State; and republicans argue that the truth lies somewhere between.
It really is that simple.
Kim
Sure, but there’s a difference between society censuring something and outlawing it. The problem with society outlawing something is that society may be wrong. Far better to censure and then say “I told you so” when proven right.
I agree with you that morals have declined, but isn’t this an effect of state interaction rather than its cause?
Guy, I think you have hit on a reason why the Tories ran out of ideological self confidence and sheer brio in the 1990s:
That was the excuse for posting the article. I’ve a lot of time for Lord Tebbit – as a straight talker – but it was an obvious strategic blunder, even at the time. Dissolving the FCS, rather than saying: “Boys will be boys: young people are bound to explore extraordinary ideas, and we welcome imagination, but obviously this student malarkey has very little to do with official Tory Party policy… ” made it look important, and this contributed to the external characterisation of the Thatcher government as “extreme right” while ensuring, on the contrary, the ascendency of corporatists.
I agree with you that morals have declined, but isn’t this an effect of state interaction rather than its cause?
Bishop,
I don’t know that the State can shoulder all the blame for the decline in morals; although, in the case of Denmark in the 1960, they were certainly a deciding factor insofar as sexual morality all but disappeared (with dolorous consequences).
Remember that, in a democratic system anyway, the laws tend to reflect society’s contemporaneous mores and beliefs. So when the restrictions on pornography (for example) are lifted by the State, it’s because the people in general feel that skin flicks are okay.
Certainly, the Church is complicit in this, by condoning behavior that, in hte past, would have caused condemnation and, in extreme cases, expulsion.
But the modern-day Church is best exemplified by the brilliant Eddie Izzard:
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Well… so have I!”
…and a risible “penance” is suggested (not imposed) thereafter.
The State, certainly in its more-recent manifestation, is also partially responsible for the breakdown in family ties. Kids today get away with behavior what, in my distant yoot, might have resulted in near-hospitalization at the hands of my Dad; but with the current, State-sponsored “child abuse” mania infecting our society, it’s little wonder that kids think they can get away with telling their Mum to fuck off, or their teacher. The truth is, they can, because parental punishment has all but been legislated out of existence.
So there are any number of fingers to point at the guilty culprits: the State, the Church, Academia, and finally, by default, ourselves.
Since no one is advocating piping Scotch into every house in the city, no I don’t “get your point.”
There are social costs to these laws, by the way. The War on Drugs, to take one example, costs US taxpayers hundreds of millions a year, but there is no evidence that it has influenced drug usage rates in the slightest. What it has done is made criminals out of otherwise law-abiding people for, among other things, smoking marijuana, a drug with far fewer associated social problems than alcohol. It has eroded civil liberties protections besides.
As for prostitution, I am not aware that it has ever broken up a marriage that wasn’t already on the skids. Marriages that end because of adultery usually do so because one or the other partner is in a long-term affair, not because of one trip to the brothel. Such affairs are neither encouraged by nor made easier to conceal because of legal prostitution. Meanwhile, prostitutes themselves continue to do business regardless of their legal status, but at considerably greater risk to their own health and that of their clients – not to mention at considerably greater reward to often violent middlemen.
You’re right that not everyone has a sterling IQ, that not everyone makes proper choices the first time. Such people, unsurprisingly, don’t always take the time to think of the consequences people like you have imposed on them for getting an illegal lapdance or smoking an illegal joint. Thanks to people like you, they spend time in jail for these victimless “crimes” and then have to live with the criminal record their (probably inevitable) slip-up netted them. This is not social progress and it does nothing to encouage public morality.
Freedom is not a thing, a predicate. It is a condition of an act. Acts are within the competence of an actor. Acts may conduce to good, bad or neutrality. Where they are not neutral or conducive to good, freedom must be constrained either by the actor himself or by another. (What is good, bad and neutral is up for debate.) In terms of survival of the species, this is why conservatism wins over absolute libertarianism. But only just. It’s not a perfect world. That’s why I am a conservative, admittedly with a libertarian streak – which I try to control.
On the contrary, freedom is the absence of condition on an act. Otherwise, considered as predicate, it is just the same thing as capacity or competence: an act occurs, there must be freedom to undertake it.
It is convenient to talk of freedom (though perhaps one might prefer the term liberty) in general in political discourse to mean the degree of absence of political ( that is, collectively-imposed) constraints on individual behaviour. I aver that more such absence of constraint is a good thing: thou shalt not needlessly control others. Perhaps conservatives (and socialists, and utilitarian liberals, though maybe not the soft-fascist ‘civic republicans’ who would think it ill-posed) would say they agree with that, but we would differ profoundly in our approach to both “thou” and “needlessly”.
“Thanks to people like you, they spend time in jail for these victimless “crimes” and then have to live with the criminal record their (probably inevitable) slip-up netted them.”
Except that their crimes aren’t always “victimless.” In the long run, proscription of various self-destructive indulgences has proven to be preferable to no regulation at all.
And this is a besetting fault of absolutists, of almost any stripe: because they automatically assume that some restriction leads inevitably to total restriction, they oppose any restriction.
In the long run, that leads to societal consequences almost as bad as those caused by over-restriction.
I myself think the War On Drugs is ludicrous — well, it would be ludicrous if the consequences weren’t so serious — but I also see the eventual cost of Needle Park, too. Few societies will flourish when there’s an opium den on every corner — human nature is far too self-indulgent.
I have an answer for most of society’s ills, but I must confess that when it comes to intoxicants, I’m at a complete loss. Somewhere between the two poles lies the ideal solution: but I’m buggered if I know where it is.
Insofar as their crimes aren’t “victimless,” I agree with regulation. I support sexual freedom, for example, but only so far as the partners both(/all) are able to and in fact do give consent. Child pornography and molestation, therefore, are and should be criminal because there is a victim. But when you start making arguments about “public morality” you open the door for the majority to ban sodomy and the like, and such bans are wholly inappropriate to a free society.
Oh, I dunno. Once upon a time in the great US of A opium and lots of other stuff was perfectly legal, and it didn’t result in an opium den on every corner. Not surprisingly, the opium dens confined themselves to certain kinds of neighborhoods, much the way they do now. The difference is that back then opium and like substances didn’t (a) command prices that make the global drug industry bigger and more profitable than petroleum or (b) land people jail time for simple mistakes, thereby ruining their lives. Oh, yeah, and the US somehow managed to grow out of swamps and weeds into the industrial wonder of the world without proscribing opium. Decline started to set in in the 30s, once we got regulation fever.
I think your argument would be a lot more effective with concrete examples. You keep talking about things like “Needle Park” and “unbounded licentiousness,” but it’s not at all clear that the law is having any effect on licentiousness or drug use. “Needle park” is a particularly silly example since current alcohol regulations also prohibit drinking in public parks. It’s perfectly possible to have legal alcohol without “Gin Park,” so there’s no reason to think legal injectibles would result in “Needle Park.” On the contrary, legalizing heroin and simulatneously requiring that people not use it in public would give people places to go get their junk besides the park – much the way they go to bars now to get whiskey. Laws against public intoxication are not in conflict with an individual’s right to decide for himself what goes into his body, so you’ll get little argument against them from Libertarians. If you want to push further and tell us what we can and cannot do for fun in our own homes, however, you’re going to have to do better than dredging up the Al Pacino backlog.
Quite right Guy – good posting.
And yes I am old enough (plenty old enough) to have been an F.C.S. man – and I was.
Norman Tebbit (then party Chairman) was conned by the left (J.S. Gummer to name one) into abolishing the F.C.S.
Supposedly we sacked the small midland town of Loughborough (although the press release about the sack of Loughborough was written, by the left, before the conference took place).
Also we were all drug abusers and child rapists (Mr Gummer’s oft boasted of Christianity never prevented him telling lies).
As a man who did not even drink booze at the time and had never engaged in sexual conduct of any sort, this all came as news to me.
What Norman Tebbit did not understand (till it was too late) was that the destruction of the Federation of Conservative Students was a trial run for the destruction of Mrs Thatcher.
The people who made Mrs T. look like a moderate were gone (so she could be presented as an extremist), and it had been established that a major part of the Conservative party could be eliminated just because the left did not agree with it – and if a major part, why not the leader herself?
The part played by the then Chairman of the F.C.S. (John Bercow – spelling) should not be forgotten.
Far from defending the organsation, Mr Bercow (a self styled “libertarian” at the time) was bought off with the promise of a Conservative seat in Parliament – which he eventually got.
This all led to the modern Conservative party. The party of John Major to David Cameron (then at Oxford the arch “wet” part of the F.C.S.) of politicians without principles. Corrupt and degenerate.
At the last conference of the F.C.S. in Scarborough the wets (as a tatic) put up quite a Conservative person to stand against the “libertarian” Bercow.
Years later I met the “wet” candidate (he had become a Conservative M.P. – of the decent sort, not the Cameron sort) and we talked.
Eventually he asked me the question, “knowing what you know now [i.e. how he had turned out and how Bercow had turned out] would it not have been better if you had supported me?”
I had to admit that I had been wrong and I should have supported him, not Bercow.
I would like to say that John B. conned me at the Conference (young man that I was), but the truth is that I had met him and knew there was something twisted and dishonest about him.
But the “line” was “vote the slate, vote Bercow” so I supported him.
I was gutless.
We were warned that the “Wets” were out to get us by Sir Alfred Sherman (spellng) – he told us at a conference in Birmingham.
However, we did not take it very seriously – we did not know how many lies Gum Gum and the rest were telling.
Of course such things as the lies about the Loughborough conference and the hammer blow that fell after the Scarborough conference was part of why I did not help out as much as I could have done in the 1989 County Council elections.
Mary Bland (the leader of the Conservative group and a friend) lost her seat by two votes, and we lost Northaptonshire by one seat.
The left (in the campaign against Mrs Thatcher) made a lot of how we had “even lost Northamptonshire”.
I was angry and resentful and fell into a trap.
I have always regreted that I did not do more in 1989 -I could have saved Mary Bland (“well I will come home to Kettering and help on the day and vote, but why should I do more – after all Mary has a safe seat” that is how I justified my inaction to myself).
Perhaps holding Northamptionshire might even have been enough to save Mrs T. – although the trial run of destroying the F.C.S. had proved the power of the left (they controlled all the information that was fed to the press and to Norman Tebbit at Central Office).
Today we have David Cameron (at Oxford at the time – the H.Q., in the period, of the left in Conservative student politics) – and a P.R. spin man.
What a defeat, what an utter defeat.
I suspect that the consequences for this country (and for more than this country) of the termination of all interest in ideas in the Conservative party (the message of both the destruction of the F.C.S. and the coup against Mrs T. being “if you have any principles and are not a total shit the Conservative party is not the place for you”) will be very bad.
And all because people like me were so crap at the time that really counted.
Of course I struggled on – it is only in recent months that I finally gave up.
But in my heart I have long suspected that the Conservative party was a lost cause.
Nor do I believe that any other party is likely to grow up and take its place as a defender of national independence and limited government.
Britian could again have been an example to the world. Now it will just be another bad example.
On the stuff on drugs and sex that Kim and others discuss about above.
The Personal Rights Association (which argued, from the late 19th century, that such things were not the business of the state was dominated by Conservatives – as was the Liberty and Property Defence League (and other such).
The “war on drugs” was part of the Progressive political movement in the United States – which grow out of the Protestant “social gospel” movement (i.e. Christians who had lost their faith in God and an after life, or at least had become obsessed with trying to create the Kingdom of God on Earth – the oldest heresy).
It was very much a minority view in Britian before the First World War.
Only gradually has the Puritan idea that the state is there to improve people’s morals (rather than to just defend the Realm) become so powerful in Britian.
My own view is that drugs and prostitution are disgusting, but I also believe (as Edmund Burke did) that the idea the state is the way to deal with vice is absurd.