The challenge seems to be something like “Can the West be fussy what countries it does business with?”

In a word, “No”.

(1)

As President Obama has said recently, we have our ideals but we have our interests too.

(2)

But suppose we stuck to our Western liberal ideals, where would not our trading with China get the Chinese peasant? (Never mind that the houses of our less-well-off would be emptied of goods.) And if we don’t trade with Africa, we’d merely buy even more African raw materials as they arrive in Chinese and African goods.

(3)

More positively I am mildly confident that the worse people we trade with, the more good we do in the world. This paradox is unpicked thus: trade enriches people and creates a middle class. In the end, and sometimes sooner rather than later, that process can be rapid and benign and leads to responsive government.

(4)

I have a good deal of faith that sanctions usually backfire. I was not a fan of South African sanctions and am not even persuaded that sanctions against Burma are all that clever. Sanctions against Saddam Hussein were seriously flawed.

(5)

The Middle East looks like a hard case. This is partly because of the complications of schismatic Islam and partly because it involves raw material trading, which is often a sort of non-commercial trading. (I mean that it is a stitch-up between small numbers of people on either side of the deals.) Even so, I am not remotely convinced that Saudi Arabia, for instance, would be a better influence in the world if we didn’t buy its oil.

(6)

To those who say we shouldn’t buy oil from, say Nigeria, I would reply that I would rather see Western companies involved than to see that oil reach the market some other way.

(7)

On Libya, it’s worth saying that the country – ruled by a dicator as it has been - ranked 53 out of 167 countries in the UNDP Human Development Index, and ahead of Trinidad and Mauritius in those tables. I am with those many informed voices who say that the Arab Spring ought to be celebrated, but that it may be very ugly for a while. I think this sort of view flows from a general Whig History view that affluence and development lead to responsive governments.

The point here, though, is whether involvement and trade helped. Well, if affluence and education and information lie behind the Arab Spring, I would say that we were right to have traded with these countries, and that – a little contradictorily – we have now to be on the side of “the rebels”.

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I’m reviewing Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How prosperity evolves for the Social Affairs Unit web review. Here’s a quote from Ian McEwan on  the cover:

No other book has argued with such brilliance and historical breadth against the automatic pessimism that prevails.

In 1995 Manchester Univerity Press published my Life On a Modern Planet: A manifesto for progress. It’s a free download here. Here’s a quote from Christopher Patten on the cover:

This sharp and intelligent book shows North at the top of his form, arguing convincingly that concern about the future of our globe does not require you to be a modish ecopessimist. It comes like a sunburst of rational optimism and commonsense”.

For all sorts of reasons, not all of which I know, after lots of coverage and some mostly rather grudging reviews my book sold 2000 copies and has never been cited in any other work, including Matt Ridley’s. Ah well. I am determined to resist the Roger Lewis school of grumpiness.

Here’s a couple of further ironies.

(1) Matt Ridley’s book is published by Fourth Estate. Back in about 1992, that firm commissioned my Life On a Modern Planet but when they saw the final draft, they hated it and said that it wasn’t what they’d commissioned. (I am almost sure that they were plain wrong on that matter.) All the other publishers I took it to said it was OK, but the only people who’d be interested were greens, and they’d hate it. Finally, Richard Purslow of Manchester University Press (whom heaven preserve) was enthusiastic.

(2) I longed for someone to notice that LoMP was a wide-ranging account of why Western thought and practice was richly interesting and that green thinking was wrong not merely on the facts of prosperity and survival but on cultural, political and even spiritual well-being. Matt Ridley’s book is really the first to match (and even beat) it on those terms. Mind you, I think my 2005 Rich Is Beautiful is a trailblaizer on those wider fronts.

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Thirty years ago, the British accepted with some complacency that  six million Lib Dem voters got a rotten deal representationally. In an age of pick ‘n’ mix consumer choice and identity politics that looks less and less sustainable. Whether in hung parliament negotiations or electoral reform, we are likely to accord the Lib Dems more power in future. The wheels may fall off their wagon as we do so, or it may gather speed.

The Lib Dems face a fascinating dilemma. People like Simon Hughes say the country has a centre-left “progressive” majority but in the next breath has to accept that it has just given the centre-right a clear lead.  

From 2005 to 2010 David Cameron tried to make his party look like the Lib Dems. He succeeded and it is possible to argue that he rescued the Tory vote. But it is also possible to argue that he threw away votes too by seeming too Blairite to head a decent government. Anyway, the Lib-Dems slightly increased their vote too.

Can the Tories ever again get the right and the centre-right to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, can Labour ever get the left and the centre-left to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, will the Lib-Dems become a solid centre party, rather than a protest vote? There is a distinct possibility that when the Lib Dems have real power they will irritate people sufficiently to revivify support for a matching and opposed pair of centre right and centre left parties. 

I don’t think the parties’ leaders will get to choose very much about what unfolds in the medium term. We will almost certainly accord the third party more power. I have high hopes that parliamentarians (I mean individual MPs and peers) will gain authority, and I think they may use it toward fiscal soundness at least in the present crisis.  

I think in the very long haul, the statist welfare state is a dead duck. I think the country will then look more coherently like a centre-right country and that a party or a coalition which will look quite Cameronian will run things. I think it will be circled and harried by parties which represent, inter alia, various regions, civil liberty liberals, unionised socialists, and fundamentalist greens.

There are other possibilities. The country may stay wedded to a statist welfare state. Whether it does or not, Conservatives may still play an important role in running it well (as they often have done historically).

With or without a statist welfare state, Conservatives are likely to be very important in working out what sort of economic policy is workable, both in terms of efficiency and equitability.

I think the big opportunity for Tories – and David Cameron has ducked it for five years – is to build on his party’s reputation for sound government. New Labour delivered its policies in a very shabby way. This is the area where Tories can hit home, and play to instead of suffering from their reputation for pragmatism.

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Plenty of people thought that Cameron’s “Nice” Tories are a cover for the “Nasty” Tories lurking within or behind the smiling faces. That’s a possibility, and I have no idea whether it’s true. I rather hope it is.

A lot of comment seemed to think that the Cameroons are genuinely very like the Blairites in being the embodiment of the centre-right (or, according to view, the centre-left) settlement reached by Thatcher’s children.   That seems plausible, if only because the Cameroons look like realists.

Anyway, the point of my book and Cif piece was to argue that it is governmental competence which may be the thing which appeals to voters now. No party - and none of the comments to my Guardian piece – has picked up on that yet.  Here’s why I wish they would.

Put very briefly: 
British politics is now about the canny management of economic life and the taxation required to fund the public services whose competent delivery and very gradual reform are mostly administrative problems. This isn’t romantic, exciting, ideological work. New Labour has shown how not to do the business of government. Whichever party persuades the country it can do better will win the country’s voters who don’t even know that’s the question they seek answers to. 

In more depth:
I’d have thought that whoever does it, the country has to be managed as a mildly Eurosceptic, mildly pro-US, 35-45 per cent tax-take sort of place. (That is, in tax-take terms, somewhere in the middle of the Anglosphere range, and well below Scandinavian and a bit below the Franco-German levels.) 

I don’t think anyone has the courage to seriously reform the Welfare State as a matter of stated desire, though balancing the books will tend to discipline the later Brownite extravagances and that will open up some possibilities.

I believe the country is mildly entrepreneurial; mildly illiberal on crime, punishment and civil liberties; mildly permissive on the family and sex and drink; and quite attached to its Welfare State, but also the military and police.

The huge centre of politics unsentimentally understands these facts. If one fielded a “Milliband + Darling” against a “Clegg + Cable” against a “Cameron + Osborne”, I’m not sure that the electorate would see much difference, or care.

I am of course an “extremist” by idealism, and I think that over a generation or two the Welfare State will be transformed (made redundant), squeezed between taxpayer reluctance and market success. I think the Conservative Party will be on the road to being meaningless or dead if it doesn’t start to say that sort of thing soon. However, that project is a long-term goal and should be framed as such.

I don’t know if Labour will frame itself as the representative of the trades union power of the Welfare State. If it does, I’d have thought it will have scant reach. If it doesn’t it really will be head-to-head with the Tories who will always have the edge as the “taxpayers’ alliance”. I don’t know if the Tories can hang on to any serious low-tax principle without alienating that part of the middle class which through guilt or self-interest thinks the Welfare State works quite well. In short, there is electorate hell to the left and right of the centre and muddle at its heart.

The centre ground is now so crowded that we may be about to see a new fractured politics. It’s far from inevitable, but imagine a new, lively parliamentary scene with prime ministers and Cabinets coming and going as old and new parties coalesce and dissolve. That has been the  norm for much of British democratic history.

Out of such shifts there may come a strengthened administrative ability and willingness to deliver an underlying consensus.

A very fluid political system will lead to a desire to have a professional elite – Whitehall - anwerable to Parliament and in charge of developing and delivering sound policy. That will prefigure a return to a British constitutional settlement which can be very modern but also authentic and effective.

Call me a dreamer. On the other hand, the British never have screwed up their government for long. Why assume this generation will?

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David Cameron wants to have a heart and a soul, preferably lined up with an intellect, and seems to have sub-contracted the enterprise to Steve Hilton and other “Social Responsibility” types. Ergo: an interest in Philip Blond’s Red Toryism and ResPublica.

The fans of Red Toryism like a mush and are full of anti-capitalist, post-materialist, well-being, communitarian tripe. But they are on to something.

The Red Tory tropes are not all that new. Disdaining capitalism’s vulgarities is a very old dry Tory theme (in the US as well is in the UK, as shown in Sam Tenenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism and my own Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics). Longing for individuals (and communities and volunteers) to take up the burden of responsibility is equally Old Tory.

Most communitarianism is the triumph of hope over experience. The individuals and communities most needing help are the least able to raise the money or motivation to fix themselves, especially after decades of crippling state dependency. Additionally, nowhere is there much local appetite for local democracy. It’s a bore and not especially efficient and would require local taxation which is, I would have thought, a no-no.

The answer? I think the state should declare the long term ambition of beating a strategic retreat from doing hands-on social justice work. Instead it should aim to mandate and control the private sector (firms, trusts, charities, individuals) and what I call the Archipelago State (quangoes, especially) to do.

We should aim to abolish the Welfare State, by privatising as much of its infrastructure and funding as possible. The state should own very little kit (schools, hospitals etc) and aim to fund equity by subsidising poor customers for their necessarily expensive use of services. This is, obviously, a dagger at the heart of universal provision and its false promise of social cohesion and well-being. So it would make an excellent political and policy batteground.

The right thinks (and I think the Tories should accept) that the state’s job is put its money, mouth and muscle (taxes, argument and laws) to work with the grain of capitalism and volunteerism. The result will be a fuzzy sector: low-profit and no-profit businesses, and professional volunteers. The Archipelago State will likewise be an oddity (scattered and unelected, for a start).

The point is that the result is the best resolution of an inherently messy business and would be authentically conservative. The Third Way (New Labour’s reconciliation of  Thatcherism and Macmillanism) says the market is OK but leaves a lot for a willing state to do. That feeble rhetoric leaves far too much space for a bossy, crippling state.

The New Tories could be showing that they know how to make a relucant state do less but better. That is the real point of saying that there’s more to society than the state.

Interestingly, Red Toryism may allow quite a lot of space to develop this latter theme whilst not frightening the horses. Even the fuzziness of their rhetoric has merit. This work will be done across generations, not just one or two parliaments. It will happen when people grow into accepting the sense of the underlying propositions, and that will happen almost osmotically.

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The reason’s simple. These are quite troubled times, but there’s hardly anyone credibly arguing for anything like a return to the policies and prejudices of The Left.

Yes, a generation of capitalists, politicians and journalists have misunderstood how risky finance can be. But the sense is that they failed capitalism rather than that capitalism failed them.

Yes, the world is in recession, but one hears rather little commentary which suggests that we should return to a vast amount of state involvement or state ownership. The taxpayer owns much of the banking system, and seems to see that the sooner they can get rid of it again, the better. People are openly saying that the recession will be survived and ended better because labour markets are fluid. (That is, “nasty”.)

Sure, Israel is attracting a lot of criticism, but the general view seems to be that what ever else happens, Israel’s most committed enemies need to stop imagining – and can’t be allowed – a terrorist victory.

And Barack Obama? He looks as though he’s going to govern as a liberal Republican. We could have predicted that because he always seemed intelligent. One imagines that he will see that the West more or less honours its commitment to Iraq and will intensify its operations in Afghanistan. I know that involvement in overseas adventures divides The Right as much as it divides The Left, but I am taking it that a willingness to use force is a Right sort of a thing more than a Left one.

I say The Right is quite confident because it isn’t very neurotic. The Right is never loved or liked. But it can be rather jumpy. The Right has often indulged in a rather surly hatred of The Left.  The Right felt themselves to be unjustly disliked and returned the favour with a vengeance. I suspect now that The Right is a bit easier in its skin, and neither triumphalist nor embittered.

All this is reflected in the media. Consider the ease with which one can now discuss the causes of The Right. Wearing fur, scrapping the BBC, supporting Israel, downsizing a firm, rebuilding capitalism, limiting immigration, boosting the military – these are all much “cooler” subjects than they have ever been. Great.

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I confess it. I never liked Mrs T. She seemed shrill, self-righteous, bossy, narrow-minded, uncultured. The St Francis stuff made me quite queasy. I was never the kind of public schoolboy who was erotically drawn to the Sybil Fawlty sort of stridency. I did however at least recognise that she was mostly right. Hating her seemed silly.

Nearly all kindly people hated Mrs Thatcher and plenty of them still do. Tilda Swinton makes one sort of case. Eddie Izzard makes another. Consider the roll-call of bad reasons to dislike her. (I take it that my own reasons were more excusable.)

Old sexists hated the fact that she was a clever and effective woman.

Feminists hated her for not caring about them (and for wearing old fashioned feminine clothes).

The snobbish Establishment hated her for being lower-middle class (and being suspicious of them).

Liberals hated her for being frankly unpermissive and pre-Beatle.

Insecure men hated her because she was sexy in an unabashed way.

Socialists hated her for loving entrepreneurs.

Sociologists hated her for realising that “there’s no such thing as society”. In other words, there isn’t a machine which makes us, but rather a world made by individuals who have responsibility for it and for themselves.

Wimps hated her because she thought the British military was one of the few things which long years of pseudo-socialism hadn’t wrecked (Tony Blair ended up with much the same view).

The coal-miners union hated her for realising that either British coal-mining would pay its way, or it should cease. (She got rid of far fewer coal-miners than successive Labour governments had.)

The welfare state hated her for destroying services. (She didn’t: she couldn’t stop the thing growing even though she’d have liked to.)

The point about Mrs Thatcher was that she struck a note of clarity and that millions of people responded to it. Britain in the late 1970s was at the end of a period of fudge and compromise. One could defend the accommodation the elite, the masses, the unions and everyone else had come to. It had a sort of decency. But it was corrupt and clapped out and many of us knew it. It couldn’t be got rid of politely. It was only someone impolite could do the work.

What is so wickedly bad about hating Mrs T is that it ignores the way she was so triumphantly British. She was made by Britain and she helped move the project on.

The way this happened is of importance.

She wasn’t a revolutionary and her thinking wasn’t new. Ted Heath had tried to be Thatcherite when he was briefly “Selsdon Man”. But he was scared-off by the left and the centrists. Even Harold Wilson had tried to “smash” the unions. But Mrs T had the balls to be hated in ways those men didn’t dare. And anyway, the country was ready for a bit of briskness by the time she came along. “You turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning” was a disparaching echo of Ted Heath’s change of heart in the early 70s.

Tony Blair has served his country by embedding the Thatcherite revolution in New Labour’s view of the world. But he was a fraud when he presented himself as being the evolutionary force which softened Thatcherism so it was fit for modern and progressive purpose. John Major had already provided a crucial bridge between the two cultures. It was lucky for New Labour that it was able to bury his Tory “niceness” under a torrent of (largely unjustified) accusations about Tory sleaze.

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It would be typical of political language if “conservatives” were progressives. Well, some are. The free market libertarian conservative thinks that entrepreneurs throw up changes – not least in technology – that will make life better. Such a person is inclined to sneer that the soft-left, liberal green campaigners are Luddites who hate progress. But conservatives really do like their history.

But hang on. Aren’t the left often described as progressive because they believe that life can get better and better if only we have enough politcial reform and taxation?

All the above is true and complicated. And here’s another problem. Both left and right are always claiming that history belongs to them. The left says history is one long struggle to get a fair deal for everyone. The right says it cares about the institutions we have been bequeathed from history, by which it tends to mean the bits that didn’t get reformed by the left.

So the left sees Chartists and Magna Carta and anti-slavery movements and the right sees the Monarchy and soldiers in gorgeous uniforms and clubs in Pall Mall.

Actually, the right is very complicated. Many of its thinkers and politicians are people who struggled out of the working class to education, affluence and power and are quite inclined to draw a different line. They say that if they can do it, anyone can. 

But to get back to the history.

I can say that my conservatism looks back at the history of my society and insists that there is great merit there. And I mean that I claim the oppressed and the oppressers as both part of a historical continuum which I feel myself to be the heir of. My conservatism insists that I don’t want my age to throw away the pain and glories of the past. I am happy to see the merit in everything in my national past, including Empire. 

It happens that this view is enriched by my understanding that I am in some form a world citizen. I am conscious that, say, the British Empire was not entirely noble. But I insist that it had great nobility and was in any case extraordinary and richly human. 

So it comes to this. I think a conservative says that the main lesson of the past is to build on it and to remember that we have a hard job to live up to the courage and talent we can see in every class and nation  there. I think the liberal and leftist mind is more inclined to say that we have really only to enjoy, relish and build on the work of the reformers and even the revolutionaries of history.

And finally, the conservative Briton does say that when he looks at history, there is a lot to be said for the so-called oppressors amongst his ancestors. They made a lot of stuff happen, much of it very good.

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One problem is that “liberal” means a socialist when you’re in America and its means a nice, free-thinking person when you’re in the UK. So what’s not to like about the UK liberal?

Well, such a person is narrow-minded. Liberals don’t like ordinary people with their uneducated prejudices. But I quite like my prejudices and some of them are quite sound. I think my neighbours may share them. I think it’s possible theirs are even better than mine. I think a lot about a lot of things (and quite uselessly a lot of the time), but some of my gut instincts are useful too.

But what I mostly don’t like about the narrowness of the liberal mind is that it knows that it is right and is never more adamant about it than when it’s wrong. It knows that Tories and capitalists and the vulgar and most Americans are not likely to be right. It knows that technological advance (except in the media) is likely to be dangerous and that there are too many people (except liberals) and that the environment is being horribly damaged (by which they mean changed).

There’s another difficulty. The liberal mind is very hypocritical. It has a deep attachment to dissidence. It thinks that disliking The Establishment is a very good thing. That it is The Establishment doesn’t worry it. It thinks that wealth is obviously a bad thing, though it is itself pretty darned wealthy. It thinks the world’s poor matter very, very much, but it can’t stomach the idea that globalisation will bring wealth to the very poor. It hates the military but wants it to interfere very forcefully whenever there’s bad stuff going on abroad.

But, and you may think it’s a big “but”, I am quite a permissive type. Not libertarian (we’ll get to that another day). I don’t like bans. I don’t like kids swearing in public, and I’m not crazy about Ross being so smutty on prime time TV. But very, very bad taste appeals to me.

I’m not permissive in the sense that I believe that one can do good by doling out largesse to unhappy poor people without demanding that they heave on their end of the rope. Hell, they’ve suffered enough by being dependent and idle.

I also see that making welfare and prisons work (ie, reducing demand for them) may depend on spending more on each “client”. Hey-ho.

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(1) The left is boring. Its tone of voice is whinging. Its middle class pretends to talk as though it had never attended school.

(2) The left makes life miserable for as many people as possible. It tries to make people guilty about any form of success they may have won (or been lucky enough to have dumped in their laps).

(3) The left is selfish. In order to satisfy its desire to lecture and control the rest of us, it scuppers the life chances of the feeble. That’s what happens when weak people get to be dependent on the state’s mercies.

(4) The extremes of the left are at least as nasty as the extremes of the right. But the extreme left is close to the idealistic left. The intellectual right has always hated totalitarianism, whist the clever left has often condoned it. Now go and add up the body counts of the 20th century dictators of Germany, Russia, Spain and South America and see how the math goes.

(5) The left winger is always trying to work out how to restrain people whilst the right is trying to set people free. Besides, the right is always trying to work with the grain of the normal, ordinarily human world.

(6) I must be careful here. My kind of right winger is reformist, and not revolutionary (more going with the grain stuff). But can one such be radical? We’ll come back to that.

(7) The left is not creative. It doesn’t do great artistic endeavour. Even art of routine quality is an act of entrepreneurship and individuality. This is true even when one remembers that dissent is sexy and bigging up the Establishment hardly ever is.

(8) The left is unproductive. In its bones, it dislikes the private enterprise which not merely feeds the world, but feeds the world’s aspirations.

(9) The left dehumanises people because it thinks in terms of sociology and classes. The right begins with individuals. It’s harder to be a right winger than a left winger: there’s nowhere to hide on the right.

(10) The left feeds on envy and anger. The right works on making things better.

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