This piece is a twin to another which looked at the failure of various modern liberalisms and was a plea for an alternative: conservative pragmatism.
Here, I discuss what I call Techno-liberalism. I hadn’t noticed it properly until I read
I argue here that several modern "liberalisms" have failed their proponents (and the rest of us). They were too optimistic, too dreamy (though some were extremely aggressive or cavalier). They were all, I think, substantially light on history and factual evidence. Some claimed to be in the same sort of freedom-loving territory as much of modern conservatism. Read more...
I have for years wanted to understand and explain the soft-left liberal mindset which has become increasingly bossy and dominant since the 1960s. I didn’t enjoy it 60 years ago, when it was the domain of various Hampstead journalists I met as a young man. I like it a lot… Read more...
The story of the past 125 years is both terrible and wonderful. The best news was that the world’s poor mostly saw greater affluence. And didn't the West abandon imperialism and defeat Fascism? Our present modernity – our 21st Century – has plenty of good news. But do we not see new proto-imperialisms, and isn’t it peculiar that Westerners have largely lost their former cheerful, mildly cynical realism under respected governments? They may even have forgotten what personal adulthood and public professionalism look like. But do we really have to believe that Fascism might be making a comeback? Read more...
My knowledge of the legal system is as much from TV as from my occasional appearances before judges in court (twice) and in Parliament (once).1In my earliest days as a freelance journalist, I was taken to court over a very small tax bill. Many years later, I appeared in the High Court as a witness against some animal rights protestors; around then I appeared before a joint Lords and Commons Human Rights committee, arguing that the media and the courts were too permissive about disruptive and vicious protest - my argument was greeted by Lord Lester with lofty disdain. ) I have been a tourist observer of some judges, both civil and criminal, and felt a lot of respect and a batsqueak of anxiety. I have sometimes felt that the less we know about judges as people, the better for justice. And yet I fell on the memoir As in Memory Long (2017) by Lord Justice Peter Millett (1932-2021), with a will. It is deliberately but almost slyly revelatory. It was encountered by chance, but exerted a peculiar spell. Oddly, but above all, Millett was not a celebrity judge. He was not a Woolf, Hoffman, Sumption, Bingham or Lester and I prefer neglected byways to well-trodden highways. Perhaps that’s because I am struck that fame conduces to the performative. A couple of warnings. Peter Millett reveals himself to have had a certain pettiness in his nature. I have not skated over this. And I repeat: I am not equipped to judge him as a judge. Luckily, I have come across Colin Paterson, an excellent writer who is, and nearly does. Read more...
The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It seemed to top-out twenty years' worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the "crisis in trust" to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that modern public bodies can't be relied on to be decent or frank. Read more...
In 2007 I wrote a book, Scrap the BBC!, saying that privatising the BBC was a cinch compared to fulfilling the far more important ambition of scrapping the big-state socialist NHS. A decade and a half on, I return in this rather long (<3,500 word) essay to that tougher theme, and have ramped it up to encompass the even more important ambition to scrap the big state socialist welfare system altogether. That's the work of perhaps 30 years'-worth of Parliaments. It needs to be stated now as the long-term vision of any party which wants Britain to be post-socialist. Backing down from that challenge is an act of daily cowardice.
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Robert Harris has the knack of good timing. His new book is The Act of Oblivion about Charles II's legislation of 1660 and the subsequent treatment of the Regicides who tried and beheaded his father Charles I in 1649. This historical thriller arrives just as Charles III ascends the throne. That's a neat Carolingian coincidence without obvious connection, as yet. Oblivion is highly relevant more because it concerns so many conundrums and dilemmas which are as rich now as they ever were. Let's enumerate some of them. But I also stress this really is a ripping yarn, an outstanding historical novel and a thriller. Read more...
This was written on 10 October 2022. That is, 34 days into the 44 days of Liz Truss's premiership (6 September 2022 – 20 October 2022). I originally called the piece, "Can We Trust Liz?". I have changed only the online title of the piece which appears below. I wrote what and when I did because it seemed cowardly not to. It now seems cowardly not to post it (31/12/22). My enduring point is that there is never a perfect moment for reform, nor a perfect reformer. Her own "unforced errors" may have put the kybosh on Liz Truss' reform mission. She may have set back our chances of reversing 70-odd years of socialism. More likely, and more hopefully, she has usefully let the cat out of the bag and broken the mould, etc etc. Read more...
This is around 3,000 words on scrapping the NHS. The privatisation project will be easier and less radical than most suppose. A modern health service is already half-formed within and around the NHS: it just needs liberating. Our GP and hospital health systems should dare to look at their histories and to Continental models with magpie curiosity. The old-age residential care system is reformable as a pioneer of privatisation. The post-Blair left is perhaps stuck with worshipping the NHS to death. The Conservatives have the greater sin. They betray their best instincts in refusing to speak truth to this post WW2 shibboleth. The young could fix all this, but they would need to open their minds to the world they are thriving in. Read more...