The Liberal Lobster Pot

Spot the odd one out…

The Beveridge Report’s terms of reference were:

“To undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen's compensation, and to make recommendations.”

Its chairman added the following:

“Policies of social security "must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual, with the state securing the service and contributions. The state " should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family, and we shall build into it study mechanisms to reverse any policies, procedures or institutions that are established which evidence shows tend towards idleness or the stifling of individual responsibility".

The Home Office Announced in 1945:

“Post-war Britain will be a land of opportunity with much work to be done. Some of that work will be unpleasant and poorly paid and it does not seem right to the Government that heroes of the British Home armed forces should be obliged to work in such occupations. Consequently, careful and measured immigration of Imperial and Commonwealth forces veterans will begin shortly to fill such posts. The British people should be assured that should such immigration show signs of changing the nature of towns and cities in which migrants settle, or of threatening Britain’s pluralistic, liberal and tolerant society, this policy will be reviewed and if necessary cancelled. The public should have no fear of finding themselves strangers in their own land.”

Labour Party Education spokesman 1964.

“Spare the rod and improve the experience of childhood for the kids, parents, neighbours and teachers alike; both at home and at school. This will be the guiding new rule of government family and educational policy over the next fifty years.

However, if there are significant indications that slacker discipline in the home and less emphasis on good manners and obedience to authority in schools are causing serious problems, well shall immediately halt further liberalisation and conduct a thorough review of progressive education theory and practise, and reverse any policies seen to be at fault.”

Regarding Mick Jagger’s conditional discharge for possession of amphetamines in 1967, the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, wrote:

"If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else."

He added, to the applause of the united intelligentsia of the academy, media and arts alike

But should serious problems arise out of greater toleration for, or even softer punishment for the possession and use of mind-altering drugs occur, then we shall all be equally united in demanding a return to former levels of intolerance and punishment for using them.”

Continental statesmen welcomed Britain into membership of the European Economic Community in Brussels today. United in their pleasure that the United Kingdom has finally been granted membership, the president of the Commission stated: ”We are eager to being work with the British and other joining countries towards our shared goals of joining in a free-trading area.

Doubters in the United Kingdom should be assured that at any time they feel that the EEC is taking more power and control over the everyday life of Britain, they shall have immediate recourse to the provisions of the Clauses Terminales, which allow for easy and immediate cessation of further moves towards unification, and the replacement of intrusive European legislation with the original native British powers.”

Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown said in an election campaign interview in 1997:

“I am definitely not, under any circumstances, no matter who begs and pleads me to, about to: encourage a massive inflationary housing bubble; sell off part of the country's hard-earned bullion reserves; tax pension funds to death from the word 'go'; or plunge the country into the worst indebtedness ever whilst increasing the State's share of the economy to levels proportionately higher than Communist Eastern Europe's; let alone threaten the very existence of sterling by accident rather than as a conscious plan to adopt the Euro. If anyone notices me even start to do anything like that, I want them to firmly but gently let me know, and I will cease and do something instead.”

Answer: the Gordon Brown one. His was the only one with a brake and a reverse gear.

He did indeed go on about ‘tough but tender’ and ‘prudence’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ a lot before New Labour swept to power. I think that that is what he meant us all to believe about him.

However, he didn’t add: ‘…and if I don’t live up to my promises, may God strike me dead...’

But nobody’s perfect; even Mister Brown.

Look at all those things they’ve inflicted on our country: the Welfare State which is now a vampire sucking at our nation’s moral and economic throat ; immigration way above previous peacetime levels and from much further afield that most previous influxes; ‘progressive education’ that only progresses downwards and in so doing destroys the work of centuries of educational experimentation, reform and refinement; softening attitudes to and punishment for the use of unfamiliar intoxicants; the dissolution of Britain as a sovereign state; the spending of all the surviving post-war imperial capital and the luxurious bullion reserves bought by the productivity of the Thatcher reforms.

And they did it all without any thought to what might happen if it all went wrong.

Not for liberals and the socialists and their Butskellite Tory clones the ideas of escape clauses or periods of reflection or review or mechanisms by which any new problems or failures of whole new institutions might be reversed if they proved insoluble.

The Left just doesn’t envisage any problems coming from their reforms as long as they do them in big, confusing, unhistorical stages; with lots of money to support them and the braying of the intelligentsia character-assassination squad against anyone who raises a note of caution. For the united Left, it’s always full speed ahead. There’s never the concept of retracing our steps back to familiar territory.

Which is largely why conservatism is best. We know - a bit - of what we’ve already got, and fear its loss and so if we must support change we support it in small, easily-quarantined doses.

I mean, would you buy a car sold like this?:

‘It’s new, Madame; fast and of a revolutionary design. It performs in the laboratories way above the levels of its closest competitors. Its wind-tunnel testing proved it to have remarkable handling and powerful steering…What? Slow it down? Madame, why should you want to slow it down? It’s scientifically designed on rational principles which the very best minds have planned for your comfort and safety. Get inside, Madame, put your children in it, too, and let’s take it for a spin…

Reversing Madame, why ever would you want to go back to somewhere that you’ve already been?...’

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