I was amused by an article by Philip Stephens in the FT this morning that begins by saying:
Britain is an island that has lost its moorings. What it needs is a foreign policy. Not another vainglorious attempt to reclaim lost grandeur, but a measured strategy to mark out its place in a different world.
I am aure Philip Stephens is right, but I have to say he is also wrong. That is because principles come before policy, but the principles of this government are deliberately hidden so that they cannot be appraised against them.
Policy has to be based on principles, and without stated principles you cannot therefore have policies. And that makes strategy in turn impossible which means operational planning is in turn reduced to the status of farce.
And this is not just a problem in foreign policy. The absence of principles also means there is no industrial policy of any note. And principles have to be deduced from economic, tax, education and other policies as those principles themselves are not stated, and the implications are ugly.
But this is not just a problem afflicting the Conservatives. The Lib Dems have lost any strategic direction they once had - the role of support agent depriving them of all vestiges of identifiable thinking they might have ever enjoyed.
And Labour is much the same. I was talking to a significant person in Labour thinking yesterday who bemoaned the fact that so paranoid are Labour about simply creeping over a line next year any big thinking has gone out of the window as issues of power and survival dominate.
Or could it be that there is again no wish on Labour's part to state its principles for fear they might expose more than it wishes? Clause 4 has gone, but the fear of too many ( even if unformulated, maybe) is that neoliberalism and hegemony replaced it and that the principles that may not be named look far too much like those false idols of competition, choice, marketisation and even privatisation when Labour should be standing up for communal wealth creation shared appropriately amongst those participating in the process with adequate provision for all thise unable to do so, whatever the reason.
It's not just policy that is missing, but principles too. With them people will engage. Without them the electorate will be rightly confused, just as most are by the UK's current foreign policy.
And one more thing: you can't build a party on policy alone: UKIP is trying to do that. It will fail for that reason precisely because the moment it reveals any principles a furore is created.
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Richard, two points.
First, this is the outworking of Blair’s risible disavowal of ideology (“What matters is what works”), the one area where he did not follow his idol, Margaret Thatcher, who could never have been accused of not being ideological, even if her ideology was a “cowardly” one, in your definition ie, of letting the market decide. But at least it was worn on her sleeve, so you knew where you were. Blair’s, by contrast, was like “the hidden curriculum” in education – a series of underlying assumptions and givens, which really drove policy, except that those givens were actually both technocratic, and radically unquestioning of the marketised status quo = an ideology of “non-ideology” and effective support of Right wing solutions.
Secondly, this causes me to raise once again my idea of a Fundamental Law Act, setting out some guiding principles, and also requiring any future legislation to copy EU legislation, by having a preamble that lays out the thinking, AND principles, behind the legislation, rather than our current system of shoving the “interpretation” of the Act into a Schedule at the back, whose content is often almost laughable (have a look at the Interpretation Act of 1978 at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/30/contents – a feeble attempt at a Fundamental Law Act).
One final point, in the late, much-lamented, Robin Cook, we DID have a Foreign Secretary who tried to run an ethical Foreign policy, and I would bid anyone who finds such an idea worthy of mockery to compare the UK’s intervention in Sierra Leone, under Robin Cook, with the intervention in Libya, under William Hague: the former led to real liberation and stabilization of Sierra Leone, where the latter has resulted in civil disorder and near civil war in Libya. That’s because Cook’s intervention was motivated by humanitarian necessity = a principle, where Hague’s was motivated by international realpolitik = a strategy.
Andrew
You may be interested to know that I raised this need at a meeting at the Treasury yesterday regarding tax law
The reception was not adverse, but not warm either
Richard
You may well be right about Cook and his intentions, but I wouldn’t get too dewy-eyed about the outcome of (new) Labour’s role in Sierra Leone and the snouts that went into the trough after our intervention in their civil war.
Much of this was facilitated by what remains one of Labour’s most despicable acts in office (which is saying something) – their transformation of the Commonwealth Development Corporation into a private equity fund (with all the associated opacity and monster salaries extracted). Baroness Amos in particular did, and as far as I know still does, do very well out of it.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/13/amos-private-equity
I leave it to you to judge what principles lay behind their actions since the intervention.
Hmm….I can remember Ed Milliband standing up in Parliament in support of the Libya intervention in a spirit of mock unity . affirming there was nothing Geo-political about it !!!!(infinite array of exclamation marks)
I agree; neo-liberal Governments creates the pretence that they have nothing to do with what goes on; that external reality is just the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium in action to which they are helpless to respond. This myth that world events are like a weather system is perhaps the greatest myth of the neo-liberal worlds -the pretence that the state has no power whilst guiding kelptocracy and subsidizing it behind the scenes with its reverse socialism.
As long as we continue with the stupidity of economic consumption as the underpinning ideology to our efforts, we will continue to suffer unprincipled politics, politicians and businesses.
Principles rather than ideologies should be where the future lies for humanity. Here inthe UK we probably have the best chance to lay these foundations. It will require a monumental change in thinking, some very harsh readjustments and social change on an unprecedented scale, but it can be achieved by stating principles and staying true to them.