‘All life is a struggle,’ wrote the Victorian ‘self-help’ philosopher Samuel Smiles. ‘Under competition, the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall he eat…Do your own share of work you must.’
Attitudes may have changed since the mid-nineteenth century, but Kemi Badenoch, it seems, is in full agreement
Attitudes may have changed since the mid-nineteenth century, but Kemi Badenoch, it seems, is in full agreement. One clear message comes repeatedly out of the Conservative leader’s public announcements: that Britain must get off benefits and back to work. In a speech last year at the Centre for Social Justice, pointing out ‘we now live in a country where 1 in 4 self-report as disabled,’ she called Britain a ‘welfare state with an economy attached… The rider is as big as the horse.’
The issue for her is clearly a moral one. A life of work rather than dependency, she said, was not just ‘better for society’ but ‘better for the soul.’ Britain needed to get back the idea ‘that personal responsibility matters, that if you can support yourself, you should.’
A few months later, at the Conservative Christian Fellowship’s annual address, she went further, quoting St. Paul’s first Epistle to Timothy – ‘Anyone who does not provide for his household…is worse than an unbeliever’ – adding that the ‘responsibility and dignity of work’ was a Christian imperative. More recently, running the risk of presenting herself as scold or killjoy, she unveiled Tory plans to ban benefit-recipients from spending money on cigarettes, alcohol or gambling. Put together, all these ideas add up to what one might call Kemi’s ‘Victorian Values.’
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We have of course been here before. Mrs Thatcher, accused by Brian Walden of holding ‘Victorian Values,’ agreed enthusiastically: ‘Oh exactly, very much so. Those were our values when our country became great.’ Later she expanded: ‘Honesty and thrift and reliability and hard work and a sense of responsibility for your fellow men are not simply Victorian values. They are part of the enduring principles of the Western world.’
When one interviewer pointed out the word ‘Victorian’ also carried overtones of ‘workhouses and shocking conditions in industry, all sorts of deplorable things,’ Thatcher was unmoved, countering with the era’s voluntary hospitals, church schools, prison-reform, and ‘a sense of duty.’ Kemi Badenoch, you feel, would sympathise.
Yet the 18 years of the Thatcher/Major governments were followed by something very different. From the mid-nineties onwards, the buzzword was ‘compassion.’ As support dried up for the Conservatives, they were increasingly seen as a bunch of sleazy Flashmans, closing mines and hospitals with a breezy wave and sauntering off to feast, in their clubs, on ‘roast songbird’ or ‘chimney sweep à la mode.’ Even one of their future leaders, Theresa May, memorably described them as the ‘nasty party’.
New Labour, it was brought home to us, were going to do things differently. Blair declared his determination to create ‘one Britain…in which our ambition for ourselves is matched by our sense of compassion’. His ‘Third Way’ would be a mixture of ‘social enterprise and economic dynamism, ambition and compassion.’ After Diana’s death, our new Prime Minister, lip-all-a-quiver and jaw trembling, eulogised the Princess:
‘How many times shall we remember her in how many different ways, with the sick, the dying, with children, with the needy? With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.’
Blair’s approval rating thereafter went stratospheric, and the era of Dianification – the public wounds, the glistening concern, the unctuous, performative ‘caring’– was upon us.
This was all quite new and refreshing for a while. Yet in the last fifteen years, ‘compassion’ has hardened from an animating virtue into a cross-party dogma, with a virulence all its own. The march of the #BeKind brigade, threatening a range of social punishments, has grown ever more menacing and ruthless.
Voters know now, as the pendulum swings under Burnham even further to the left, that compassion doesn’t just involve caring. It means a £333 billion welfare and social security bill and a Prime Minister who declares that national security ‘can’t come at the expense of social security.’ It entails, among other things, an undermined police force, employers unable to sack failing staff, a shackling litany of ‘protected characteristics,’ and human rights legislation that turns national borders into works of fiction. We have, to adapt Withnail, been shat on by Diversity and shovelled up by Inclusion. In the circumstances, Kemi’s Victorian values and her customary war-cry of ‘What a lot of nonsense!’ may have increasing voter appeal.
Critics, of course, will accuse her of a lack of empathy and a poverty of outlook (certainly her recent choices on Desert Island Discs – two songs from ‘Hamilton’ and, as a luxury, the Marvel film collection – gave no sense of any great hinterland). They may recall the late Baron Annan’s words about Thatcher and her own ‘Victorian Values.’ Things like prudence, temperance and self-reliance, Annan granted, were unquestionably virtues…
‘But in pursuing thrift, people can become avaricious and mean; in pursuing prudence stiff-necked and reactionary; in pursuing diligence they can end by condemning merry-making and all the harmless relaxations that make life supportable for the poor and enriching for the rest of us… if you have never experienced excess you cannot understand to the full the merits of the golden mean.’
It’s hard to disagree – yet against that quote of Annan’s is another, just as pertinent, from Boris Pasternak. ‘Revolutions,’ the Russian poet observed, tend to be ‘made by fanatics with minds narrow to the point of genius.’ As Charles Powell said of Thatcher, ‘There was never any question of seeing both sides of the question. There was only one side, the side she believed in, and she was going to implement it. And that was her great strength.’
As for Kemi, those who wish for a complete sea-change in Britain’s political economy may admire her clarity of outlook: she too has her convictions, and we know by now what many of them are. Andy Burnham’s Big State may soon turn to ashes, his longed-for return to the 1970s lead, as night follows day, to the harsh realities of the decade that followed. When that unfolds – as it’s likely to – it’s to be hoped Kemi Badenoch, fanatic or otherwise, proves narrow-minded enough to clear up the mess.
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