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SAXONS AWAKE! |
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The
Consent of the Governed - a Conservative View Historically speaking, few societies
have sought their legitimacy in the consent of the governed. Ancient
Greece may have invented the concept of democracy, and Roman Emperors may
have ruled in the name of 'Senatus Populusque Romanus', but in both those
societies the 'people' were not the broad mass of the population, but free
men only. In Christendom, the legitimacy of government was sought in
divine authority, in government by an anointed monarch. In a relatively
short time (just over a couple of hundred years), however, it seems that
all sides of political debate have conceded the notion that government
should be representative of the people. The left-liberal establishment is
now attempting to move towards a supposedly 'post-democratic' form of
governance, where the legitimacy of the state is underpinned by the
concepts of multi-culturalism and human rights, which form an ideology
that has to be enforced by unelected commissions and bureaucracies. The
aim of post-democracy is not that we should get rid of parliament and
accept rule by appointed commissions. Left-liberals pay lip-service to the
consent of the governed, but aim to use new post-democratic institutions
to create a new cultural consensus the better to manipulate the democratic
process. Similarly, on the right, supporters of aristocratic government tout
court are nowadays few and far between, even though consent of the
governed is by no means an essential feature of Tory ideology. We support
'leadership' when we feel our principles to be out of line with the wishes
of the population, but permit ourselves to rediscover the principle of the
consent of the governed when things are not going our way. The changing cultural settlement Conservatives have traditionally been
conscious of the challenge to their principles that the idea of the
consent of the governed threw up. This is because Enlightenment thinkers
saw the question of the consent of the governed in terms of resolving the
potential conflict between the individual and society. According to
Rousseau 'Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.' However, to a
conservative, man is not born free. We are all born, not as members of the
universal human race, but as members of particular societies living in
particular periods. From our earliest years, society shapes who we are,
makes us become who and what we become. Man is everywhere born in
chains, but the chains are chains of culture and civilisation, without
which society would be unimaginable except as a war of all against all.
Therefore, the Enlightenment tenet that society has to justify its
strictures to each and every individual - this is the basic idea behind
the Rousseauian 'social contract' - in order to be legitimate, forms no
part of conservative thought. Far from believing that man is perfectible,
conservatives have traditionally understood the possibility of conflict
between the individual and society in terms of preventing a slide back
into barbarism. The norms of society passed down by countless generations
are there for a reason, culture and civilisation are meant to exert
a restraining influence on the individual. A withdrawal of consent for the social
system by the lower orders needs to be averted, and in certain
circumstances a democratic mechanism might be required to accomplish this,
but what really counts is not the arithmetical consent of the governed as
such, but the reaching of a cultural settlement to underpin the polity,
whether democratic or otherwise. The cultural settlement underlying a stable
society might never have received the arithmetical support of the majority
of the population, never having been voted upon and being merely accepted
by the governed as 'the way things are'. By contrast, democratic assent,
through elections or referendums, to social changes proposed by the
left-liberal elite carries no guarantee that the changes will not
jeopardise social stability, as unforeseen consequences of radical change
work themselves through. This is why as conservatives, we are interested,
not in democracy as such, or in a society based on the consent of the
majority, but in a coherent cultural framework that provides a stable
society. Once a cultural settlement is reached and accepted, uncivilised
behaviour is checked by social restraints, government follows an
understood pattern, and subjects can be accorded their traditional rights. There is an overlap between the
concepts of the consent of the governed and a cultural settlement, as a
cultural settlement needs to be accepted by the governed. Furthermore, as
we have been raised in a particular society and a particular historical
period, the policies and principles that we give our consent to through
the democratic process are coloured by our cultural assumptions, and our
right to representation in Parliament in itself forms part of the cultural
settlement in this Kingdom. But the two concepts, one left-wing, the other
right-wing, are logically distinct, and increasingly so in the current
period of rapid social and cultural change, where formal democracy is
maintained, thus enabling the elite to claim the consent of the governed.
However, the cultural goalposts are continually shifted in waves of social
engineering designed to produce a multi-cultural society. It is awkward
for us to argue against changes that -apparently - have the (passive)
support of the electorate, but the real question for us is the weakening
cultural set-' dement, the attenuation of the traditional rights of the
subjects of the British Crown that ought to be protected if we are to
continue to be a nation-state. This
Country is no Longer Ours
The
problem with our membership of the European Union, mass immigration and
the piecemeal abolition of the common law is not that democratic consent
as such has never been given to these developments, but that they
represent a sudden removal of the rights that we had under the cultural
settlement that was in place as late as the 1960s. If these changes remain
then this country is no longer ours. The new British elite that finally took
power in 1997 -but which had exercised increasing influence on government
policy since the 1950s - behaves as if it has reached a new
cultural settlement, one where unelected bodies enforce their views on
racial, national, cultural and other issues, and is pressing on with its
agenda although the new settlement has not been accepted by large sections
of the population. As democracy gives way to 'post-democracy', the
democratic form (robbed of any real content) is retained merely in order
to endow the new order with some very thin veneer of rhetorical support.
But the real justification of the rule of quangos, international
commissions and judges exceeding their remit is provided in terms of a
proposed cultural settlement based on human rights and multi-culturalism.
The new elite believes itself to be morally superior and thus views the
good society as one where the parameters of social debate are controlled
within boundaries acceptable to it, allowing it to remain in power
democratically. However, its claim to rule is essentially moral; it does
not depend on popular support for justification. All elites make moral claims to back up
their right to rule, although the cultural settlement under which an elite
operates under can only be said to exist once the elite's values, and thus
its right to rule, have been accepted by the wider population. The
previous British elite (1688-1997, with the 1950s-1990s marking a
transition to the new elite with its new set of supporting values)
justified its rule in terms of the Protestant religion and the
nation-state, not in terms of popular support as such, despite the gradual
adoption of more democratic forms of governance. Just as blasphemy,
treason and sedition represented a challenge to the governing structures
of the past, today 'racism', xenophobia and offensive language are a clear
challenge to the new elite's legitimacy, and therefore need to be
repressed. Andrew Marr, the thinking man's left-liberal, has penned a
fascinating article on this subject, arguing that state repression has the
potential to crush certain opinions and create a new society: The final answer, frankly, is the
vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my
Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a
great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain
"natural" beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them
off. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race
Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives
too. ('Poor? Stupid? Racist?) Then don't listen to a pampered white
liberal like me', The Observer, February 28th, 1999). Although Tories may be outraged by such
open advocacy of political repression - the frankness with which Marr
states his case allows us to wrap our objections up in the language of the
consent of the governed - objectively speaking it is equivalent to the
repression of treason and blasphemy under the previous elite. The question
is not can political repression be justified? Rather it is, can
multi-culturalism form a cultural settlement that can become accepted by
the broad mass of the population? If political repression works this time,
and society comes round to accept the views of the left-liberal elite, a
dwindling band of Tories could become like the recusants and Jacobites who
clung on to an earlier conception of social legitimacy in the 17th and
18th centuries, as the Hanoverian settlement became accepted Losing our inherited rights Multi-culturalism is not a true
cultural settlement, as it aims to destroy the pre-existing culture
without installing a common culture in its place. With a population that
sullenly accepts the supposedly anti-racist principles of our new betters,
the new elite can reign supreme, an elite divorced for the first time from
any cultural ties or obligations to the people over whom it rules. But why
should we come to see things the left-liberal way? What is in it for us?
To create the new dispensation, the left-liberal elite has to be able to
convince ordinary people, not only that it has an ideological stance that
is genuinely moral, but that the rights and lifestyle of the people are in
some sense bound up with the elite's continuing to rule, just as the 17th
century Protestant settlement was connected with the maintenance of a free
society. Many English people have been persuaded, to at least a
superficial extent, by one of the key tenets of multi-culturalism -
anti-racism - which holds that it is 'wrong' to discriminate against
people on the grounds of their colour, even though a nation-state is
logically founded on a distinction between people who are and people who
are not members of the nation. But the other key tenet of
multi-culturalism - the value of diversity - seems to contradict the
anti-racism concept, and provokes more resistance. We dimly recognise that we stand to
lose rights that we thought were guaranteed to us, as we realise that all
cultures are worth promoting, save our own; that all ethnic groups are
entitled to celebrate their cultural and racial origins, except us; and
that our rights to freedom of speech, expression and association are
subject to the more important universal 'rights' now being assiduously
promoted. It is seldom suggested that our rights
under previous constitutional 'settlements' - Magna Carta, the Petition of
Right, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, the Acts of Union, etc -
should all be summarily repealed; left-liberals probably see 'human
rights' as the culmination of a process of extension of rights to the
population that they suppose began with Magna Carta. The slow-motion revolution is being
accomplished by means of court judgments that are hard to reconcile with
previous understandings of the law and by decisions being taken at the
pan-European level. Habeas corpus, the right to a jury trial, the
right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to freedom of speech and
freedom of association, the right to defend one's property and the right
to bear arms - all these rights have been limited by Parliament, the
courts or the European Union in recent years. Under the old cultural settlement these
rights were the Englishman's birthright; no legitimate government or
courts could rob us of them. Some of us even took the Coronation Oath
literally and believed that the Queen had sworn to uphold the rights of
every single one of her subjects. Instead of the traditional rights of
the Englishman, we are being offered universal 'human rights', which
amount to much less than the liberties to which we have been accustomed.
'Human rights', are often rights gained by the authorities to regulate
private behaviour, a state of affairs that overturns the traditional idea
of a 'right' as something that is held against the state, limiting
bureaucratic interference in the lives of the population. This gathering of rights into the hands
of the state bureaucracy has been contrived by the immigration of millions
of people from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Multi-racialism as such is
an irrelevance to the
new elite, but it is the battering ram whereby a society of free
individuals, each endowed with inherited rights including the freedom of
speech, the freedom of expression, the freedom of association and the
right to bear arms, can be destroyed. Of course, there are individual blacks
and Asians who believe in the political ideals represented by England, but
the arrival of immigrants has destroyed the basis of the pre-existing
cultural settlement that once undergirded the English nation. One could
argue that the presence of large numbers of non-white people has
necessitated the transition to a new 'social contract' - a shift in the
basis of the state's legitimacy away from the concept of a nation-state -
for it to gain legitimacy in the eyes of newcomers, and so avoid the
creation of a large minority that does not accept the cultural settlement
on which government in our islands is based. To smooth the way to this new form of
society, the state has then assumed the right to monitor relations between
the races, if you please, and intervene where appropriate. This is in fact
the most positive gloss that can be put on the multi-cultural project.
However, interestingly, the task of accommodating others, while failing to
'include' newcomers effectively, has alienated large numbers of our own
people. If adjustments needed to be made in order to include the ethnic
minorities, why are no adjustments needed in order to re-include
nationalist whites on the housing estates who object to the multicultural
project itself? The answer lies in the project of post-democracy.
Anti-racism, multi-culturalism and human rights have been introduced, not
to favour ethnic-minority residents but to bolster the moral pretensions
of the new elite, handily shifting power out of democratic forums into the
hands of a non-elected elite. The fragmented multi-cultures that we
are now building are non-inclusive, centrifugal social formations that
lack legitimacy, with little connection between the ruling elite and the
broad mass of the people. But as more is held by international bodies and
the various commissions, it is harder to challenge the rule of the
illegitimate left-liberal elite. But why should the new elite seek to
destroy our freedoms? It is important not to ascribe the loss of our
liberties to a scarcely credible left-liberal 'conspiracy'. The new
'values' represented by the new elite involve a move towards
post-democracy. For the Anglican nation-state had positive values that
could be inculcated in all, through Sunday school, support for families,
and a Reithian BBC. The prohibition of treason and blasphemy tended to
glue society together by emphasising our common national-cultural origins.
The gradual loss of belief in Christianity, sexual morality and national
particularisms has, by contrast, led logically to a situation where an
elite that gains strength from its feelings of moral superiority because
of its stance on racism and diversity fears the supposedly atavistic
attachments of the lower orders, who threaten to destroy the smooth
progress to a new order. The propagation of such ideas as
multi-culturalism, the celebration of diversity and opposition to
organised religion is incapable of producing a free, yet united
population, because the new values rob society
of any real sense of community and fail to provide the next
generation with a moral compass. By atomising the population, the realm
can be cohered only by an elite of interfering moralisers. The logic of
the new values is suspicion of other people, and the gradual loss of
personal autonomy to the state bureaucracy. Bureaucratic rule over atomised
individuals The supposed liberal outlook of our
governing classes is unrecognisable from the standpoint of the
intellectual debates that surrounded the Enlightenment. Universal human
rights proclaimed during the French Revolution have turned out to be the
mechanism whereby we arc subjected to a new form of tyranny. Today our
lives are intimately connected with the state to an extent unthinkable in
ages past. The government spends around 40 percent of our gross domestic
product; one-quarter of the workforce is directly employed by the
government and 7-8 million people, excluding pensioners, live on handouts.
Employers, local councils, and quangos all attempt to have their say on
how we live our lives, what we think and say, and what we do in our free
time. Some unfortunate people face even grosser interventions in their
daily lives that directly raise the question of the legitimacy of the
politically correct state. Numerous examples could be given, but a good
example is the unfortunate man, divorced or separated from his wife, who
has to pay for the maintenance of his child, but was recently told by the
High Court in a fatuous 'judgment' handed down by a female judge that he
could never see his child again, because access to the child 'distressed'
the mother. To such people, the state is a tyranny, a powerful group of
misguided interventionists that gets its way because of its monopoly on
power; these judgments are a violation of the old cultural settlement,
although fully in accordance with the multi-cultural settlement that seeks
to replace it. To say that the new dispensation is a
tyranny is not to pretend that we are controlled by a left-wing military
dictatorship, or that the torture and mass imprisonment of political
dissenters takes place in England today. The new elite found the older
morality of nation and family discredited and has come to believe
passionately in its new ersatz morality characterised by
anti-racism, feminism and environmental ism. But however passionately they
make themselves believe in their mission statements and equal
opportunities policies, there is a large ingredient of hypocrisy in any
off-the-shelf, made-to-measure moral system. The new morality is a comfort
blanket clutched by an elite that is casting round for a means of
justifying itself to itself. The government may not be torturing its
opponents, but if we allow the new elite untrammelled rights of
intervention in our personal lives, then we will no longer be free. Will
conservatives be able to challenge the increasing bureaucratisation of our
lives, which proceeds in the name of a new morality? The post-democratic
dispensation has been largely put in place, and key facets of it such as
the demographic reconfiguration of our country are irreversible. But a
much more acute problem is the failure of conservatives themselves
-particularly the Conservative Party - to develop clear cultural goals
that could lead a path out of the post- democratic nightmare. That we no longer
conceive of society in terms of nation and families, but in terms of
individuals subject to the might of the state, is clear from Conservative
policies on crime which emphasise punishment. Few Tories would oppose the
implementation of proper punishments for criminals - but the party has no
policies to address the breakdown in the fabric of society itself, which
is the real source of crime. What about the church? What about divorce,
abortion, illegitimacy and homosexuality? What about the corrosive role of
the education system and the broadcast media? The Conservative Party
either has no policies in these areas, or has policies that actively
encourage social disintegration. The key problem in Conservative ideology
is the assumption that a 'free' society can be based on individuals,
rather than on families within the overarching structure of the
nation-state. Atomised individuals can be free to make their
consumer-level decisions, but need to be 'regulated' by a state
bureaucracy. A society with a strong identity, a common culture and an
agreed moral framework produces
individuals integrated into the social fabric whose individual
choices are less likely to be of the anti-social
variety. Democracy itself is meaningless in the absence of a
cultural settlement, as there is no reason why opposition parties should
accept the verdict of the majority in the absence of a shared identity. As
atomised individuals can point to no shared values, perpetual conflict -
especially cultural conflict - becomes etched into the bones of society.
The democratic form itself becomes devoid of substance and power drifts
away into the hands of the quangocracy. Attempts by some Conservatives to
counterpose libertarian ideas to the bureaucratic tyranny under which we
live do not represent a way forward. We cannot pin our hopes on a sort of
warmed-up liberalism that promises free markets as well as sexual licence
and educational 'opportunity for all'. A genuinely free society, one that
needs no closed-circuit television cameras and anti-harassment codes, can
develop only in the context of moral restraints and the love of one's
country and nation. Only when these cultural foundations have been sunk,
can 'democracy' and the 'consent of the governed' come to mean anything at
all.
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