First Confession Read online

  It is curious that identity politics has become such a threat to our security and stability at exactly the moment that globalization and technology appear to be flattening borders, and bringing us closer together. The threat is seen in slightly different ways in poorer countries and in more developed ones. Some in less well-off countries assume that globalization is a Western bid for economic and political hegemony, that it will impose a Western model on everyone. The advance of China and other Asian countries does not give much support to this argument. What is true, however, is that globalization has left some whole countries, and larger groups in other countries, far behind in their development with the gap between their living standards and those of the better off increasing. While not everyone can win the race, there should be fairer rules in trade, for example, about how it is conducted, and more investment in education in poor countries. There are also aspects of globalization that appear to be monopolized by developed, usually Western, societies. One reason why campaigns against AIDS and other diseases have run into difficulties in Africa is that science, and even medical science, is so strongly culturally associated with the Caucasian West. Add to these issues of inequity a worry that globalization can lead to the sort of standardization that again favours the rich West, and you can certainly detect issues that contribute to identity politics. Nativism has become more alluring with its simple answers, the rhetoric of control, and triumph of ill-remembered histories, as international co-operation is thought to have failed, even to have become a menace.

  The consequences of identity politics are readily globalized. Terror can be financed by credit cards and transported by aeroplanes. Destroying the institutions of one state can, as we know, result in flows of migrants which threaten the cohesion of others. Mass immigration produces a backlash. Europe provides a home to almost 80 million international migrants mostly from Africa and the Middle East. In Britain even migrants from elsewhere in Europe are thought to be unsettling and the forerunners of many more from further afield. In America about 14 per cent of the population are foreign born compared to 5 per cent in 1970. This is where identity politics becomes a sharper threat to us, in Europe and even in America, encouraging our plural democracies to turn in on themselves and embrace a Hobbesian agenda in which international co-operation on traditional liberal lines becomes the casualty. Our memories of what a fiercely nationalist world was like in the first half of the twentieth century become scummed. Our instincts to protect ourselves tell us to shut gates, pull up drawbridges, distrust all those others whose different identity menaces us. Victimhood begets victimhood; a denial of common humanity echoes and reverberates across countries and continents.

  Many in the West do not feel at all that they are the winners in globalization’s competitive climate; they think that less well-off countries have unfairly stolen a march on them, grabbing their jobs and picking off their industries. This was plainly a major factor in Mr Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, the triumph of one strong personality over two political parties that had become cut off from their roots. In the US much of the anger focused on free trade; in Europe the EU plays surrogate for this aspect of international behaviour. Both Trumpites and Europeans, in parties of the embittered on the left and the right, reject the post-war narrative of international co-operation, economic development and a non-violent domestic political tussle between parties that were broadly in favour of more state action and those who believed the opposite. There was a general consensus about the balance required to make an equitable form of welfare democracy work. That sort of politics is today assaulted by loosely organized populism, a refusal to engage in a rational discussion based on long-accepted facts and assumptions, which feeds off a sense of alienated identity.

  Populism denies the fundamental importance of the virtues and institutions of restraint which make democracy acceptable and effective for a whole community. The rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, the recognition of the rights of minorities and not just of majorities, an instinct for compromise – all these are being subordinated to a belief in the popular will. And the popular will means ‘my’ people not ‘your’ people. So, for instance, the people whom the British Parliament and government must obey today do not include any of the 48 per cent who voted to stay in the EU. ‘The people’ who are in complete charge are the other 52 per cent. In America, ‘the people’ are not even the majority, because the aggregate popular majority voted for Hillary Clinton. Populism is government by ‘my’ people, and forget about nuance or consensus, let alone magnanimity.

  The right frets about the loss of old (frequently imperfectly recalled) certainties; the left feels trapped in a downward economic spiral. Sometimes both sentiments collide and connive. Local identities are drowned in global tides. Looking east, some American and European populists see an unlikely hero in Vladimir Putin, the bragging and assertive demi-tyrant who has reinvented the nastier sorts of nationalism in a great country that under him today is sometimes, alas, little more than a gangster state on the highway to economic degradation.

  The rise of economically motivated populism creates a paradox. Some of the most effective answers to it would involve policies that would customarily horrify those (on the Republican right) who most benefit from the populist hostility itself. In America, for example, it is true that free trade and the huge success of manufacturing exporting industries in emerging markets like China, India and Mexico have made some US companies unprofitable and have therefore contributed to the loss of jobs. It is worth asking whether firms that are uncompetitive because of cost or product quality should or could survive indefinitely – presumably at a cost through subsidies to the state, or to the consumer. But to protect domestic markets from competitive free trade overall hurts the poor more than the rich, not least because of the rise in costs. So what is the best answer for those who lose their jobs? It is partly for government to help them through socially redistributive tax-and-spend policies, especially labour market schemes like retraining. The US spends 0.1 per cent of its GDP on labour market policies, as compared with 0.6 per cent in OECD countries as a whole. Whether Mr Trump’s billionaire cabinet and Tea Party supporters will embrace policies that will address, in an economically and socially sensible way, the impact of a growing lack of competitiveness in the ‘rustbelt’ states that voted Republican seems very doubtful. In addition, Mr Trump is likely to discover sooner or later the number of American multinationals that export part of what they produce to emerging markets, like Mexico, where they are completed and sold back into the USA.

  In Europe, similar questions arise. Recent high levels of European immigration in parts of England, which have sustained economic growth, plainly increased the size of the Brexit vote there. One answer would be to increase levels of social spending in those areas; this has been done successfully in Denmark. But Conservatives show little sign of being prepared to embrace this sort of redistributive economics. As their opponents argued in the 2017 General Election, they are unlikely to abandon the espousal of fiscal rectitude and more cuts in social spending. So Europe is too often blamed for the consequences of dramatic failures of economic and social policy. As for Labour, its leadership has had difficulty connecting to the mainstream political agenda.

  Things are made worse by social media. Yes, the internet and social media can link people across oceans and continents and open their minds and eyes to things to which they previously had little or no access. Immediate access to information and knowledge of all kinds can do and often does immense good. But there is a darker side to this. The internet can promote fragmentation by allowing those with a very strong sense of a single identity to connect with others who have a similar outlook. The interaction between them then turns on a sense of identity enhanced even further, to the detriment of other connections and wider interests of people with different points of view. The vulnerable, the angry and those who feel oppressed connect with those like themselves; they exploit one another’s grievanc
es and weaknesses. Before long, they are setting off to join Isis or (in too many tragic cases) shooting up their classrooms. It also enables many people to receive their news in a very selective and politicized way – sound bites and factoids, tablet e-papers, Fox, Twitter and so on. Their existing worries are aggravated and their instincts made much more extreme. Glance at the news headlines and reporting of the Breitbart News Network whose chairman, Steve Bannon, was made Mr Trump’s strategic adviser in the White House. Breitbart has been accused, with good reason, of xenophobia, racism and misogyny. No wonder that Bannon’s appointment was applauded by the Ku Klux Klan. Breitbart is associated with the ‘alt-right’ in America and in Europe, where so-called identitarians in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere link racist groups through their websites across the continent. The skinhead right is joined to allegedly more respectable right-wing groups which call for a reconquista in Europe, recapturing the continent for white Europeans from high-breeding immigrant hordes. Are British tabloid newspapers much different? The headlines from one during the weeks before the referendum tell a familiar tale: ‘Migrants spark housing crisis’; ‘Britain’s wide-open borders’; ‘Deadly cost of our open borders’; ‘Britain’s broken borders’; ‘How many more can we take?’ A few high-minded campaigners for Britain to leave the EU still claim that the outcome had nothing to do with immigration, race and the stoking of xenophobia.

  St Augustine wrote: ‘When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful.’ Balanced analysis by the media commands little attention beyond the despised so-called elites. In a society where facts are made up to be exchanged by tweet or over a beer in the saloon bar, bigots become more articulate: so much more material is being fed to them. There is not much of a market for ‘on the one hand, on the other’. We seem to be threatened once again by perturbed demons similar to those in Matthew Arnold’s great mid-nineteenth-century poem ‘Dover Beach’, written as faith seemed to be assaulted by science. Today it is corrupted faith transmitted by technology that threatens certitude and peace, and offers no help for pain.

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  This is why I want to write about identity, beginning with my own, rather than produce a conventional political autobiography. Along the way I hope I may explain a little about why I embarked on the odd, demanding and occasionally satisfying political life; how important the political adventure was in the balance of what I have done; how and when I realized like others that most political careers usually end in minor or major failure; and how I remain more strongly attached than ever to the idea – even after the world-shaking events of 2016 – that liberal values constitute the best hope for a decent future and the strongest basis for what is still the honourable adventure of politics. Explaining how this person we used to recognize, but have now probably forgotten, emerged for a time into the spotlight of modest celebrity and then faded out of it will also, I hope, give a few insights into what has happened in Britain and the world during my lifetime. I hope above all that in trying to describe myself honestly, without memories being too blurred or occluded by small vanities, I will be able to add a little to the arguments for an immoderate defence of liberal order and a counter to the violence of narrow identity.

  Because I have written this book around the things that have shaped me, it does not simply follow the time-line of my years from childhood to old age. I begin, however, conventionally, with my family background and my education, concluding that chapter with some thoughts on social mobility. I then travel to America as a student and go on to discuss that great country’s impact on who I am today, and for that matter who you are too. Then I discuss why I am a Conservative and what sort of Conservative I am. I write about my early years in Conservative politics and my life in Parliament. I describe the three leaders I have served: Heath, Thatcher and Major. In Northern Ireland I confronted identity politics at their most ferocious. In Hong Kong, I encountered some ludicrous arguments about the impact on our identities of alleged civilizational differences, especially involving China. I discuss my experiences as a European Commissioner in Brussels (for example, dealing with the Balkans) and explain why I think Britain voted to leave the EU, comparing the reasons for this vote and for the election of President Trump. I look at my Poobah years in Oxford, the BBC and Rome. I conclude, I hope not too gloomily, thinking about religion, violence and death, a visitor eventually at every hearth.

  So here it is: my first confession, for which I hope the penance will not be too severe.

  2

  Mass and Privet

  Parish of enormous hayfields

  Perivale stood all alone,

  And from Greenford scent of mayfields

  Most enticingly was blown

  John Betjeman, ‘Middlesex’

  … the Church was my first book … my introduction to ceremony, to grace and sacrament, to symbol and ritual.

  John McGahern, Guardian (8 April 2006)

  ‘Why waste your money looking up your family tree?’ Mark Twain asked. ‘Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.’ Fortunately, in contemporary British politics there has never been much effort to discredit public figures by disinterring the sins of their bloodline. A distant relationship to Oswald Mosley is not to be recommended, but other than that there is less muck-raking about heredity in Britain than in America. Perhaps that reflects the fact that politics on the allegedly class-ridden, European side of the Atlantic is less dynastic than in the ‘land of the free’. Our dynasties are constitutionally confined to palaces these days to which the public, who pay for them, are admitted from time to time to have a look around.

  I only really became interested in my roots because of my growing sense that many of those with whose contribution to the public realm I had to contend created trouble for the rest of us by their sense of single-blooded loyalty to some cause or other. This self-identification was invariably far from the whole story. Anglo-Irish relations, at the worst of times, were a bleak example. The history and culture of the people of our archipelago – Britain and Ireland – are inextricably intertwined, individuals and families. Thinking of my years in Northern Ireland, the very names of politicians – the Norman French Fitzgerald and Molyneux, the Scottish Paisley, the English Adams – showed this and contrasted oddly from time to time with the views of those who bore them. So I went hunting for my own ancestry, knowing that like that of so many who hold a British passport on my father’s side it lay in Ireland. At least six million people who live in the United Kingdom today have at least one Irish grandparent. Go back further than grandparents and the numbers soar.

  My own great-grandfather, Patrick, was born in 1829, in County Roscommon. His name seems to have changed from Patton to Patten, which may have been a clerk’s error rather than a deliberate exchange of letters by Patrick himself. At some time in the 1840s, like a million others, he fled Ireland’s potato famine. They left behind a million dead with heavy fatalities in the town, Boyle, in which he lived. The population of this little town, near Lough Key and the Curlew Mountains, is smaller today than it was when Patrick left. Suitably, the Irish Museum of the Famine was established in Roscommon. Patrick headed east for Britain and established himself initially in Haslingden, near Rossendale in Lancashire, just north of Manchester. He worked first, as he described on the census form, as a chair-bottom maker, presumably repairing cane chairs. But he soon progressed to become a weaver, married into a Yorkshire family of weavers, and eventually became a tailor. Patrick and his wife, Mary, had four daughters and one son, my grandfather Joseph (born in 1860), who became a teacher and married a fellow Irish member of the profession, Annie Nolan. By the turn of the century, before the 1902 Balfour Education Act brought Catholic schools into the state-funded system, they were running St Alban’s School in the Ancoats district of Manchester, a co
mmunity that contained many Italian immigrants, was often served by Italian parish priests and was famous for making ice-cream for Mancunians. The Italians, mainly from southern Italy, Lazio and Campagna, and the Irish, helped to rescue the Ancoats slum from crime and violence.