POLITICS, MORALITY AND THE NATION STATE

POLITICS, MORALITY AND THE NATION STATE

ST. MICHAEL CHURCH
CORNHILL
CITY OF LONDON

10 January 2003

May I begin by expressing my very great appreciation of the opportunity to give this address today. Politicians are often accused of pontificating; they are less often invited to pontificate. So I am especially grateful to Peter Mullen for issuing this invitation which I confess I accepted with alacrity.

When I did so, almost a year ago, I wanted to use this occasion to talk about the moral purpose of politics and the relationship between morality and politics. It is a subject which has always interested me. The first attempt I made to treat it seriously in public was in a lecture I gave to the Workers Education Association in my home town of Llanelli many years ago, not long after I first became a Government Minister.

I thought it had gone rather well until the Chairman asked for questions. The first question was:
“If the Tories are so moral in their approach to politics why do they keep fiddling the unemployment figures?”

I promise not to accuse the present Government of fiddling any figures – not in the course of this address, at any rate. But the question does perhaps illustrate the dangers which lurk in this territory and the caution with which it needs to be approached.

Since I accepted Peter’s kind invitation a new topicality has been given to the subject by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Dimbleby Lecture. The Archbishop has set out to place the relationship between the individual, the state and the church – or as he entitled his lecture, “Nations, Markets and Morals” – in a new context. Basing much of his argument on the work of the American writer Philip Bobbitt, he predicts the death of the nation state and suggests that this gives new and greater space to the role of religion in political affairs.

It is a striking thesis and both Mr Bobbitt – whose epic 900 page volume, The Shield of Achilles: War Peace and the Course of History, promises to adorn countless coffee tables and may even be read by some of the owners of the tables – and the Archbishop are to be congratulated on the intellectual controversy they have provoked.

It is beyond doubt that the challenges which have arrived at the beginning of the first century of the new millennium are, to put it mildly, enormously formidable. It is a timely moment to re-examine the nature of the relationship between government and governed, between state and subject. And politicians should always be ready to learn and to benefit from new perspectives on the problems with which they are presented in their daily toil. But politicians, too, have their perspectives and it is in that spirit that I modestly offer the perspective of a practising politician on the Archbishop’s thesis.

At the very beginning of his Dimbleby Lecture, the Archbishop poses what he clearly regards as a central question:

“Why should we do what the government tells us?”

It is, if I may say so, a rather odd question.

It is odd because in any modern state governed by the rule of law, we do not have to do what the government tells us. We are not ruled by fiat. If governments wish us to do what they tell us they have to go through certain processes. In any state governed by the rule of law, the government has to pass a law, if it wishes its people to do what it tells them. In any democratic state that will involve a consideration of the proposed law by some kind of elected assembly which will decide whether the proposal should indeed reach the statute book. It is only if that process is satisfactorily completed that the people are obliged to do what their government tells them.

This is not a petty or irrelevant distinction. In the 20 years or so for which I have been privileged to serve in Parliament there have been several real life examples of Governments failing to translate their wishes into law. Sometimes that failure was partial, sometimes complete.

In a different context a current example of people refusing, quite legitimately, though in my view, profoundly mistakenly, to do what the government tells them is provided by the reaction of the English Cricket Board to the clearly expressed wish of the Government, from the Prime Minister down, that they should not proceed with their intention to play their opening match in the Cricket World Cup in Zimbabwe.

I entirely share the Government’s view that this match should not take place in Zimbabwe. But there is no law which says it should not. So the ECB do not, in the Archbishop’s words, have to do what the Government tells them.

This distinction is crucial. It goes to the very heart of the legitimacy of the modern democratic state. We accept that we should obey the laws passed through the recognised democratic processes of our state because we accept the logic of democracy. We agree with Winston Churchill that democracy for all its faults is the least bad system of government. It is the practical embodiment of Jeremy Bentham’s dictum (which I appreciate the Archbishop may not entirely approve) that:

“The greater happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”

As the Archbishop says in his Dimbleby Lecture.

“You need to be reasonably confident that your system of government is worth supporting overall if you are prepared to go along with what it tells you in some particular areas where you may not feel completely convinced or are frankly not convinced at all.”

You will not be surprised to hear that there are a great many areas of the policy of the present government where I do not feel convinced at all. But so long as they enshrine their policies in law, following due constitutional process, I do indeed feel obliged to obey that law because I accept the consequences of the democratic system I support.

There is, I recognise, one particular dimension of the legitimacy of the modern nation state which can, to put it mildly, prove problematical. That is the determination of the appropriate boundaries within which these democratic processes are to work their way through. Within our own United Kingdom there are clearly some – in Northern Ireland, in Scotland, in Wales, and perhaps in England too, - who think our present boundaries, which fix the unit within which we currently make our democratic decisions, are wrong.

Similar considerations elsewhere – in the Balkans, in Indonesia, in the Middle East – have led to some of the bloodiest and most bitter conflicts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But arguments about where you draw the boundaries of any particular nation state do not invalidate the concept.

Philip Bobbitt identifies five developments which, he says, make it impossible for the nation state to fulfil its historic functions and which, therefore, are leading to its replacement by what he calls the market state.

But these developments, though the tensions to which they give rise in the 21st century may be greater than in the past, are not, for the most part, new. It is certainly arguable, for example, that the globalisation of the transfer of goods and services is not different in kind from the era of free trade which prevailed for many decades before the First World War.

And the extent to which the state should intervene in economic affairs and, in particular, should itself provide certain services has been a matter of intense and partisan political controversy for a very long time.

Indeed the conflict between those who emphasise the collective over the individual has been one of the most durable dividing lines in party politics for the whole of the 20th century and promises to continue to be so. Some nation states have coped with these challenges better than others. Most have coped better at some periods of their history than at others. So, I dare say, will it be in the future.

But to argue from all this that the nation state is dead or dying and is about to be superseded by something called the market state seems to me a very great leap of the imagination. I am one of those who is very far from persuaded that this analysis is correct. Indeed I would argue that in the age of globalisation, when the pace of change is faster than ever before, the need for the bonds of familiarity and social solidarity provided by the nation state has never been greater. The strength which comes from a sense of belonging to a community – a national community – is the most effective antidote to the uncertainty and insecurity of globalisation.

How much does this argument matter? Is it important that we call the national unit within which we organise our government the market state rather than the nation state? I rather doubt it. To me what is important is that we strengthen our democracy and the ways in which government is accountable to the people it serves.

That notion of service is central. And it happily and conveniently brings me to some of the conclusions the Archbishop reached at the end of his Dimbleby Lecture. I very largely agree with them. And I do not think they are, to any significant extent, dependent on the acceptance of Philip Bobbitt’s analysis.

One of the Archbishop’s points is that religion can help man understand his position in relation to eternity and that this may provide a helpful perspective in relation, for example, to questions of environmental policy. There is no doubt that this kind of perspective can considerably reinforce the desire of one generation to bequeath a benign legacy to the next. As a former Secretary of State for the Environment, who represented the United Kingdom at the first Earth Summit in Rio and was instrumental in persuading the United States to sign the Climate Change Convention which was agreed at that Summit, I am very sensitive to these concerns.

And the Archbishop is right, also, to emphasise the importance of the role which religious and other voluntary groups can play in filling the gaps which undoubtedly exist and sometimes become more visible as the state recognises the limitations in its ability to provide the solution to every problem. Iain Duncan Smith and Oliver Letwin have both spoken powerfully on this theme and it is certainly something which is of great interest to my party.

Only three weeks ago, I made an appeal, at the annual Carol Service organised by the Salvation Army in Hythe in my constituency, for an initiative emanating from the Churches Together to appoint a youth worker to get alongside young people in our area so as to enrich the quality of their lives and, hopefully, reduce the amount of vandalism which is such a problem in our community and in so many others.

So while we may disagree about the future of the nation state there is much in what the Archbishop said in his Dimbleby Lecture – and, thankfully, particularly his conclusions – with which this practising politician, at any rate, can agree.

There is, after all, a moral purpose to politics. The overwhelming majority of those of us who engage in it do so because we want to make our country, and to the very limited extent of our capacity, the wider world, better places to live in. We want to make a difference. We want to make people’s lives better.

That is the only valid reason for going into politics in the first place.

But there is a sting in the tail.

Once we are faced with the hard choices of which the Prime Minister speaks so often, in most cases neither side of the argument has a monopoly of morality.

In the 1980’s, there were frequent demands for action to be taken, usually though government-provided subsidies, to keep loss making industries, and the employment they provided, in business. These demands were often accompanied by the cry: It is a moral issue.

But if, as many of us thought, the effect of such subsidies would be futile in anything other than the shortest of short terms, largely because they would have to be paid for by taxes on otherwise profitable industries which then might themselves be unable to survive in consequence, was it right to pillory us as being in some way morally deficient?

If an increase in the number of criminals in prison leads to a large fall in crime –18% over the four years during which I was Home Secretary – can the person responsible reasonably be accused of some moral shortcoming?

And to bring things more completely up to date if those in positions of authority are convinced that a regime such as that which is currently in control of Iraq poses a real threat to those whose security they are elected to protect, do they not have a moral duty to take action to deal with that threat?

I suspect that we shall hear much more about these questions in the coming months. And, to be frank, I do not think that Mr Bobbitt’s work is very much help in resolving them.

But I am nevertheless grateful to him, and to the Archbishop, for the way in which they have done so much to focus attention on some of these issues. The more we can, all of us, encourage people to think about them, the stronger our democracy is likely to be. And whether you call it a nation state or a market state that is an objective all of must share.

Rt Hon
Michael Howard QC MP