Why I am a conservative III: family values

III. Family values matter

By family values, I mean the Tony Blair interpretation - the idea that the two-parent family is quite a good way to bring up children, and should be supported. I do not mean - hopefully, by 2015, this will cause little surprise - that I hate gays, want to ban abortion or stem-cell research, or point at single mothers in the street.

It does mean that some things I hear make me angry. Take the phrase "single-parent family", which replaced the earlier "broken home". "Broken home" is judgmental, yes. That judgment has an immediate emotional resonance for me. I spent some of my childhood in a broken home. The description fits really well. I don't say it would for everybody.

Now "single-parent family" is less judgmental, but for me it is a lie. I wasn't in a "single parent family": I had two parents, one of them had custody, one had access. A majority of "single parent families" are, like mine, not single-parent families at all but two-parent families of whom one parent is not in the house, either having left or never having arrived.

Beyond vocabulary, the point is that there is no useful judgment-free definition of a family. A family is a set of people who have obligations to each other. It is a good idea for a society to have public expectations about what those obligations are and who has them.

Again, I do not long for the days when single mothers were shamed and their children put in orphanages. But this seems like a red herring. Why would I be blaming the mothers? A while back, I was talking to someone in my home town. He was a small-time criminal and drug dealer, and did not seem very nice. He told me he had a kid, but he'd moved out of the mother's home. Why? "She was doing my head in," basta.

On the face of it - and of course superficial judgments can be mistaken - I did not really think that was OK. Is it?

So, then, after making all allowances for the huge complexity of human relationships, would we not, quite likely, want to blame somebody who behaved like that?

And if you don't like the idea of blaming people who heaven knows are facing difficult enough lives, with tight enough material constraints and few enough spiritual resources, might you not at least blame the society that has created the message that thinking that way, acting that way, is OK?

I don't especially see why this would make anyone vote Conservative in 2015. Tony Blair practically cared much more about this kind of family values than David Cameron seems to. But it matters. Most thinking people in America, Left or Right, seem to have understood this. Few in Europe do.

Why I am a conservative II: socialism

II. Socialism doesn't work

Come on, you are thinking, even Labour admit that Soviet socialism failed. The debate's moved on. Well, actually there are still loons out there like the Green party. But do you really think that socialism doesn't work? Specifically, that command-and-control systems, where goods are allocated by a central planner according to need rather than being demanded via a price mechanism, are doomed to failure?

If you do think so, then you should draw the conclusions that follow. For instance, the NHS won't work: it is just this kind of system. Nor will state education, for the same reason. You must expect these systems to fail. I do. (I see the failures of state education at first hand.)

This does not mean that the market will provide a utopia. There are excellent reasons to think it won't - health and education are not like packets of cornflakes, whose buyers know what they need. I do not know any perfect solution; but our current systems are doomed to failure by design.

Socialism doesn't work. Consider taking this truism seriously.

Why I am a conservative I: state spending

(The next few posts are going to give some views of mine which few other people seem to share. That might make them interesting to think about. They are the reasons why I am a conservative, and they also help explain why I will be voting Conservative in May.)

I. State spending does not need to be more than 35% of our extremely large GDP.

To me this seems obvious. A third of everything this country makes is not enough? Really? Of course, economists have thought of many reasons why state spending should carry on getting higher forever: I think they're bonkers.

For the record, I think that Krugman and the Keynesians have won the economic debate about austerity. I do not think the big cuts in 2010 were a good idea.

However. First, at some point stimulus has to stop being an argument and we have to assume normality is returning. As I understand it, intellectually respectable Keynesian policy works like this: you spend more than you save during recessions caused by inadequate demand, and, to fund this, you save more than you spend in normal times. Western democracies have been failing to do this for some time. Austerity has harmed many in the past few years. Unsustainable public debt, however, has destroyed many regimes. If this happens to us, the harm to us and democracy will last for generations. So, the long run matters more.

Second, politics has its topsy-turvy logic that makes it hardest to cut spending when the economy seems to be going well, to "take the punch-bowl away". If the choice were between cutting during good years or during bad years, I would choose the former like a good Keynesian. But I fear the choice may be cutting during bad years, or not at all. Neither of the Labour and Conservative platforms offers much grounds for optimism about this, since both parties are irresponsibly promising tax cuts to their core supporters.

What's wrong with UKIP?

What's wrong with UKIP is not that they want less immigration. A large majority of the populace has wanted lower immigration for a long time. This government promised and failed to reduce immigration, so at present immigration levels can fairly be called uncontrolled.

This is not even a question of the majority view versus good policy. The cost-benefit analysis of immigration looks like this:

B = E + X

where B is the total benefit or cost, E is the economic effects and X is the political and social effects. To my mind, Jonathan Portes and others have persuasively shown that E is positive. But nobody has even tried to measure X. One example of X is that there are now about 600,000 people resident in Britain who "have some sympathy" for the Charlie Hebdo murderers. So these are not airy-fairy intangibles.

What's wrong with UKIP is that they want to leave the EU, and this would cripple the EU in its hour of need. But the point of view is defensible. Nation-states are ultimately incompatible with the EU, because free migration ultimately breaks the link between state and nation, and reduces government to administrators of the local populace. So, there is an existential choice between Europe and the nation-state. I favour Europe, since I want to be able to stand up to other bigger nations. But I cannot blame people for a different point of view - especially when Europe seems on the point of imploding because of economic stupidity, and unable to protect itself against a clear and present military danger.

Defending Rozanne Duncan

(This post is tagged NLUWDC, for Nobody Likes Us We Don't Care, i.e. it takes a view which is likely to be unpopular.)

Rozanne Duncan, a Thanet councillor for UKIP, was expelled from the party for saying: "The only people I do have problems with are negroes. And I don't know why. I don't know whether there is something in my psyche or whether it's karma from a previous life ... But I really do have a problem with people with negroid features."

So, Mrs Duncan used the words 'negro" and "negroid', and she said she had a problem with people with negroid features. It is not surprising that a party which wants to shake off accusations of racism booted her out. But I am not sure she deserved it.

She did not say, for example, "I have a problem with negroes because they are all violent criminals!" She said she had a problem because of something about herself. That is being honest, not racist. An Asian friend who works for an anti-racism charity in Birmingham told me: "Before I worked here, I used to be really scared of black people". If you think you are better, try taking an Implicit Association Test.

All the ethnic groups of this country have to live together: not just side by side, together. If we attack people who admit - not in public, but while being secretly recorded - that they have feelings about other groups which they think they ought not to, this will not make anyone less racist. But it will lead to pretence and hypocrisy, to a society where everyone wears an anti-racist mask.

Next, is the word "negro" racist? Probably: it is a cognate of, and in many European languages identical to, the N word. Mrs Duncan defended her vocabulary, like the policewoman in the 1990s Lawrence enquiry who used the word "coloured", on the grounds that it was what she knew. The issue is not clearcut. The main African-American civil rights organization, founded in 1909, is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In his I Have A Dream speech, Martin Luther King used the word "negro". The book The Mis-education of the Negro was an early civil rights classic: Lauryn Hill borrowed the phrase for the title of her first album.

Like swearwords, racially derogatory terms are insults just because they are. You probably should not use either of the words "coloured" or "negro", as they might cause offence. But standards change. Unsurprisingly, not all councillors in Thanet are up to date. This looks suspiciously like an old British tradition, word-snobbery. Black is to coloured as lavatory was to toilet for our parents. Again, this may show off one's cultural awareness, but it is unlikely to help fix racial divisions.