Brown + Willetts = get me out of here

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I've written relatively little in OK over the past week and a half. I have been depressed by a double whammy on Wednesday 20th February. I went to hear Gordon Brown talk to ippr about citizenship which turned into his speech about immigration. In the evening David Willetts gave the Oakshott lecture which was billed as a response to Brown's emphasis on values. He was going to stress the importance of institutions. So - a day when I could compare and contrast perhaps the two best read leaders on the two main front benches, exercising and applying their intellectual and strategic overviews.

OK touched on the two events. Tony Curzon Price did a brilliant blog the Today programme trailer when Willetts suggested that vampire bats were an example to us all. I am not sure how many modern conservatives could grasp its significance but they'd be well advised to read it twice, and no doubt look up autophageous (it means self-devouring). I wrote about the new immigration policy but without linking it to the Brown lecture.

The whole experience was extremely lowering. I think this is going to turn into a long post, so let's start with a picture. This is a bad one I took of Lisa Harker co-director of ippr introducing the Prime Minister. You can see the 'Governance of Britain' branding.

If you go to the ippr website HERE the four pictures they select diplomatically exclude the flagwaving. It also takes you to the speech itself, text and sound, and a brief official YouTube extract.

David at BritologyWatch has had a good long go at what Brown said, calculating that he used "Britain" or "British" 64 times but never "English" except in the sense of language (as in you better learn it or you will be expelled). David's conclusion:

we have moved from a national identity based on history, and a sense of belonging to a place and a territory, to one that is almost definitively, and definingly, encapsulated in a national ID scheme, designed to control our access to the rights of citizenship, depending on the extent to which we are fulfilling our civic responsibilities.

This is a national British identity codified, indeed digitised, by the British state; in fact, bestowed by the British state based on merit against a set of prescriptive qualifying criteria, rather than an automatic right. Being English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish isn’t one of those qualifying criteria - and you’d better accept GB’s state-civic Britishness if you want to preserve your native rights.

It was depressing how much emphasis Brown put on the numbers who had been expelled. The tone and detail was overbearing, with two Ministers sitting on the side like poodles.

At one point Brown said:

The idea of citizenship can be addressed more cogently here in Britain than elsewhere because for centuries Britain has been made up of many nations. As the first - and probably the most successful - multi-national state in the world, we have always had to find ways of bringing people into a United Kingdom.

Put it another way: geographically, Britain is a group of islands; historically, it is a set of ideas that have evolved over centuries: brought together uniquely across traditional boundaries and today united not by race or ethnicity but by distinctive values that have, over time, shaped the institutions of a multinational state.

I said at the Labour Party conference that I am proud to be British; that I believe in British values.

And it is my view that these values are founded first of all on the enduring British commitment to the ideas of:

* liberty - the concept of freedom under the law which has to be renewed every generation, about which I spoke in the autumn;

* of civic duty;

* of fairness;

* and of internationalism - a Britain that sees the channel not as a moat that isolates us in narrow nationalism, but as a highway out to the world that for centuries has given our outward-looking nation an unsurpassed global reach.

But that these values are founded secondly on a vision of citizenship that entails both responsibilities and rights.

So for all citizens, I want us to emphasise - and, to some extent, codify - the rights they have:

At the end he talked of Britain as if it was one nation as Britology Watch spotted. I was struck by the intellectual incoherence of the argument. Values cannot be founded on a vision. Least of all can enduring values be founded on a vision of citizenship which is a very recent concept in British political life. One felt the tabloids rattling around in his brain. A young man in front of me declared with a smile that he wanted to go and live in Switzerland. I know what he meant. One did not want to be British if this was the welcome being extended.

I expected some intellectual robustness when I went to listen to Willetts. It was puffed in advance by Danny Finkelstein in the Times. I have not got a link to the full text. Willetts said that he wanted to close the Tories exposed flank of libertarianism. He wanted to find a"secular" argument for supporting society. A civic conservatism of government that assists people to act for themselves. He turned to game theory, evolutionary biology and neurology. All this was supposed to end up in support for institutions rather than values. Rather lamely, he explained at the end that while game theory was effective when you had very clear ends, for example in auctions or when it comes to nuclear deterrence, he had learnt from experience that political leaders hate being really clear about their purpose in which case game theory had little to offer them. I asked him what institutions he would put up against the Prime Minister's check list of values. Willetts' answer, "the family".

I came away feeling there is no hope: there is neither a coherent case for the government nor for the opposition if these are their best and brightest.

A few days later I had the pleasure of listening to David Marquand give a Political Quarterly lecture which discussed his forthcoming book (due September). This will show that there have been four traditions competing for dominance in British politics since the Civil War. Whig imperialism; Tory nationalism; democratic centralism and... democratic republicanism. Power has changed hands between the first three.

I look forward to a debate on Marquand's important thesis. The lecture ended with a discussion as to whether Brown who is essentially a democratic centralist is also in any way a democratic republican as well. Claire Short was in the audience. She is confident that Brown a pure centralist. Marquand thought not and that his call for a national conversation showed he had a glimmer of the need for something else. We also debated the national question and the EU. Well, soon I'm off to Scotland to take the temperature there.