Very interesting article from Times columnist Matthew Parris (Dan I think you'll enjoy it):
The Labour Party should dump compassion
Christianity has not done socialism any favours. The Left must embrace progress and winners, not the workshy and the weak
It's time to ask not who should lead the Left in Britain, but where they should be led. Does socialism have a future? Little seems to be coming from the old warhorses of the left-wing intelligentsia these days, so, as the party conference season gets under way today, I thought I'd have a bash myself.
Socialism was never set in stone. In postwar Britain it has been evolving, and a powerful influence on this evolution, especially under the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been something called “Christian socialism”: the belief that the democratic and liberal Left may have something to learn from, and contribute to, New Testament morality: the working out of God's purpose on Earth. After all, didn't Jesus say “sell all that thou hast and give to the poor”?
I'm not suggesting that most politicians on the Left are consciously motivated by biblical injunction, or are even active believers. It's more subliminal. Ours remains a predominantly Christian culture, with Gospel beliefs about fairness, mercy and helping the poor, sick and weak, embedded deeply among our values; as is a tendency to ennoble suffering, and a guilt about wealth.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us have drunk deep at this well. It does not take the subtlest of minds to make a connection between these values, and the socialist political imperative to redistribute wealth, and care for all classes. Both aim, in their outcomes, for humanitarian goals.
Background
But this apparent convergence of purposes is a deception. Far from reinforcing true socialism, Christian socialism has ambushed it, subverting its original message and wrecking it as a viable philosophy of government in a market-driven age.
Marx is about power. Christianity is about charity. Marx is about the authority of the collective. Christian liberalism is about the individual conscience. Marx is about justice. Christian humanitarianism is about mercy. The common causes in which Christians, liberals and socialists have tried to reconcile their differences - personal freedom, the redistribution of wealth and the beneficent State - have in Christian hands proved ruinous to the socialist idea: softening its head, picking its pocket, throwing good money after bad, nursing the weak and neglecting the winners, hearkening to disability and turning away from ability, and leaching its energies into a welter of simpering charitable causes. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Western socialism has hovered around the bedside of the victim, the loser and the marginalised. To win, it should have been outdoors, exhorting the strong.
This wheelchair socialism has sucked the Centre Left into spending people's taxes on unproductive causes, and associating itself with failure rather than success. Nietzsche characterised the driving Christian ethic thus: “It lived on distress...” H.L.Mencken added: “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.”
It's not for me, here, to defend or attack the Church's absorption with the Prodigal Son rather than his industrious brother, the single lost sheep rather than the rest of the flock; or the way Christianity has made victimhood on the Cross both its mascot and its guiding light. I simply observe that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx was trying to say. Socialism was a most unsqueamish creed. If it wished to redistribute wealth, that was not for reasons of mercy but because Marx saw capitalism as a machine doomed to seize up: whereas mankind would fire on all cylinders if labour realised and exercised its potential muscle, and all men pulled together.
A socialist true to these roots, sitting in a modern British Cabinet, and faced with a decision whether to channel Treasury money into (a) scientific research; (b) transport infrastructure; (c) free bus passes for pensioners; or (d) a subsidised national paternity-leave scheme, could weigh socialist arguments for any or all of these purposes; but Christian charity, compassion, or a human-rights-based notion of “fairness” would not be among them.
Properly understood, socialist priorities should never be divorced from considerations of how most effectively to motivate citizens, oil the cogs and drive the pistons. Marx would have been contemptuous of the workshy and mildly uninterested in the disabled.
Nor would he have shared Christian socialism's tenderness for the outcast, for individual conscience, and for liberty. Socialism should see little value in personal freedom except in so far as it contributes to the collective good.
Central to socialism is the power of the collective (for the moment, the State): the power to improve the common lot, overriding the individual where necessary. This case for muscular government has always been stronger than we free-market liberals have wanted to acknowledge. Perversely, as socialist movements flounder everywhere, the case for muscular government is actually getting stronger.
This is not an ideological movement I would join, and in a post-industrial age its fixation with organised labour is redundant, but in other ways it remains a perfectly modern if brutal idea that deserves a confident voice in the century ahead.
Not that you would know it from the state of the Labour Party. I'm not in the business of advising Gordon Brown on how to save his skin; that battle is lost. The next election is lost. The election may come sooner than we think - how many more Siobhain McDonaghs wait to fall on their swords?
After that election, a Left Opposition will need to find a voice. It will not hear it from the Manse. It needs to find a crowd. They will not be discovered sleeping rough. It needs to find a class. They will not be the underclass. It needs to find a national purpose. Fairness and Equality will not suffice; Sure Start is not enough.
There's no point trying to out-smooth David Cameron or out-compassion Nick Clegg. Away (the socialist should say) with caring and diversity: let's hear about investment, not subsidy; progress, not equality; about Crossrail (what's the betting Mr Brown cancels it?); about how Britain generates its own power, how we rescue our rail network from impending insolvency, how we get from London to Scotland by train in two hours, and how we stop the planning system throttling every big project; about how we develop a global positioning system that the Americans don't control, how we pay for better highways and uncongested streets with proper road pricing, and how we research and market carbon-free transport, heat and power.
Unless you believe in big, costly, muscular and intrusive government, your voice in all such national causes must be muted. There's a damn good case to be made for strong-arming by the State, and only the Left can make it. This is not a time for Bonhoeffer and playgroups, but for a Left which believes unashamedly in taking command."
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