Come paddle with me in the soupy Middle Sea

Consider first Margaret Hodge, the radical minister. Bravely breaking with decades of accepted practice and flaunting several taboos, Ms Hodge argued for a change to council housing rules to favour those who could be regarded as “indigenous” over those who could be classified as “new migrants”, regardless of actual housing need.

This was amazing stuff. The MP for Barking herself talked of how a “recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded, privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma” would get priority over a family who might have lived in an area for “three generations”, and suggested that a “rebalancing” was needed. For me this created the wonderfully retro image of the asthmatic children having to stay put in the damp house by reason of their incorrect origins, while the perfectly healthy indigenous couple got in ahead of them on the housing list. All of which, according to Ms Hodge, would “promote understanding which leads to better tolerance and integration in our society” by making white people feel that life was less unfair. The asthmatic children’s response would presumably be for a future generation to cope with.

Consider second the miserable figure of David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, in making it overclear that the Cameron Tory party has no intention of returning to the pre-1970 system of 11-plus selection. The mild Mr Willetts immediately became the target of the most sustained bashing any Tory politician has received since Iain Duncan Smith. He had sold the soul of the Conservative Party – not to mention generations of bright but thwarted youngsters – for a mess of pottage, in this instance the illusion of electoral appeal to the centre ground.

Perhaps I am insufficiently gender-blind, but it seemed odd that the most savage of the Willetts floggers were women newspaper columnists. Until, that is, I read yesterday’s stories of how, judging by the spread of his DNA, 13th-century women must have regarded Genghis Khan as something of a sex god.

But this is a dangerous digression.

Ms Hodge has spoken her mind, has broken with the consensus, has stepped out of the comfort zone, has done whatever it is people want done when they argue that politics should be more edgy and ideological. Lordy, how they do argue this. The end of the confrontation between world ideologies – between socialism and capitalism – has left us becalmed in a windless, warm, soupy Middle Sea. Politics is dominated by a bloodless, inauthentic centrism that bores voters away from the polls and makes them think that “they’re all the same” and “it makes no difference”. The result is ennui. That’s why we needed a bloody big bust-up between Gordon Brown and a powerful articulator of a radical alternative vision of the Blairite Right/traditional Left (delete according to taste). Like what they had in France.

The persistence of this shallow trope, and the smugness with which it is reiterated, is almost physically irritating. Take the current debates in which Mr Willetts is surely right and Ms Hodge is surely wrong.

It is an eternal conceit that grammar schools were a marvellous ladder for upward social mobility. They weren’t. From 1965 to 1968 I attended a comprehensive school, and found myself overwhelmingly in the company of working-class kids. From 1968 I attended a grammar school, where the clientele was even more markedly middle-class. They were two miles and a culture apart.

For this, and other reasons, no Tory government post-1970 attempted to recreate the selective system – John Major only promised “a grammar school in every town” in his last desperate manifesto. It was not a vote-winner, but remained as a kind of totemic nonpledge lodged in the Tory psyche.

Ms Hodge is wrong because her “rebalancing” – by introducing an obvious element of injustice into the allocation of social housing – will cause far more trouble than it will alleviate. She is also, however, not typical of those who seek more ideological policies on the Left. A Sunday night radio show reminded me that my idea of grim is to have to listen to the complaints of some union leaders about how Tony Blair has hollowed out Labour and how what is needed is “reconnection” with the grassroots by going back to ideological basics, like giving union members more public money and jobs and not asking too many questions.

In The Westminster Hour Tony Woodley, joint general secretary of the new superunion, Unite, told listeners that Mr Brown had to reconnect with “core voters”, and that “more of the same must mean we’re going into opposition and that Gordon Brown becomes the shortest-lived Prime Minister in history”. The pathologically pessimistic Mr Woodley has forgotten that Mr Brown only has to get to July next year to have been in No 10 longer than Sir Alec Douglas-Home, but as forgetting is an essential part of his act, this is hardly surprising.

And what a boring act it is! The claim that more ideology equals more excitement never survived contact with members of the Militant Tendency, or with Tory golf-club bigots. In any case, who is supposed to be Labour’s answer to the orgasmic Hugo Chávez? Michael Meacher? As ever, such thinking proceeds from the delusion that – despite all electoral evidence to the contrary – the country really yearns for Woodleyism or (in the case of the Right) a return to the 1840s.

It is true that we are living through a period of political convergence, as serious parties agree about what the great problems are, and about the general ways to tackle them. But this is only a difficulty if you think that, say, climate change is either not a threat or quite fun, or that Britain should become a very high-tax or very low-tax economy. If you don’t think those things it is positively capricious to blame politicians for not conjuring up imaginary storms just to keep you entertained.

In any case true radicalism doesn‘t reside in ideological posturing. Changing anything in this country, with its addiction to local campaigns to stop this or halt that, is hard enough. Take NHS “reconfiguration”, which means hospital closures but also will create a substantially better health service as a result of concentration. Driving that through takes real guts – and all serious contenders for office know that it should be done. Call it the Genghis Willetts syndrome.

Comments

[dsquared]

[Until, that is, I read yesterday’s stories of how, judging by the spread of his DNA, 13th-century women must have regarded Genghis Khan as something of a sex god]

errr ... 13th century women were not usually given the option of saying no to the Golden Horde after their town was ransacked. Being one of history's most prolific serial rapists is what Genghis Khan is famous for.

[Michael Fitchett]

David,
Don't agree with you that Margaret Hodge is wrong. surely, all she is saying is that what you get out of society depends on what you put in. Those who have been here generations and paid their taxes are entitled to be ahead in the queue of those who have not yet had time to contribute anything.
It was after all Karl Marx who defined 'socialism' as 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.'

[John Phillips]

Michael: actually it should read 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his NEEDS'.

[Marge]

"Being one of history's most prolific serial rapists is what Genghis Khan is famous for."

No, it isn't. What he's famous for is the bloodthirsty conquest of a huge territory (central Asia, northern China and much of Persia and Afghanistan), starting the Mongol empire, and organizing largescale massacres on the way.

Doubt that he had much time for rape, especially since he had a vast harem.

[john b]

But people in the queue for council houses, by and large, *haven't* paid their taxes...

[Al]

Marge - it's still rape unless the inhabitants of his harem were all volunteers and not selected from the fruits of his conquests......and the words harem and voluntary don't seem to go together!