Nothing is as liberating as prosperity
We are in danger of ignoring the most important political message of recent times , warns Janet Daley.
By Janet Daley
Published: 6:42PM BST 15 Aug 2009, Telegraph, UK

When I first arrived in Britain from America in the 1960s, I was shocked by the class system. Not because such social divides were unknown in the US, but because there was an utterly different attitude here towards the possibility of moving on from the condition into which you had been born. It was not the poverty or the deprivation of British working class life that staggered me – there was plenty of that where I came from. It was the passivity and defeatism, the ineradicable sense of resignation, of people who believed it was inconceivable that they or anyone they knew should transcend their social and cultural limitations. I had never met people who said, when you encouraged their children to aim for university, "Don't go putting ideas in his head."

My memories of that time had faded over the years, but they were brought vividly back to life by last week's controversy over which political party is the truly progressive one. I was on the Left in those days, a veteran of the student revolution at Berkeley: indeed, one of the reasons I had become an expatriate was my disenchantment with America's capitalist values. So my natural political sympathies hovered between the Trotskyite New Left and the fundamentalist wing of the Labour Party.

There was, at first, something deeply stirring in the message that class solidarity was the answer to the unjust arrangements of a hierarchical society, and that solidarity meant loyalty to your roots. It was easy to romanticise the attempt to make an ideological virtue out of entrenched social immobility. To believe, indeed, that to move out of the working class would be treacherous to your brethren, that it was selfish (a word that was to play an enormous role in anti-Thatcherite rhetoric) – an abandonment of those with whom you shared a common misfortune.

Labour's message to what it used to call "our people" was a mix of trade union militancy ("We hate this unjust society, so we will sabotage it") and paternalist, welfare state condescension ("Stay where you are and we'll look after you"). What it preached, above all else, was that the working class could only triumph collectively: that the true struggle was between one fixed set of people who had been born into disadvantage, and another who had, for illegitimate reasons, every privilege that life could offer.

But the Marxist mystique collapsed pretty readily once you looked at the real consequences. Individual aspiration and self-determination – the things that actually made a life worth living in terms of personal fulfilment – were being devalued or forcibly crushed. Opportunities were not so much being denied to working-class people as being renounced by them. And the party that was most enthusiastic in perpetuating this grotesque state of affairs was Labour, because its electoral power base depended on it.

Then we were into the 1980s and suddenly the Conservatives were saying genuinely radical things to working-class people: you don't have to stay where you started out in life; you can buy your council house and join the property-owning class; you can start your own business and leave behind your old assumptions about your place in the world. There followed a generation of Essex Men, with their much-reviled "Loadsamoney" mentality and vulgar habits which Left-wing intellectuals found so easy to despise.

But the snobbish venom that poured from the mouths of all those supposed egalitarians could not put the genie back in the bottle. The Labour Party learned the lesson of the late 20th century – that it was no longer the 19th – and reinvented itself to address the aspirations of the free-born individual. In other words, it embraced the truly progressive politics that free-market economics had brought and accepted that nothing is more genuinely liberating than personal prosperity.

But the most important message of the era is in danger of being lost in this latest scrum. Forced to defend the Brownite incarnation of New Labour, Lord Mandelson is now chucking out every lesson that was learned by his party after so much pain and four lost elections. It was the Conservatives who broke the mould of British electoral politics by offering economic self-determination (to coin a phrase) to the many, not the few.

They did this by altering the basic understanding of wealth production: the wealth of a country was not a fixed entity, not a pie that needed to be cut up and distributed (or redistributed) by the state. Wealth could grow almost without limit. It expanded with increased activity, and the force of its own market dynamic would spread it to as much of the society as was free to join in that activity. Wealth does not have to be forcibly transferred from one sector of society to another, like a parcel. In fact, the more it is forcibly directed, the less it grows.

And similarly, the poor are not (or need not be) a fixed caste. This was the real difference that had struck me between the American attitude to poverty – which is that almost everybody who began in it hoped to rise out of it – and the British idea that poverty was a fate to which you were condemned unless you were helped by some outside force. In relative terms, statistical poverty may be a permanent fixture: in a free society, some people will always be less well-off than others. But for any given individual, it need not be an immutable condition – or one that can only be alleviated by state intervention.

Every country with a liberal economic system will have people who are poorer than others. But they should not be the same people from one generation to the next. In a dynamic economy, individuals may move out of (or into) poverty, but what is important is that their fate should not be determined by forces wholly outside of their own will.

The test of a progressive society, in fact, is just how much of that movement can be controlled by the person himself. If, for example, a whole industry closes down, taking with it the livelihoods of an entire community, we should expect a society to make available possibilities for retraining and geographical mobility, rather than create permanent dependence (and indissoluble poverty) through government benefit programmes. The question was (and still is): are people ready to take responsibility for themselves?

What radical Toryism taught, and Labour once admitted that it had learned, is that real progressivism means making people more, rather than less, free.