An awful lot of ‘new Right’ thinking is devoted to laundering the notion that a political party can be ‘Left on the economy and Right on culture’. This certainly seemed to be the phrase on everybody’s lips at NatCon U.K. in 2023. The idea here, I think, is that most voters are basically in favour of a big, interventionist state when it comes to health, welfare, protectionism and industrial policy, but also like the idea of hard borders, toughness on crime, national pride and so on. If a political party could somehow find that political Lagrange point between Left and Right, the theory goes, they could romp to electoral triumph and usher in a new era of populist domination.
Let me break it to you: this is a pipe dream. While the desire on the part of modern conservatives to divorce themselves from ‘neoliberalism’ is understandable enough, the simple truth is that there is a very good and obvious reason why parties on the economic Left tend towards being Left on culture, too. And it is simply this: a state which minutely governs the economy is one which minutely governs society as a whole, because economy and society are not in fact separate phenomena but an integrated whole. This means that if the state is big vis-à vis the economy, it is going to be big in all areas – and it is going to want to squash or co-opt competing sources of loyalty and authority (like the family, religious and community groups, businesses etc.) which the Right holds dear accordingly. The truth of the matter, then, is that conservatives and libertarians both fundamentally need the same thing (a small state) and that the ‘Left on the economy and Right on culture’ meme is just that: a slogan without a genuine cause.
I now aim to elucidate this for you through the use two symbols: the toothbrush and the scorpion.
Let me begin by asking you a question: whose job do you think it is to make sure that little Johnny, aged four to 11, brushes his teeth properly each day? Would you say it is his parents?
Well, you would be wrong. The leader of the opposition in the U.K. and presumptive next Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer MP has been busy making this clear for us in recent months: the job of making sure children brush their teeth properly is in fact the state’s. You see, tooth decay is a big issue. Children are having to be taken to hospitals to perform tooth extractions. This is bad for their health and bad for the taxpayer, who has to pay for treatment. Parents can’t be trusted to do the job. And the only solution is therefore for teachers to supervise toothbrushing in school. If Labour wins the next election, this is, then, going to be part of the overall children’s health plan which it implements. Each day, at least in the early years, the teacher is going to monitor the children in the class, and watch them brush their teeth – and, presumably, step in to help if a child is doing it wrongly.
Keir Starmer’s mentality in this respect is deeply instructive – indeed, in a recent piece for The Guardian about this issue he made two of those most revealing statements I can recall a politician having made. First, speaking about the Tory Government’s “inability” to think strategically about children’s health: “If parents treated their own children the way this Government has treated the nation’s children, the word being used would be ‘neglect’.” And, second, speaking about the way in which the problem of poor health in children will be solved: “None of this will happen without a genuine and respectful partnership with professionals and parents to improve our children’s health.”
Note carefully what is going on here. Note how the state is conceptualised as national pseudo-parent, with overall responsibility for the health of the nation’s children; note how parents are reconceived as, at best, ‘partners’ in the project of improving children’s health. And note the result: the state’s insinuation into, and subversion of, the most fundamental human relationship of all, that between parent and child. Children are no longer the responsibility of parents or the extended family to bring up; they are rather best conceived as beneficiaries of a benevolent nexus of fiduciaries – state, parent, professional. And of these the state is the most important of all, since it is always there in the background to step in and pick up the slack where parents or professionals fail.
There is of course an impeccable and inevitable logic to this, which Starmer himself makes plain: “Healthy, happy children is not something nice to have, it’s a basic right that has economic urgency [emphasis added].” Healthy, happy children help the economy to grow and don’t impose as much of a drain on the state’s resources as do unhappy, unhealthy ones. Since the state, in other words, has general responsibility for the wellbeing of the population, whether economic or physical (the state must increase GDP; it must also provide universal health care) it simply has therefore to involve itself in the decision-making of the population at the most granular level of detail – taking responsibility ultimately even for tooth-brushing. And therefore it is no good imposing limits by circumscribing activity X, Y or Z as properly within the realm of the family, or the church, or the business, or of ‘society’ broadly construed. All such limits must be eroded and broken down, because all such limits stand in the way of the state’s overarching mission.
As soon, in other words, as you grant that the state should have responsibility for the economic wellbeing of the population, you grant that it should have responsibility for its health and mental well-being too – and ultimately of course even its biopolitical features: its demography, its sexual morality, immigration flows, and so on. And this sets the relationship between state and society more or less on rails, with every intervention on the part of the State creating yet more reliance upon it on the part of the population, so that indeed in the end the presence of a universal free healthcare system almost necessitates the absurd situation in which we find ourselves, with the role of the parent reduced to a kind of wage-earning sibling of the child, unequipped even for the most basic exercise of authority such as the requirement of teeth brushing.
This is not a circle that can be squared by imagining that the state could somehow have responsibility for actively intervening in society in the name of, say, strengthening the family, church, civil society and so on and so forth – if only the right people (Viktor Orban, perhaps?) could be put in charge. To do so would simply be to concede the point that those institutions do not and should not have an independent existence of their own, and that they should be made transparent to state action in order that the state can operationalise its ends. This is tantamount to accepting that the existence of society itself is contingent – and that it is for the state to determine its composition, its material circumstances, and its mores, rather than the people themselves. And in practical terms, of course, all it would serve to do is to produce the policy levers that can be pulled by progressives to further intervene in society whenever it is that the ‘right people’ happen to leave office – or have their backs turned.
To be Left-wing with respect to the economy is therefore to be Left-wing with respect to culture, and the state’s relationship to both economy and culture are on precisely the same trajectory, since the distinction between those two phenomena is more conceptual rather than it is actual. And that trajectory is an arc that has its ultimate end in totalisation: the eventual identification of state with society, and the eventual relationship of total subservience between individual and state. To acknowledge this is not to say that it is inevitable that matters will reach that culmination; it is rather to map out the path upon which we are walking, so that we have an idea of our likely destination in advance.
To unpack that last paragraph, let’s turn to the scorpion. You will be familiiar, I am sure, with the old tale about the scorpion and the frog, made famous by Orson Welles. But to refresh your memory, the story goes as follows:
And now I’m going to tell you about a scorpion. This scorpion wanted to cross a river, so he asked the frog to carry him. No, said the frog, no thank you. If I let you on my back you may sting me and the sting of the scorpion is death. Now, where, asked the scorpion, is the logic in that? For scorpions always try to be logical. If I sting you, you will die. I will drown. So, the frog was convinced and allowed the scorpion on his back. But, just in the middle of the river, he felt a terrible pain and realised that, after all, the scorpion had stung him. Logic! Cried the dying frog as he started under, bearing the scorpion down with him. There is no logic in this! I know, said the scorpion, but I can’t help it – it’s my character.
What is the character of the state? It is that which governs. I have written about this at length on numerous occasions (perhaps most fully here), but the import of the observation – I claim no credit for it; blame Foucault – is so poorly understood that it bears repeated emphasis. The state is the central political problem of modernity, because it is only in modernity that the ruling framework of a society must find secular, temporal justification. In the premodern world that justification was theological; in the modern world, the only way that a ruling framework can provide such a justification is indeed by ‘governing’: it must do things. The state, which governs, is then the fundamental political feature of the modern world, precisely because it is that which governs. It is the only form of rule which a modern society will tolerate, and to maintain that position it must endlessly present itself as engaging thoroughly and wholeheartedly in governing, and as reflecting on the practice of governing – as to reassure both itself and the population that its existence remains justified.
The entire exercise of modern government, then, must be understood self-referentially. Continual reflection on the practice of governing is the very means by which the modern state comes into being and perpetuates itself. As Foucault put it, in an absolutely crucial passage that is worth reading and re-reading until it can be parsed:
The appearance of the state on the horizon of a reflected practice at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century has been of absolutely capital importance in the history of the state and in the way in which the institutions of the state actually crystallised. The reflexive event, the set of processes by which the state effectively entered into the reflected practice of people at a given moment, the way in which, at a given moment, the state became for those who governed, for those who advised the governors, for those who reflected on governments and the action of governments as they saw it… was absolutely essential, I think, for the entry of all these elements into the field of an active, concerted, and reflected practice that was, precisely, the state. … The state is a practice. The state is inseparable from the set of practices by which the state actually became a way of governing, a way of doing things, and a way too of relating to government.
The result is a vision of the state as neurotic, insecure, restless, self-critical and constantly striving for new ways in which it can govern – new vistas to open up, new areas to explore, new barriers between itself and society to break down. It can indeed do nothing else, precisely because of what it is: it is, to repeat, a practice – not an object or territory or ruler or state-of-affairs, as was a medieval realm, but the very exercise of government itself.
Once this is understood, it explains a great deal about our predicament, and why it is that we ordinary people simply cannot be left alone by those engaged in government, but rather must be always “watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, [an] commanded“. And it also explains why it is that the idea that there is a way that this monolithic drive to govern can be directed towards bolstering competing institutions with their own calling upon our loyalties and our resources – those such as the family, religious organisation, community centre, or business – is such a well-meaning delusion. Those who make this kind of argument are precisely like the frog in the fable, swimming along in good faith, and earnest in their public-spiritedness, but fundamentally misguided about the nature of what they are dealing with. The state will in the long term suffer to exist no hindrance to its project of government, because governing is straightforwardly what it does. That is what it is for, and reflecting upon its own practice is how it justifies itself to itself and the society which it rules. And in the end it always exercises its sting.
I am no anarchist. But it is important for conservatives and libertarians alike to understand this lesson. The state may on occasion be a necessary scorpion, but it is a scorpion all the same, and should be given licence to act only on the strictest and most assiduous of terms. In the great run of cases, society – like the economy – functions best when left to its own devices, and when the basic good sense of ordinary people is allowed to ‘govern’ in a loose definition, in recognition of the basic superiority of dispersed over centralised knowledge.
There will, though, be situations in which it the state is rightly called upon to rule, particularly in the making and enforcement of law, and in acting to preserve the stability of the body politic across time. It will not escape your observation that this will mean doing many of the things that conservatives wish it would take seriously – such as maintaining a proper border, deporting foreign criminals, properly investigating and punishing crime, pursuing the national interest in foreign affairs, and so on. Identifying further such situations is of course the proper purview of politics – though I will give you a clue: toothbrushing is not one of them.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack where this article first appeared.
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“‘Left on the economy and Right on culture’.”
What is ‘new’ about that? It’s what we have had since Labour’s victory in 1945 introducing a ‘Mixed Economy’ of private and nationalised businesses sitting aside traditional working class social conservatism.
Subsequent so-called Conservative Parties adopted this model until Thatcher denationalised State run businesses, but kept the rest.
Post-Thatcher the Conservatives followed in Blair’s footsteps, moving away from social conservatism towards the Left and following World-saviour Brown’s return to economic socialism.
Putting neo- and social in front of words is just distraction – and not very original.
Excellent analysis. Ostensible Conservatives like Cameron, May, Johnson, and Sunal are liars and/or fools for believing the big state can be a force for good.
Unfortunately, politics attracts the arrogant and the narcissistic who are forever looking to expand their realm. It seems to be nigh on impossible to confine the activities of the state to its core functions only. Even the USA, with its constitution which explicitly limits the scope of the federal government, has seen the federal government continue to expand in open defiance of the constitution. Perhaps Swiss style radical decentralisation and direct(ish) democracy has the greatest ability to contain the state.
I don’t particularly have an issue with schools teaching children to clean their teeth regularly and properly. It’s not much different conceptually from giving them daily milk at school, which used to happen when I was a kid.
It’s all the other evil nonsense I object to – teaching them there are seventy-something genders, sex is a social construct, the government is on their side, etc.
I had ‘compulsory milk’ at school too. It was originally put in place for kids who were genuinely malnourished. The problem with this program of teaching kids is that you are also teaching parents that government absolves them of their responsibility for child raising (as if enough damage hadn’t been done already).
I think protectionism can be overused, used for the wrong reasons and may often be the wrong thing, but I find the idea of a very self-sufficient country very appealing – it gives you more ability to go your own way, which would hopefully the “way” the people want to go.
Found this quite interesting but genuinely confused – I thought the battleground in UK politics was to appear right wing on economics and on the left socially?
“It is that which governs” – or jobs for the boys, in effect. What organisation would want to cut back on it’s rôle in business? While there are many benefits from international standards, as distinct from commercial anarchy, in most industries, it’s also true that most institutions, whether in or outside political government, tend to operate defensively.
Traditionally, conservatives were monarchists and monarchical states of the past, which controlled, among other things, public transport as well as public communication and tightly regulated a real lot of things in the economy, were anything but small by standards of today.
In Germany, Bismarck introduced universal health insurance towards the end of the 19th century but nobody demanded that the state must oversee the private hygenie of the children of ordinary people because this would save the health insurance money. In fact, even the NHS has existed for over 70 years without someone coming with this idea. It probably even existed for longer without aggressive campaigns against smoking and drinking than with it. Our modern would-be tyrants want to rule tyrannically because they would really like to be tyrants. There’s no law of nature which forces them to, it’s all down to allowing the wrong kind of people access to levers of power and let them dig in there since the advent of Cool Britannia, if someone (hopefully) remembers the slogan.
The solution to this problem is to get them out of there and not
let the semi-undead neoliberal Shreeenk the stateee! zombies fire-sell whatever baths they can still find somewhere and throw the bathing babies into the bin.
The argument seems to be that there is no centre ground in politics. We are either extreme Left (the state rules in everything) or extreme Right (close to anarchy). Well I occupy the centre ground and always have. I believe in well funded public services and I am prepared to pay more tax to fund them. But when it comes to the prevention of disease the state should never instruct but it must advise.
Starmer may well desire to instruct the nation’s children to clean their teeth, but he would be well advised not to try. Instead I would suggest that the author of this piece and Starmer study the “back to sleep campaign” which ran between 1990 and 1995 and led to the fall in the number of deaths from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in England and Wales from around 1500 per annum in 1985 to 500 per annum in 1995. The standard teaching in the early 1980s was to put infants to sleep on their fronts. The evidence was that there was better oxygenation in the prone position and the infant would be less likely to inhale vomit. This fact was rediscovered in the Covid pandemic when patients in ITU were placed prone to improve the oxygenation of the blood. Peter Fleming and colleagues published a paper in the BMJ in 1990 which pointed out that the prone position seemed to be asscoiated with increased risk of SIDS and reviewed a number of other papers which had found the same thing. There was a lot of publicity about this paper and midwives and health visitors started to advise parents to put their infants to sleep on their backs (supine). This occured without any government intervention. Ann Diamond, a well known TV presenter, who had lost her infant to SIDS, led a media campaign but there was no offical campaign. I attended a meeting in Peterhouse College in Cambridge the day after black Wednesday (1992), run by the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID). There was discussion about a national campaign, although deaths had already fallen quite markedly. There was actually one voice (who will remain nameless) who wanted a randomised trial. But everybody else agreed to support the “Back to Sleep” campaign. It was a great success. But the key point was that there was good medical advice and parents were keen to follow it.
The majority of people in the UK, those on and around the median wage, want good public services, want their children to be able to buy a house, want to stay healthy and don’t mind paying taxes. They are not interested in GDP, but they do want employment and do not like rising prices. Those with a white skin do not want to be told that they should be ashamed of their heritage. They do not want the state to tell them what to do but they do not object to sound advise based on good scientific evidence. Best summed up as slighltly to the left on the economy and slightly to the right on matters cultural.
I brush your child’s teeth, therefore I, the State, exist. I, the State, exist in the brushing of your child’s teeth.
What happens when the parental state becomes a neglectful parent? Shall we ask the girl children of Rotherham? And in other places and circumstances?
Mr Starmer might as well go the whole hog. Given how ‘neglectful’ parents are, how does the parental state know what horrors are in the child’s lunchbox? How can the state exist and ensure children’s health unless teachers wipe someone else’s child’s @rse?
To paraphrase an Hungarian revolutionary: Who will free us from Government?
What is this ‘drain on the state’s resources’ that Starmer talks about?
If the state doesn’t exist apart from what is does, it’s resources are only the things or people in which it acts. The state’s presence is never latent. The state is therefore everywhere it acts. It’s resources are only limited by the number of things in which it has not yet acted.
As God’s grace or the Holy Spirit is for Christians, just so the invisible state. As with the ‘wind of the Spirit’ you hear the sound of it but know know not whence it comes of wither it goes, so with the spirit of the state: you feel its presence but know not its beginning or end. The Almighty God-State. Eternal, immortal, invisible, only wise; dwelling in unapproachable light of unchallengeable goodness and infallible righteousness; without shadow of change, though changing everything else
Has to be mentioned here as well: The purpose of a health system is to repair health problems and not to prevent them. There’s a very simple reason for this: The first is a tangible objective which can – within certain limits – be accomplished. The second isn’t as it’s impossible to determine how many health problems some action XY really prevented. That’s all guesswork based on inherently unverifiable opinions. This implies its also impossible to quantify the cost-effectiveness of health problem prevention as only the cost of the measures is known but not the savings indirectly caused by them.
Some people are very convinced that total abstinence will prevent lots of health problems. Some other people are equally convinced that praying to some god will accomplish this. Neither of both is verifiable, so, let both of them preach to the unconverted in order to convert them. Neither the former nor the latter lifestyle pressure group ought to be allowed to use the power of the state to force people into their creed, no matter how convinced they are of it.
How does your statement on health problems fit with my description of sudden infant death syndrome (above).? There is a possibility of preventing SIDS, but no way of repairing it.
The “back to sleep” campaign was a great success because parents quickly took to what they considered to be sensible advice; and advice that was consistent with their instincts. The government had no direct role but the NHS supported it.
The Labour party are making a lot of promises on prevention which involve putting a lot more pressure on the NHS and will be counter-productive. In fact most of their so called prevention is actually early detection of disease, which is very expensive, because we always find much more potential disease then would ever materialise.
The Conservative party must not make the mistake of being against primary prevention, they just need to be against the way Labour approaches prevention.
I wish someone in the Conservative Party would grasp the concept of the mucosal tissue microbiota, because then it would be obvious how to reduce the burden of disease within the UK.
https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2821/rr
How does your statement on health problems fit with my description of sudden infant death syndrome (above).?
Well, nobody knows how many people, if any, took this advice, nobdoy knows how SIDS would have developed without it, nobody knows the reason why the toddlers who didn’t die suddenly didn’t die and lastly, taking everything for granted, the effect of the campaign (at which cost?) was that a numerically unremarkable event remained numerically unremarkable. That’s classic public health voodoo and somehow, people in earlier times used to have more healthy children under ecomically worse circumstances entirely without it. If people want to proselytize in favour of proper sleeping positions for toddlers because nature just cannot be trusted, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t even have the right molest anybody with this who doesn’t want to be bothered with it, let alone go beyond that.
The PFKAL¹ is still chock-full of academic New Age lifestyle religion zealots and public health and/ or NHS money spent on something useful (like pulling broken teeth) and not on their preferred pet causes is still the argument to force their weird creeds onto everyone. That’s obviously counter-productive to anyone except these people themselves who are probably motivated by a combination of simply lusting for the money in the NHS budget and a desire to affirm the correctness of their beliefs by forcing others to bow to them.
¹ Party Formerly Known As Labour, that is, until Tony ‘Call me Messiah!’ Blair killed the actual Labour party.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/labours-bold-mission-today-brushing-teeth-tomorrow-tying-shoe-laces/
TCW’s view of the ground-breaking ‘how to brush your teeth’ initiative announced by Kneel.
Funny. But the Labour policy actually isn’t. It’s another demonstration that the lifestyle dictators adhering to a zoo of worldly New Age religions aren’t willing to let anything slip past them, no matter how small. The problem with these people is that they’re convinced that there’s a single right way to do everything, that they’re the ones with higher insight enabling them to determine what that single right way is and that they’re entitled to enforce it because they’re the ones with the higher insight, ie, demigods (at least) and not just mere fallible people.
These people would love to prescribe things down to the colour and kind of bed linen others must use and would certainly also love to operate CCTV in every toilet to ensure that everyone uses them properly.
I wish this was a bette text than what I can accomplish in this area …
Another muricanism from the All the world is murica! muricans. The battle – it’s not really appropriate to call this a battle – is not between the Everything is political! and the Nothing is political! aka Taxation is robbery! people as these are just two sides of the same coin: People whose understanding of the world is binary, ie, who are convinced that there are always exactly two choices and that one of them is always right and the other always wrong. Both kinds should be firmly kept in their playpens as both are equally dictatorical. Standpoint A could be described as Every child must be forced into a comprehensive public school! and B as Teaching future McDonald’s Burger grill operators to read is a waste of public money! In both situations, common people have no choices.
The ones who started the nannying are now reaping what they sowed:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/jonas-himmelstrand-the-swedish-daycare-experiment-has-been-a-social-disaster-2/
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/swedish-parents-have-lost-trust-in-themselves-under-the-daycare-assault/