Ever since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party, Leftist commentators have complained about his sense of entitlement.
If you’re not British, you might not catch the class-war connotations with which that word is freighted. The Prime Minister is an Old Etonian, and he looks and sounds it. Of course, many of his socialist critics went to private schools themselves, but they generally pretend to have been miserable there. Tony Blair, who attended the most famous boarding school in Scotland, went so far as to invent a story about having tried to run away to the Caribbean.
The class system is the peculiar curse of the British Right. In other Anglosphere democracies, conservative leaders can cut taxes without being accused of waging war on the proletariat. Canada’s Stephen Harper, Australia’s Tony Abbott and New Zealand’s John Key have all constructed electoral majorities around the idea of a smaller state. None of them feel the need to keep repeating, as Cameron had to do over and over again at his manifesto launch last Tuesday, that he is on the side of working people.
And yet I can’t help feeling that the entitlement shtick misses the point. These days, the British Establishment is not made up of dukes or bishops, but of radical lawyers, politically correct broadcasters, avant-garde artists, heads of government agencies and, behind them, the mass of licensors, regulators, inspectors, officials and judges who run the country without the bother of getting themselves elected to anything. They’re the ones who truly radiate entitlement.
David Cameron’s opponents might be on firmer ground if they pointed to his relatively slight experience outside government. But they’ll never do it, because that criticism applies far more strongly to their own side. Neither Ed Miliband, the Labor leader, nor Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat, has ever had a job beyond politics.
That’s the kind of entitlement that should worry us. Not the supposed swagger of the posh, but the world-view of politicians who are so much a part of the governing class that they can no longer discharge the primary purpose of the elected representative — to ensure that the state machine works for the rest of the country rather than the other way around.
Can you think of anyone in American politics who might have that problem? Here’s a clue. On the day she announced her candidacy, I had a look at Hillary Clinton’s Twitter page. What, I wondered, might it tell me about her likely priorities in government? She followed nine other accounts: Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton Foundation, Clinton School, Clinton Library, Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Women in Public Service, Too Small to Fail and Beyond Differences. (To be fair, five more accounts have since been added: @HillaryforSC, @HillaryforNV, @HillaryforNH, @HillaryforIA and @HillaryforNY.)
And why not? When you’ve been in and around government at the highest level for long enough, you’re bound to start taking it for granted. You forget that you are passing through institutions that are greater than you are. It becomes all about you.
This was precisely the phenomenon that the United States was created to forestall. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. He aimed to design a system where the government would be ousted regularly, where power was dispersed, where decisions were taken as closely as possible to the people they affected, and where the citizen was exalted over the state.
That system, as Jefferson kept telling anyone who’d listen, depended on constantly changing the people at the top. If certain families got it into their heads that the republic was their plaything, America would descend into oligarchy as surely as if it had a hereditary nobility.
Are we really contemplating another Bush-Clinton contest in 2016? I mean, Jeb Bush strikes me as a decent sort and, as I’ve written here before, Republicans badly need Hispanic support. But in a nation of 320 million, the law of averages suggests that there must be some capable candidates with a surname other than Bush or Clinton.
David Cameron may be distantly related to the Queen, but he is not the wife, son or brother of a previous prime minister. He grasped that his job was to prevent the producer-capture of the state machine and, by and large, he succeeded, cutting spending, slimming bureaucracy, rebalancing the economy back to the private sector. Result? The deficit has more than halved, Britain is the fastest-growing major Western country and — incredible as this sounds — more jobs have been created in the U.K. over the past four years than in the other 27 member states of the European Union put together.
That kind of shake-up, as a rule, comes only from leaders with an outsider’s perspective, like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Spend enough time in and around office and you lose your sense of “us” and “them” — or, rather, you start seeing “us” as the apparat and “them” as the general population.
In 1825, Jefferson bemoaned that the principles of the revolution were being lost as young Americans “look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy founded in banking institutions and monied in corporations.” As so often, he was ahead of his time. Britain, on paper, is a monarchy; but it has long since given up entrusting its actual government to political dynasties. Can you say the same of America?
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
