Tory Personal Generosity vs Public Meanness

On 10th March, I attended the opening of the CAB’s (Citizens’ Advice Bureau) smart new offices in the Battersea Library on Lavender Hill, where I was approached by a self-confessed Tory constituent of  mine, who said nice things about my monthly newsletter. We got talking about how he could possibly be both a CAB volunteer and a Tory. I am afraid that I was a bit rude to him, or perhaps I should say over-dramatic for such a social environment. If I knew for certain who he was I would apologise to him (I hope he sees this) – it was OTT of me.

But this exchange made me reflect on the nature of personal and public morality. Why is it that so many Tories I know are personally pleasant and generous but would no more dream of voting for, say, a 1% income tax rise than  the proverbial “turkey voting for Christmas”? After all the Tories I am talking about are not strapped for a bob or two, nor are most of them personally mean or ungenerous.

For example, I remember I once did some fairly aggressive fund raising for the British Heart Foundation (I raised about £10,000) and, as I move in political circles, I knew the politics of most of the donors, who sponsored me. I don’t think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that the Tories were considerably more generous as a group than my Labour colleagues. And yet, when it comes to politics, generosity is about the last quality one expects to find in any group of Tories.

The opposite sign of the coin is, of course, that at least in my observation, many Labour colleagues respect and value what one might call collective action, e.g. having much higher levels of direct taxation, even when this action would be clearly against their own personal and immediate interest (, although all of us would, of course, benefit from not having to step over rough sleepers on our way in, and out of, the opera). Equally Labour members can be and often are contemptuous of “charitable” giving, condemning it as merely a palliative and an inadequate replacement for organised state (or mutual) redistribution.

Take my constituent CAB volunteer as a case in point. I think it would not be unfair to say that his basic argument was (and is) that “you can’t interfere with the market”. He would not, or could not, accept that the market is a social construct, made and designed by human beings and therefore capable of being interfered with very easily. Here in Wandsworth, for example, we have completely changed the housing market by taking 20,000 council homes out of the controlled sector and putting them on to the so-called “free” market, in what I would call a massive interference with the market, both in terms of supply and demand.

My constituent argued, during our conversation, that the Council sales issue was past tense and that I was wasting my time crying over spilt milk. This sounds superficially to be a good point, but the Tories are now in the process of extending this “principle” to housing associations, so it isn’t actually past tense at all.

In reality, of course, the Tory party only claims that the market cannot be interfered with, when it suits their case. They have a very different perspective when the banks face bankruptcy, when of course the opposite applies and the market MUST be interfered with, as a matter of urgency.

But, even at the local level, I well remember senior Tory councillors, now MPs Chris Chope and Paul Beresford and Boris’s Deputy Mayor Eddie Lister, when pushing for more and more privatisations, stating that they were “creating a market”. If you doubt that then just ask yourself what the market was in home helps or meals on wheels 30 years ago before privatisation got going – of course, there wasn’t such a thing as a market then – all such services were delivered by Council manual labour on nationally negotiated rates of pay and conditions.

Whether or not the market has been a “good thing” is another issue; but my point is that my constituent’s argument is that one can’t interfere with it and hence he comes down against political action, whereas I think political action is all and his volunteering is very good-hearted of him but only, at heart, a minimal palliative. Whilst for him, my political activism is useless resistance to market forces – or in the vernacular, “pissing in the wind”.

Is this why I am so often confused by the fact that so many Tories seem so nice but vote for such ghastly, mean, pauperising policies? And no doubt, why so many Tories think that most “of you chaps are well-meaning but unrealistic idiots”?

I think that my side is right; but its surely time that we made the case publicly for the enlightened self-interest, that collective intervention represents, before the rough sleepers return again to more aggressive forms of opposition.