Local government elections are coming later this year, possibly as early as April. Then the big one, another general election, is due next year. I fear, therefore, that one will shortly be entering another season of manifestos. Thus will the precious time of a multitude of intelligent, able and dedicated men and women be expended to little, or very likely no, avail – not to mention the loss of the small forest of trees which will be consumed to supply the paper. I suspect that most people either can’t be bothered to read manifestos or are deeply cynical about their purpose and value. It may be that the very word manifesto has fallen into popular disrepute because the most famous of them all is associated with communism and communism, fairly or unfairly, has become a hardly mentionable dirty word in the political lexicon these days. Modern day political parties are increasingly thinking of other words to describe their efforts to gull the voting public into believing how good and great their intentions are and how miraculous their achievements will be. But a thorn by any other name is still a thorn.
By whatever name, the master plans of any sort are rightly viewed with grave scepticism by nearly everyone except those who painstakingly compile them. They are seen as comprising a mixture of promises for which the resources do not exist to fulfil, promises which will be forgotten as soon as power is gained, promises which those who proclaim them have no intention of implementing and promises which changed circumstances will in any case prevent ever being carried out. There is no grand political programme which cannot be summed up in the phrase “a chicken in every pot, gold in every pocket, a skill in every hand, a rainbow in every future.”
I think myself that all efforts to declare impressively tidy and comprehensive schemes in a very untidy world are profoundly misguided. The blueprint theory of politics, or indeed of economics or business or anything else, makes no sense to me. Master plans, as soon as they are announced, begin to be eroded by changing circumstances and rendered out of date by evolving time’s unforeseen imperatives. Such master plans are soon worth less than the paper on which they are written. Recall what chaos theory tells us: the merest flap of a butterfly’s wing over the Amazon can cause an immense storm in Paris a few days later. The cruelties of nature, not to mention the imperfections of man, are many times greater in effect than the rigidities and perfections of any master plan. Every day that passes makes a master plan more of an abstraction which, if clung to, becomes increasingly useless and even dangerous.
Similarly, dependence on any abstract principle to guide policy is a deeply flawed way of going about managing the affairs of man. The truth is that all doctrinal formulae are dangerous. The insistent cry of ‘the solution of the market place’ and the command ‘Privatise!’ are the same incantatory nonsense as the magic phrases ‘planned economy’ and ‘Nationalise!’ used to be. Consider politics as you might consider cooking. A bad cook is not somebody who lacks a vision of cooking or a set of core beliefs about cooking or a master plan of how to cook. A bad cook is just a cook who doesn’t know how to cook and serves rotten food.
The best politicians are those who serve up ideas which function like hypotheses in science; in other words they are the best ideas currently available but must always be subject to testing and replacement by better ones. Thus judgements can and should be made continuously about the utility, value, effect, rightness or wrongness of ideas or proposals without any concern about whether or not they correspond to a pre-existing abstract principle or preconceived master plan. Actions should test, not slavishly follow, plans. When something is wrong it is wrong because it is wrong and not because it is inconsistent with some preconceived plan. The distinction, and even the greatness, of democratic politics is to make the usual moral fault of inconsistency into something very like a virtue.
Judgement of a politician’s morality and success ought to be made, in George Orwell’s beautiful phrase, on the basis of how clean a smell he leaves behind. If our idea of a political hero should be that of an original thinker who had a vision for his people, translated it into a detailed master blueprint, and then stuck to his stated principles through thick and thin, the best example of such a political hero to be found in the last century is Adolph Hitler.
In our daily practical affairs no such condition of things called ‘truth’ or ‘perfection’ or ‘ideal’ can possibly be attained. Therefore none should be proclaimed. The exercise of political power makes most sense when it simply aims at the cultivation of what the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott termed the “peaceable decencies of conduct” between those who are to be governed. Is there the remotest possibility that any of the manifestos we will shortly be asked to read will be written in that conviction?
