Gove’s Ditchley Lecture is a breath of fresh air in the corridors of power
(Photo by Luke Dray/Getty Images)
He may not be the most popular of British politicians, but Michael Gove’s reputation as the most thoughtful, knowledgeable and open-minded member of the Government will have been reinforced by this year’s Ditchley Lecture . This is not the work of a speech-writer: anyone who knows Gove will recognise his incisive, erudite style. The only member of the Cabinet who could have written this lecture is the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Who else is capable of combining a tour d’horizon of European, American and British political culture; a sharp critique of the Conservatives’ record in office (including his own part in it); and finally a plea for reform of the machinery of government as radical as any since the Victorians created the modern civil service?
Gove begins by quoting Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who rejected violent revolution in favour of “the long march through the institutions”. Unlike the many who unthinkingly repeat this cliché, however, Gove has actually read his Gramsci. Instead he offers a less familiar quotation from the Prison Notebooks of a man whose hopes for a Communist utopia had been crushed by Mussolini’s Fascists: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the inherited is dying — and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Why is a busy Cabinet minister citing a disillusioned Communist thinker writing nearly a century ago? The point, for Gove, is that there are strong similarities between our present predicament and that of the early 1930s. That is why he dwells at length on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal — a response to the global depression of that “low, dishonest decade” (yes, he quotes Auden too). We should not assume that the present Government’s plan will necessarily resemble Roosevelt’s, but Boris Johnson’s slogan “Build, build, build” does have a whiff of the Keynesian public works programmes of the last century about it.
However, Gove’s lecture also draws on much more recent writers, such as David Goodhart and his distinction between “Anywheres” and “Somewheres”, suggesting that “the gap between those who can live and work anywhere, and those with fewer resources who remain rooted in the heartland, has only widened in recent years.” Indeed, Maurice Glasman, the sage of “Blue Labour”, has even proposed a new definition of the working class. In the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lord Glasman says, working class means “not being able to work from home”. Gove’s professed aim is to open up the civil service and the rest of the public sector to those who are not, like himself, Oxford PPE graduates.
Though he does not say so, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the limitations of establishment generalists when confronted by a public health crisis with scientific advisers pulling in one direction and business lobbyists in the opposite one. In Germany, the scientific hinterland of Chancellor Merkel contrasts strikingly with the classicist Boris Johnson’s background at Eton and Balliol. Both enjoyed an elite education, but only one of them was intellectually equipped to master the detail of epidemiological modelling.
On the subject of the Germans: one of Gove’s parallels with the 1930s has already come under criticism. Helene von Bismarck, an Anglophile descendant of the Iron Chancellor, has tweeted her displeasure with the minister’s inclusion of Germany as an example of the collapse of support for traditional centrist parties in Europe, in favour of populism. As an historian, Dr von Bismarck takes a less alarmist view of recent German politics. She points out that the long-term decline of the ruling coalition parties, the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, does not necessarily imply a lurch to the extremes. The Greens, she suggests, are now a mature “people’s party” (Volkspartei), responsible enough to replace the Social Democrats (SPD) in government. As for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): it has gained in prestige and popularity from Mrs Merkel’s handling of the pandemic, at the expense of the upstart Alternative for Germany (AfD).
As against this characteristically Bismarckian analysis of German Realpolitik, however, the Conservative MP Greg Hands and others have sprung to Gove’s defence. He is correct to draw attention to the fact that the AfD is the first party to the right of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party to sit in the Bundestag. And the steady draining away of support for the centre parties at each federal election is undeniable. Unmentioned is the fragmentation of German politics: instead of three parliamentary parties in the postwar era, there are now six. In its present composition the Bundestag resembles the Reichstag in the latter stages of the Weimar Republic, which also had six major parties. This is not to suggest that the substance of German politics bears any resemblance to the 1930s, but if an economic depression is in prospect, the auguries are not encouraging.
Although it feeds on numerous discontents, the AfD is primarily a single-issue protest party: it campaigns against immigration, and in particular against immigrants from Muslim countries. One hitherto unnoticed by-product of the Covid-19 crisis has been the virtual closure of European borders, including those of Germany. For the past three months, there has been no immigration into the Federal Republic at all. It may be coincidence that support for the AfD has slumped, just as the CDU is riding so high that there is even talk of Mrs Merkel postponing her retirement yet again. (After 15 years in office, she would be unwise to listen to such siren calls, but who knows?) If, however, the collateral damage of the pandemic were to include a new migration crisis, as desperate people from Africa and Asia head for Europe, it is unlikely that the Germans would repeat the experiment of 2015, when they welcomed more than a million Syrian refugees and other migrants. For Chancellor Merkel, a hard lesson has been learned: remember that while your friends and colleagues may be Anywheres, your voters are mostly Somewheres.
For Britain, as for Germany, the danger of populist extremism is always present. The antidote is, as Gove suggests, to bring public service closer to the public. In Germany, as in the US, such localism is built into the federal system. Here, the domination of London can at best be mitigated.
The “morbid symptoms” of which Gramsci wrote are best tackled head-on. The emerging new battleground is the rule of law, which must of course be defended at all costs. Violence against the police must not be tolerated, any more than police violence against minorities. What is required is a rebalancing of law enforcement priorities away from the preoccupations of elites and in favour of reassuring the masses: as Gove puts it, “the former are more sensitive to the harm caused by alleged micro-aggressions; the latter are less likely to be squeamish about tougher sentences for those guilty of actual physical aggression.”
There is much more thought-provoking material in Michael Gove’s Ditchley Lecture. It is a breath of fresh air in the corridors of power.
