The mother nation

A recent visit it to a ProgCon (Progressive Conservative) website alerted me to an interesting dichotomy: the mother nation versus the nanny state. We have here two fundamentally different views of the role government should play in our society. We have a choice to make in this matter, and it is my view that by adopting the ideal of the mother nation, as opposed to the nanny state, we choose an enabling state, rather than the state as a vehicle for a dependency culture.

A recent conversation with a local Conservative councillor was also illumintating. He spoke of the local government as an 'enabler'. He advocated a different approach to higher taxes and increased spending. He promoted the idea of partnerships between government and business, the bringing in of the private sector with the help of public sector subsidies, to enable projects and initiatives to get off the ground and remain economically viable for the long-term. The Conservatives had taken a cautious approach to spending the people's money, and had not rushed into ambitious yet uncertain projects that would rely on unyielding state funding.

This is not a pitch for the Conservative Party. But it is a pitch for the consideration of different ways of operating in government.

The conventional wisdom would seem to be that greater public benefit must only come from greater public spending and greater government attention to problems. It seems to me that the only real way of dealing with social and economic problems is to develop solutions that allow people to solve those problems for themselves. This is not a harsh, stand-off-ish philosophy, but one which recognises that government, in and of itself, cannot hope to be able to solve all of society's problems. It is a philosophy which runs directly counter to Fabianism, the socialist school of thought advocated by George Bernard Shaw, which would imply that only a large, ever expanding government, run by experts who know the people's interests better than they do, can build a better society. It is the philosophy of voluntarism, of compassionate conservatism, of the fundamental belief in the power of individuals, families and communities over any form of social engineering or activist statism.

Government and the welfare state have an important part to play in our society, but as an enabler, as a vehicle to help people help themselves. 'Compassionate Conservatism', a book written by Marvin Olasky, illustrates excellent examples of how this approach can be encouraged and nurtured. Let us debate the role of government!