The Pinch

"This book has only just been written and therefore can’t be described as being in the pantheon of Conservative classics. But, as a modern policy book, it’s hard to beat. It’s an absolutely brilliant book. His basic theory is that all policy questions should be considered through the generational filter: that means booms and busts of population are absolutely critical, that the ties between generations are critical. His views on the ties between the generations are what make this a distinctly Conservative book. I think David Willetts is by far the most considerable Conservative political writer; and I don’t mean he is the most considerable Conservative writing today, I mean it in absolute terms, full stop. He is always interesting and he has read massive amounts of social research. He has inserted sociology into Conservative thinking. What he’s done in this book is a tour de force of that kind of thinking. He was the first to understand and explain the importance of the family. Now he has explained the importance of generational shifts, of generational equality, of generational obligations. He gives a startlingly original explanation for our problems with saving and debt and some very good modern ways of illustrating how things like the baby boom have influenced social policy. I recommend it because it’s an illustration of very smart, non-ideological thinking that proceeds from an understanding of how society is rather than from how society should be. Yes I do. Willetts does write about what he thinks should happen but he starts with where society is. It becomes more and more clear to me that the whole of democratic socialism was an intellectual error. I don’t mean that believing in greater social equality or wanting to eradicate injustice was an error. Rather, there was a particular democratic socialist idea, which was that it would be possible to control and organise the world. This was based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how complicated the world is. It didn’t proceed from how the world is, but from a misunderstanding of reality. Whereas what David tries to do is to rely on research about how people actually live their lives, what their first relationships really are; and it’s not theoretical, it’s based on social research. I also use this book to stand for something else – that Conservatives are increasingly turning to evolutionary psychology. Human behaviour and instinct is what it is, so then you have to do what you can to change it or change social arrangements to work around it. It’s not very likely to me that we are the one species that didn’t evolve and whose behaviour is not basically evolutionary in origin. Of course. But one of the things in evolutionary psychology which is very important for politics is the understanding of the origins of altruism. What’s very important about this book is that Willetts is trying to find a Conservative theory of fairness rooted in the question of what we actually regard as fair, not what somebody else happens to decree we should regard as fair. Our altruism is based on a desire to reciprocate other people’s favours. We know that’s a good way of surviving, so we try to reciprocate other people’s favours and hope they reciprocate ours. This has a good consequence, which is altruism towards others who are not our family; the bad consequence is we tend to look for other people who are like us and we tend to co-operate with them. So it can lead to tribalism but it can also lead to social cohesion. Nobody who understands evolutionary psychology should go from that to believing, for example, that because women and men are different that either are superior or inferior to the others. But the starting point in discussions of fairness should be who we are and what we are, whatever that might be. All of that discussion is reflected in The Pinch . I think a Conservative idea of fairness is very important. Clearly, every community’s idea of what’s fair will differ, but a sense of justice and an appeal to fairness should be central. You have to have a language in which to talk about fairness and I think it has been a weakness of Conservative thinking that we haven’t had that. And so people like David are trying to redress that imbalance."