Moral Enormity

The sins of mission-driven governmemt

Mission-driven government means raising our sights as a nation and focusing on ambitious, measurable, long-term objectives that provide a driving sense of purpose for the country.

-Labour Party Manifesto, 2024

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has for several years been telling anyone who cares to listen that it will be ‘mission-driven’. The population are now going to find out exactly what that means - good and hard. What they will discover, too late, is that (except for very limited exceptions which I will come to in due course) the last thing on Earth that anybody should want is a government that has a mission. That is because a government with a mission needs conscripts. And being a conscript is not a good position in which to find oneself.

The English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott helps us to understand all of this very succinctly. Human associations, he tells us, are almost always ‘enterprise associations’ - they have purposes, however vague. Companies are supposed to make money for their shareholders. Sports clubs are supposed to win games. Fire brigades are supposed to put out fires. Church congregations are supposed to evangelise or worship God. The Terra Nova expedition was supposed to get to the South Pole. And so on.

Very often, an enterprise association will have more than one purpose (a sports club is supposed to win games but also to serve a role for the community; a church is about mutual support and socialising as much as it is about worship; the Terra Nova expedition also wanted to bring back an emperor penguin egg; and so on). But generally speaking when people bring themselves together into an organisation of some kind, it is in order to do something, or some set of things.

Not all human associations are like that, of course. The obvious example is the family. Oakeshott, though, a notorious womaniser and libertine, did not write much about that subject. His interest was in the contrast between enterprise associations and something which he called a ‘civil association’ - an association which has no purpose, and which is joined together ‘solely in terms of the recognition (not the choice or the desirability)’ of a system of law and a system for administering that law.

Such an association, in Oakeshott’s view, did not exist anywhere on Earth, and never had. But it was the only morally legitimate basis on which a State could be constituted. The State, for Oakeshott, only had the moral right to exist if it had no purpose, goal or objective; it could only be moral if it consisted merely of rules, and a means for making, enforcing, adjudicating, applying and amending those rules. And it could only have a moral relationship with the population, it followed, if that relationship inhered only in the recognition on the part of the population that the system of law and legal administration exists, and has force.

This may all sound very abstract, but it is of critical importance in understanding our current predicament, so let me unpack it. If the State has a purpose, mission, objective, etc., then it obviously becomes one of Oakeshott’s enterprise associations. But the crucial point for Oakeshott was that, unlike any other type of enterprise association, the State is one which the individual cannot choose to join (one is simply born into it), nor choose to leave (except by actually physically no longer being within the State’s jurisdiction at all). One is stuck with things as they are.

And what this means, of course, is that, whether one likes it or not, one has to work towards - or at least not work against - whatever purposes one’s government has in mind. One does not get to choose (to come back to Labour’s manifesto) whether there is, for example, a National Wealth Fund, or Britain becomes a clean energy superpower, or we get a young people’s mental health ‘hub’ in every ‘community’. And nor does one get to choose even whether to abstain from participation in the realisation of the State’s purposes - because at the very least one’s wealth will be appropriated and directed towards those purposes, and one will very often be compelled, nudged, coerced, or cajoled into otherwise taking part. One is not, then, in those circumstances, free. One has liberty only to the extent that one does not interfere with the State’s ‘mission’. And that is no liberty at all.

But Oakeshott was no mere knee-jerk libertarian. He was a making a subtler, and deeper point. His concern was that, if a State has a purpose or mission, then that means the population is deprived of the very conditions of morality as such, as Oakeshott understood them. This is because the only option available for any individual citizen in such circumstances becomes obedience of whatever commands, obligations or precepts come from on high, in the name of whatever objectives government has in mind. And that is not in fact to act morally: it is merely to pursue morality ‘as the crow flies’. It is to do somebody else’s conception of the ‘right thing’, on the basis simply that one will face severe consequences if one does not. It is to have one’s behaviour subject, then, as Oakeshott put it, to causes, rather than reasons. One is not, in such conditions, exercising choice on the basis of reflection on what is right. One is simply doing what one is supposed to, because one must.

This can be contrasted with the State imagined as a civil association. It will be remembered that the civil association, as Oakeshott described it, was a State which has no purpose, and which only makes, enforces, adjudicates, applies and amends rules. Clearly, coercion is not absent in such a State - enforcement of rules, after all, is nothing if not coercive. But unlike in the State-as-enterprise-association it is a morally legitimate form of coercion, because it serves to preserve the sphere of moral choice for everyone. A society in which there are no rules is a society of might-makes-right, and that is, obviously, one in which there is no moral freedom either. Coercion in the civil association happens only on the basis of maintaining the social order necessary to ensure that there are rules of conduct which have any application at all, and that moral choice can in fact be exercised by everybody.

This puts Oakeshott’s conception of morality very close to that of Michel Foucault (not necessarily the first person to leap to mind when thinking of examples of moral philosophers). Foucault once said that ‘freedom is the ontological condition of ethics’. This is a French post-structuralist’s way of making a point that is fairly obvious when one really thinks about it: if one is not free, then one is not acting ethically, or unethically, because one has no choice. It is only if a person has the choice to do right or wrong, and chooses to do the right thing (or not to do the wrong thing) that he or she can be said to be exercising ethics. Otherwise, he or she is a what Oakeshott called a mere ‘role-performer’. He or she exists only to obey.

Morality, then, is about choice, and Oakeshott labelled the State a ‘moral enormity’ when it takes on the characteristics of an enterprise association, because when it does so, it deprives the population of the most human capacity of all - the capacity to exercise free will in respect of what is moral. And in so doing, it not only sets itself up as moral arbiter, but reduces the human individual to a purely instrumental position - a tool for the achievement of the State’s purposes, rather than a soul with independent value in its own right.

We are all, I think, familiar with the feeling of being subjects of the State-as-enterprise-association. As Oakeshott was at pains to make clear, all States in modernity have at least something of that character - there is no pure civil association in anything like the terms he described. But that feeling is going to become particularly acute for those of us who live in Britain as Labour’s grip on power strengthens, because it is of course the Labour Party that always bills itself most forcefully as having grand overarching purposes into which the population will be conscripted. That, after all, is in essence what the Labour Party is for.

In my last post, I described that drive - to ‘deliver [the population] from the great anxiety and fearsome torments of free and individual decision’ - as always existing at the heart of Labour government, and used as an example the case of mooted capital gains tax on the sale of primary residences. But the news is now each day veritably packed to the gills with such examples.

Today we learn, for instance, that Labour will be conducting a school curriculum review - led by somebody who once complained in print that the UK education system had an ‘obsession with academic achievement’ - and that it will force every school in the country, whatever its status, location, history, or pre-existing mission, to teach the same, centrally mandated curriculum. Whether a school is State-funded or fee-paying, religious or secular, an academy or a bog-standard comp, the curriculum and its objectives will be ineluctable - and the population will have to accept it. Since all schools will be teaching the same curriculum, the option for parents to send their children, if they so choose, to a school which has an independent set of values will be extinguished. The only option, to repeat, is to be conscripted into the national educational ‘mission’ - and simply to hope that the people exercising choice on one’s behalf are wise.

And so what we have here again finding expression are the same, almost primal, instincts which Labour politicians in particular always display: towards control, and command, and coercion in the name of achieving some social purpose or other, and against the freedom, responsibility, and self-sufficiency which are the necessary features of moral autonomy. And the parents and teachers of the land will simply have to respond accordingly, through gritted teeth, whatever their own views about the rights and wrongs of education might be, whatever they think of the people in charge, and wherever they think the interests of children really lie.

The tenor of the next Parliament is therefore well and truly set. This will, of course, not exactly be entirely out of keeping with what has been happening since 1997 in some form or other, and it is one of the great failings of Conservative Party rule since 2010 that at no point did any government seriously grapple with the question of how big the State and its control over moral choice should be. To bring us back to the introduction to this article, the position in which we will likely find ourselves, perhaps in five years, perhaps in ten, will be one in which the State is bigger than ever before, and - much more importantly - its control over moral choice more commanding. We will then be well and truly within the scope of one of the rare exceptions I mentioned in my opening paragraph, in which mission-driven government is actually desirable: it will simply have to happen in order to reconfigure the State towards the core function of maintaining a strong and secure system of law, and to force it into returning at least some matters of morality, freedom and respect to the population once more. That will be one hell of a battle, and whether we have it in us to form and elect such a government is quite another subject; we will in any event in the fullness of time find out.