Tories, names and markets

Daniel Finkelstein comments:

I used to have an informal test for absurd right-wing fogeyishness. If my interlocutor insisted on calling me Finkelshhhtein, they passed the test, and could duly be regarded as right-wing fogeys. This however restricts those who could be tested to people whom I knew. So now I have replaced it with my all new Dave test.

Columnists who, when attacking David Cameron, attempt to belittle him by calling him Dave pass the test. Congratulations to my good friend Stephen Pollard who, after many years of trying, has finally qualified.

Stephen, who is a good friend of mine too, gracefully accepts the point. Using diminutive names where (unlike Ken Livingstone or Tony Blair) the person has not indicated a preference to be known that way is bad practice. There are usually more effective, because more subtle, ways of belittling your opponent if that's what you want to do. Christopher Hitchens touched on this point once when he referred to a polemic against him by the pseudo-historian Norman Finkelstein (no relation to Daniel):

It is headed "Fraternally yours, Chris", which is supposedly the way that I "used to sign off" my correspondence. I very often still do end my letters with the old salutation of the British Labor movement, but it’s usually without the "yours" and I have never signed a letter "Chris" in my life - chiefly because it isn’t my name. I tried everything I knew to stop Norman calling me "Chris" but I couldn’t get him to desist. This is a detail, but it does indicate a man who - even his friends would agree on this - was a slightly more ardent talker than listener.

Christopher's critics are wont to claim that he engages in smear tactics. This exchange with Finkelstein seems to me a nice counterexample of his deliberately presenting those voluble and often abusive critics in the best possible light. Finkelstein's slighting use of a diminutive name is, so far as I can see, not an idiosyncrasy but a conscious choice. Someone who uses this tactic has the reassurance of knowing that an interlocutor who comments on it can immediately be marked down as fretting about a trivial issue. (On a less exalted level, I suspect this is what would happen if I pointed out to the diarist of The Guardian, who has been known to comment sceptically on my being a left-winger who works in the financial markets, that no one who knows me addresses me as 'Ollie'. So he is welcome to carry on referring to me that way; I'm grateful enough for his efforts in putting my views before Guardian readers.)

This seems to be a week for disagreeing with Stephen. He also graciously accepted an objection I made to another of his observations about the Conservative conference:

On this evidence, the only feasible choice for a vote in favour of a pro-business party is a vote for Labour. [I should rephrase that. As a friend points out to me, business is a lobby just like any other. What I should have written is: 'the most feasible choice for a vote in favour of a pro-market party is a vote for Labour.' But that seems so self-evidently wrong that I resisted writing it. It has taken the Conservative conference for me to think it might actually be right.]

I still don't agree with this. I prefer the term 'liberal' to 'pro-market'. In my view, goverment generally operates best by establishing a disinterested framework of rules (as in monetary policy) rather than through discretionary intervention. But this is not the same argument as being 'pro-market'. One policy issue where I differ from Stephen, for example, is his advocacy of the abolition of the BBC licence fee, so that the corporation would compete directly with commercial broadcasters. I very much disagree with this, and support the notion of public-service broadcasting. Stephen's advocacy of market disciplines in this case confuses competition for advertising with competition for audiences. Stephen's proposal would narrow consumer choice by forcing the BBC to shift downmarket; there is quite enough of that going on already, most obviously in news and current affairs.

My original objection to the notion of a pro-business party is probably the only point on which I agree with the campaign of Labour leadership candidate John McDonnell (though I argue it for very different reasons). Business is merely one lobby among many; it is the task of government to distinguish sectional interests from the public good, not to entrench them in policy. The public interest is not necessarily served if, for example, government departments use their procurement policies to 'buy British' in deference to domestic manufacturing. In particular, government should in no circumstances defer to the business lobby by adopting its portentous term 'UK plc' (as in this ridiculous intervention in a policy issue about which the business lobby has no expertise). Labour was perceived, with good cause, in the 1970s and 1980s to have been captured by public-sector union lobbies. One of the few apt criticisms of Tony Blair by his party critics is that his government has been marked by the opposite extreme of unwarranted respect to the point of deference towards big business.