A Today programme interview with Alan Johnson MP, Shadow Chancellor, on 21st October 2010 focused on his claim that some Tory backbenchers were delighted with the cuts announced in the spending review on ‘ideological grounds’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9113000/9113228.stm
Johnson claimed that irrespective of the economic crisis, the Tories want a smaller state and these cuts are the way to deliver them. In other words, Johnson felt that for some Tory MPs the cuts were driven by ideology not economy. The interviewer pressed Johnson, accusing him of objecting to the cuts on ideological grounds and implying that Johnson was a hypocrite. The interview became a contest in which the winner was whoever could make the charge of ‘being ideological’ stick.
Forget whether or not we should have a smaller state. My question is: how did ideology become a term of abuse? Isn’t an ideology just a set of life-guiding beliefs and values? Shouldn’t each of us have one of those?People may disagree as to which ideology is best, but is it wrong to adhere to any ideology whatsoever?
One explanation for how ‘ideology’ became a dirty word is that it is synonymous with having a hidden agenda. Someone may say that they have sound economic reasons for holding such and such a view, when their motives are anything but economic. But that is just to say that people should not be dishonest about their motives. It says nothing at all about why saying that one holds a view on ideological grounds has become reprehensible.
Perhaps the problem with ideologies is that they should not have anything to say about the economy. Why? Because economies should be run by facts not values.By parity of reasoning, where any issue is governed by facts, there should be ‘evidence-based’ policy making, not ideological or ‘value-based’ policy making.
If this is right, then something fishy is going on in our social discourse about ideology.For when is there an issue not governed by ‘facts’? To oppose ‘facts’ and ‘values’ is forever to exclude ‘values’ as the proper determinant of a view or a policy. And so it is that to call someone ideological has become another way of saying that they are so loaded down with values and beliefs that they are ‘blind to the facts’.
It is sometimes said that modern life has become too complex for anyone to hold onto anything so monolithic and inflexible as an ideology. If this is the reason that ideologies are unfashionable, then good. Complexity can challenge lazily held beliefs and values and force dogmatic ideologies to wake up. But in making ideology an insult, we must be careful not to demean the value of ‘values’.
Owen Gower
Senior Fellow
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