By Laveen Ladharam
Many of us will remember the comments that Daniel Hannan made about the National Health Service, being said to be ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘insulting’ to the doctors and nurses of the NHS who work quite heroically to do their jobs. Similarly, through the critical eye of various political parties, Mr Hannan has been picked up by stating that Enoch Powell was one of his political influences, due to the free market ideals and belief in small government, ignoring of course the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Known in the world of the media as the ‘gaffe’ that he amongst others are famous for, this is the crime that the media accuses politicians of when deviating from the party line.
I of course talk about the most interesting type of politician, the maverick, and include the likes of Hannan, Boris Johnson, Lembit Öpik, Kenneth Clarke, David Davis, Frank Field, Senator John McCain in the USA and even Tony Benn in his day. The politicians who are famous for divulging from the party line often do attract the attention of the media and the straight and narrow tribal politicians like Gordon Brown and Ed Balls who hark on at the basics of party politics and the vulgar notions of class warfare. Yet people do not seem to care about them but these storms in teacups will tend to put politicians off speaking their minds in public.
Other than the Hannan furore, recent ‘gaffes’ such as the Mayor of London claiming that attempts to curb the city bonuses were ‘crackers’ were quite reasonable if unpopular. Similarly, John McCain’s staunch support for the Surge in the Iraq war against the popular opinion actually worked; Ronald Reagan’s opposition to the Keynesian consensus and the desire to look for a more liberal economic order was seen as wrong in 1964 with his support for Barry Goldwater. More famously, the likes of Winston Churchill and Leo Amery were seen as cranks during the 1930s when they called for rearmament and a hawkish policy towards Germany. But the press dub these ‘splits.’
Yet the maverick can only occur in a party setting and I cannot see how this could occur otherwise. To have your own opinion, the best way to alter that is within a political party and within many parties, you do get groups: the Tories’ Cornerstone Group, Thatcherites and One Nationists; Labour’s Blairites and Brownites; the old Liberals’ Squiffites and Lloyd George Liberals; that will oppose things within their parties. Thus the old idea from in the 2008 Presidential Election that John McCain and George W Bush were the same – when McCain had voted with Bush 95% of the time for the previous year – is invalid. Chances are that if you are a member of a political party, you will agree with the vast majority of its views but you need to disagree with things. The difference is whether you officially oppose your own party, and thus a 95% voting record (if we take the statistic at face value) is reasonable when compared to the President Obama’s nearly 100% Democratic record in his year and a half in the senate – and it is actually pretty interesting how he is turning into a quasi-dictator – and you see how Senator McCain was seen as an independent person until the election.
The role of the maverick is definitely the most important in politics and it underpins the fundamental principle of liberty that, which George Orwell said (and is among many peoples’ Facebook “quotes” pages) ‘is telling people what they do not want to hear.’
