"Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." (Gen. 12:7)

In God's eyes party politics must be tantamount to erecting "a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven". Why else would He mete out the same punishment for both?
Linguistic confusion is, of course, a serious matter, for how can people agree on anything if they don't understand one another? The whole process of communication begins to resemble jigsaw pieces lying face down on the table: the elements are all there, but they don't add up to much.
Take the latest election, for example. Exactly who were the major players? Tories, who are anything but? Liberals, who aren't? Labour, who used to be but no longer are? And if we aren't certain who the real players were, surely we don't know exactly who won, do we?
Now back in the 19th century, there was no confusion. The two major contenders were the Tories and the Whigs.
The Tories, aka Conservatives, were, not to cut too fine a point, the party of aristocracy. They believed in social order based on the traditional hierarchy, although not without some flexibility. Their attitude to the lower classes was kind but paternalistic, akin to a father's who feels that even his retarded child deserves love. Since the lower classes were mostly employed in agriculture and nascent industry, Tory paternalism extended to those as well, taking the shape of what today we call protectionism. Even as a good father doesn't let neighbourhood bullies beat his child, so did the Tories use tariffs and subsidies to shield the masses from the villainy of foreign poachers.
The Whigs, aka Liberals, while also respectful of tradition, despised paternalism. Firm believers in laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad, they felt that as long as the state got out of the people's hair, the lower classes could fend for themselves. Neither did they believe in protectionism, and their success in having the Corn Laws repealed spelled Britain's economic success.
Liberal ideas put into practice created in the Waterloo-to-Ypres century the greatest economic growth Britain has ever enjoyed, and the most astounding upward mobility Europe has ever known. Tory rearguard action was, in the same century, moderately successful in attenuating the shock waves of this growth and keeping the now threadbare social fabric from being torn to tatters. Then in barged the 20th century, heralded by the roar of the August guns. Out went aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Whitehall. And all we see at the end of it is Babel.
For several years now, the Tory Party has been explicitly committed to a classless society. Enough has been said about this nonsense; suffice it to say now that perhaps we can no longer regard the Tories as the party of aristocracy, or aristocracy as the ruling class. And in one of our less charitable moods, we may even hiss that all those Hons have become nothing but a Ye Olde England side show, a development emphasised by the Buckingham Palace collecting admission prices only marginally lower than those charged by Barnum and Bailey.
So where does that leave conservatism? More important, what does the word mean these days? Take the aristocratic social order out of it, and paternalism is more or less all you have left. Which, in today's terms, means a huge bureaucracy running a gigantic "welfare state", to the "basic features" of which the true-blue Tory Peregrine Worsthorne wanted us all to pledge "loyalty" as far back as 1958. That may be what 'conservatism' means to the party faithful, but to many conservatives it means something entirely different. So they have to acknowledge that the word is semantically inoperable as is, and add to it a typographic dimension by describing themselves as conservative with a lower-case 'c', thus renouncing knee-jerk loyalty to the upper-case Conservative Party. As a result, the latter loses elections.
What do they mean by that small 'c'? Most definitions probably include some aspects of what is inaccurately called Thatcherism or Friedmanism. (The more appropriate terms, such as Smithism, Ricardoism or von-Miesesism must have been rejected on phonetic grounds.) And more specifically? Limited government, personal freedom, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad. In other words, all those things that circumscribe the traditional domain of liberalism.
So this is what that word means today? asks the perplexed Martian student of English. Not at all. In America, liberalism means, mutatis mutandis, socialism: big government, replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, as much government control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps. In Britain, it means the platform of the Liberal Democratic Party, which stands for roughly the same, plus the negation of Britain's national liberty. In this aspiration the upper-case Liberals go even further than the upper-case Conservatives, who used to swear by God, King and country but now tend to support multi-culturalism, classlessness and Jacques Santer.
For the 19th century liberal, the 10 percent of the nation's income the government was then spending was too high. For today's liberal, the 40-odd percent it spends now is too low. So if one wants to use 'liberal' in its proper sense, and it is after all a cognate of 'liberty', then one must either modify it with 'classic' or replace it with 'libertarian' (which in America means anarchist). Where does that leave the word? In the garbage heap of lexicology.
At this inauspicious site it's piled on top of other cognates of liberty, e.g. 'liberation', as in 'national liberation'. When applied to places like Uganda or Burundi, the term means a transitional stage between colonialism and cannibalism. When applied to the 'former Soviet Union', it means a shift from de jure to merely de facto Russian control. When applied to Asia, it means Mao, Ho and Kim. Thus Babelised, 'liberation' and its cousin 'liberal' join 'conservative', which incidentally means old-style Whig in America and old-style Communist in Russia. If Russell Kirk could identify the prominent Whig Edmund Burke as the father of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, then his Russian counterpart Rostislav Kirkoff is justified in assigning that role in his country to Lenin, thus confounding us even more.
But of course today's Liberals aren't descendants of the 19th-century Whigs. They are a splinter group of Old Labour, which in turn traces its roots back to the Luddites, Chartists and other trouble-makers of yesteryear, such as the oxymoronic Tory Radicals. More important, it is umbilically linked with certain unfashionable continental doctrines, a link Labour don't mind emphasising by adopting foreign tunes like Internationale and Bandera Rossa as their party songs, and the foreign red flag as their party banner. (By doing so, they endorse the Walpurgisnacht these symbols embodied, but that's a different matter.)
New Labour, so called because the unmodified term is a historically compromised election-loser, hang on to the symbols but feign to renounce the substance, claiming they represent the middle classes rather than the unions, aka Labour. In other words, Labour aren't Labour. They stake a claim on the territory held in the past by the Liberals, who used to be Whigs but aren't any longer.
If such elementary terms have been Babelised, imagine the confusion with more amorphous concepts, such as right wing and left wing. For instance, strident adherents of Old Labour don't mind describing Lady Thatcher 'as extreme right wing' or, if they are not only strident but stupid as well, 'fascist'. Both designations are also applied retrospectively to the likes of Hitler. One infers that the political spectrum, as they see it, starts at the extreme right exemplified by Thatcher and Hitler and ends up at the extreme left represented by - Cook? Prescott? Benn? Scargill? Livingston? Perish the thought. Those lads are mainstream. No, extreme left are the sort of chaps who released cyanide fumes into the Tokyo underground.
So what does the 'fascist' Maggie stand for? Why, laissez-faire economics at home, free trade abroad, limited government, individual responsibility, meritocracy. In short, to a naked eye unassisted by the magnifying lens of socialism, she is an out and out Whig, even though she confusingly led the Tories.
If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. Applying this proven logic to the task in hand, we have to assume that Hitler, Maggie's fellow right-wing extremist, was a Whig too. But then we read a book or two and find out his beliefs ran more towards socialist ideals: big government, nationalised or at least subjugated economy, wage and price controls, strict tariffs, cradle-to-grave welfare, vegeterianism and the kind of genocidal peccadilloes that until (or after) him were practised on that scale only by socialists. But socialists are on the left, not on the right, aren't they? Then we remember that Hitler's party was called National Socialist Workers' and ask the inevitable question: So who's the right-wing extremist then?
Perhaps other countries can give us a clue. In America, 'extreme right wing' usually describes John Birch Society or Ku-Klux-Klan types. Importing the term here, we give Lady Thatcher a blazing torch and wrap her in a bed sheet with slits in the hood. Somehow my mind's eye must be too myopic to see the picture clearly, though white is definitely her colour. In Russia, right wing means communist and left wing means a Whig-Socialist mongrel. Thus, no serious help is forthcoming from abroad; yet again Britain has to rely on her own resources to straighten out her mess.
But forget about straightening it out. We are sinking even deeper into the linguistic morass, pulled down by terms like 'social conscience', 'free medical care' and 'free education'.
"Have you no conscience, Sir?" enquired a US Senator detailed to crucify Joe McCarthy for saying that many good communists were communists. Fire-eating rhetoric, that. Now let me try a modified version on you: "Have you no social conscience, Sir (or Madam)?" The only proper answer is, "What exactly do you mean, old chap?" Or, to keep it short, "You what?" What I mean is this: "Do you believe the government should confiscate your hard-earned money and waste it on ill-conceived schemes whose only results have been amply and universally demonstrated to be the strengthening of the state and the weakening of the individual?" Or, to keep it short, "Are you a socialist?"
But the word 'socialism' was found years ago to be a sure election-loser for people with social conscience, so it had to be replaced by something more Babelian. 'Conscience', on the other hand, has a nice Christian ring to it, like 'charity'. The more you have of it, the better. Tony 'Anthony' Blair, for example, is a Christian. More precisely, he is an Anglican who regularly attends Catholic Mass. That's why he is positively bristling with conscience. In other words, he is a socialist. Except that he isn't, because socialists lose elections, and Tony didn't. That means his conscience, even though it's social, is merely an extension of his synthetic religion. At least that's what was asserted by Paul Johnson, an authority on synthetic beliefs.
But surely Christian charity is something one does with one's own money! you exclaim. When one does it with somebody else's, one must first take the money from somebody else, and that's robbery, isn't it? Robin Hood ethics? There, I knew you had no social conscience whatsoever. What's the difference whose money it is? One way or another we must pay for free medical care and free education.
Hold on, admonishes a semantic rigourist. 'Free' means we don't have to pay for them. There's another example of someone whose understanding of language leads him to a misunderstanding of politics.
Of course, somebody has to pay for all those doctors, nurses, hospitals, CAT scans and ECGs. Those things don't grow on trees, you know. They are, in fact, jolly expensive. And the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get. The payment comes from the government, which can only make money the old-fashioned way: from taxes. 'Free' thus means that the transfer of money from you to hospital, rather than being direct, is mediated by the state which acts as a general contractor with megalomania. But governments are less efficient than private enterprise (compare, say, Air France's ledgers with BA's). So we must assume that mastectomies have to be more expensive when you pay for them through the government, whether you need them or not, than they would be if you paid for them direct - and only when you need them.
But when you make your NHS 'contributions' (the Babelian for tax), you don't just pay for mastectomies. A huge chunk of your money pays for the ever-growing state bureaucracy required to administer 'free' medical care, and this is something you wouldn't have to pay if medical care weren't free. In other words 'free', translated from the Babelian, means 'more expensive than it otherwise would be, not to mention less good'.
Doctors complicate matters even further. In a recent survey, 90% of 'medical professionals' stated that people suffering from 'smoking-related diseases' ought to pay for treatment direct, on top of getting it free by paying taxes. Why? Because these diseases are behavioural, caused by the patients' obtuse bloody-mindedness. How about AIDS? asks a simpleton untutored in Babelian. Just goes to show how little he understands the meaning of 'free'.
A quick look at education confirms this semantic conundrum. When education wasn't entirely 'free' and 'comprehensive', it was good and cheap. Now that it has acquired those modifiers, it's horrendously expensive and shamefully bad. Advertising copywriters deepen the confusion by admitting tacitly that the word 'free' means nothing at all. That's why they routinely leave it unemployed in front of 'gift', which is perfectly capable of doing all the work by itself. So down into the semantic bin goes the lying parasite 'free', where it lands with a dull thud on top of the previously discarded 'social conscience'.
But wait. As Charles Moore hastened to reassure us in his Telegraph leader two days after the election, conservatives have social conscience too. Even Peter Lilley has it, and we all know what a right-wing extremist he is. Peter Lilley "cares". In other words, he is a socialist, and since most of his party lies (no pun intended) to his left, the party is even more so, even though it is Conservative, which means not Whiggish, Thatcherite or Nazi.
In fact, Alan Clark, writing in the same paper a few days later, explains that "Thatcherism is in, and of, the past", and "the Friedmanite orthodoxies... were never entirely accepted." "Almost lost to sight," he continues, "remain the three principal functions of the state: to ensure that its citizens are secure, that they are gainfully employed, and that they are enlightened."
Of the Three Functions According to Alan, the first is another word for social conscience, which is the Babelian for socialism; the second is another word for wholesale nationalisation (the only way for a state to 'ensure' total employment), which is the Babelian for socialism; the third is another word for 'free' education, wherein the government makes us pay through the nose for the illiterate egalitarian junk pumped through our children's minds. Which, too, is the Babelian for socialism. The three functions of the state can thus be reduced to one: being socialist.
Therefore the Conservative Party must become, if it isn't already, as socialist as New Labour but not quite so socialist as Old Labour , and then one day it may win another election in the name of conservatism - but not of liberalism, which is what Friedmanism is, and it is "in, and of, the past" - unlike Alan Clark who, by being a more sober thinker than his predecessor, has managed to come back into the present.
To make certain he is right, and God forbid such a dashing fellow should be wrong, I've re-read Friedman. Sure enough, he is an unrepentant Friedmanite. He believes that an economy based on voluntary exchange among free citizens is more effective than a command economy wherein all citizens are the state's slaves. And he even has the temerity to illustrate that subversive postulate with incendiary examples, such as a comparison between the economies of North and South Korea. So Mr. Clark is right, and we should be grateful to him for exposing Friedman's sharp practices. That sort of thing is indeed "in, and of, the past". All we need now is for Mr. Clark to provide some examples of booming command economies that will demonstrate the full extent of Milton Friedman's folly. Obviously, Mr. Clark has lots of such examples up his sleeve, otherwise people might not take him as seriously as he doubtless deserves.
His hefty homophone Ken doesn't do much better. Battling for the leadership of the Tories, Mr. Clarke explained his politics as commitment to "free enterprise", but with "social conscience." The former means small government. The latter means huge government. Does Mr. Clarke propose to nationalise not the means of production but merely its results? "I wish he would explain his Explanation, " was Byron's comment on something much more straight-forward.
I don't know about you, but by now my head is spinning like a top. Let's score another one for the language of democracy (in itself, incidentally, a Babelian shibboleth) and make a few concluding remarks:
Muddled words reflect muddled thinking. Meaningless words hide meaningless concepts. If the terminology of our politics is tangled up in a grotesque cobweb, then it's politics that needs sorting out, not just the language.
If the word 'Tory' has lost meaning, then Toryism has to be re-created. For that aristocracy must come back into its own. Since this is unlikely, we ought to bury the word 'Tory' and weep at its funeral, for it stood for something good while it lived.
The word 'liberal' ought to be yanked out of the greedy clutches of one of the West's most illiberal parties and either rehabilitated or, failing that, allowed to follow 'Tory' into the communal grave.
The word 'Labour' doesn't rate fanfare; it should be dumped into the nameless ditch reserved for those who lived without honour and died without glory.
And then we should take a look at our politics and ask ourselves the question first posed by those great conservatives Chernyshevsky and Lenin: What is to be done?
You and I could probably sit down together and in a few hours come up with a political expression of Eldorado. Spinning out of our eager minds would be a Britain of free, prosperous men and women who neither need nor would accept pathetic handouts. Those qualified to do so would vote for a government spending no more than 10% of our money because it would be committed only to its true functions: justice and defence. Our Britain would be sovereign and independent - but it would welcome with open arms, rather than penalties, anyone who wants to sell or buy anything that is legal. She would enjoy the best of relations with anyone who wishes her good - and be strong enough to repel anyone who wishes her ill.
Our leaders would be sage statesmen who would realise that man's nature is immutable. A true government is not one that attempts to eradicate the distinctions between good and evil - but one that prescribes the former and proscribes the latter.
They would consider it axiomatic that free enterprise is superior to socialism not only economically, but also ethically and socially.
They would know that the only true equality is equality before God and under law; an attempt to enforce any other kind by legislation leads to tyranny.
They would presume that civilised society requires hierarchical classes - the more the better, for true harmony thrives in diversity as much as it withers in uniformity.
And they would accept, however grudgingly, that hereditary aristocracy, the highest of these classes, has the greatest responsibility in governing society. Constitutional monarchy in Britain should thus play not just a ceremonial but functional role.
Our two main parties would be named - for old times' sake - Tories and Whigs. These words would be exhumed, cleaned out, de-Babelised and restored to their traditional meaning. The two parties would differ not fundamentally but in the relative importance they attach to different principles. The Whigs, while respectful of tradition, would accentuate liberty and the removal of arbitrary obstacles on the way to self-betterment. The Tories, while committed to liberty, would stress the defence of Britain's cultural and social tradition from the onslaught of the self-bettered masses. So balanced, the two parties would achieve prosperity without barbarism, liberty without equality and harmony without uniformity.
Thus, and only thus, would we be able to get rid of the Babel where English, the greatest language on earth, is used not to communicate thoughts but, following an earlier continental model, to conceal them. In our Britain, English words would tell the truth rather than mendacious approximations. They would once again enthral the admiring world with their precision and subtlety. They would once again begin to flow in powerful streams from the pens of great poets and thinkers, not just the PCs of hacks and touts. They...
Suddenly we wake up, shake our heads and realise that there is no point in you and me sitting down together, much as I would enjoy that. For everything we could ever dream up would be a utopian fantasy. It will never happen. You and I are powerless. So try to make yourself comfortable in Babel - it's here to stay.