IN FLIGHT from the present tense, this generation’s politicians are trying to alter the past, and invoice the future. They are hearing appeals against the indictment of the dead, and sending bills to the accounts of the unborn. Anything, it seems, to avoid confronting the living; to evade the awkward here and now.
The latest posthumous pardons of First World War soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice are minor examples of the evasion, but they speak volumes. During this recent controversy my mind has returned again and again to the cold-eyed lucidity with which Leon Trotsky justified shooting his own men:
“An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements — the animals that we call men — will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.”
Surely that must be right? For many, blind obedience or selfless duty may be sufficient, but never for all. I doubt we are able today to second-guess judgments made three generations ago in different circumstances and according to a harsher moral code. Without wishing to thrash again through a debate that has been pretty well-thrashed this last fortnight, and with no intended disrespect for the dead soldiers or their living descendants, we should stand back and look at what are becoming two politically fashionable pastimes, and the subtle linkage between them.
A posthumous pardon implicitly censures one group of dead people — those who administered the justice we now seek to overturn — and rewards another, the accused soldiers. A Private Finance Initiative for (say) the building of a hospital shifts the burden of its costs away from us and on to the next generation. So though the two may not at first sight seem linked, both are acts of apparent generosity by this generation’s politicians, for which this generation does not have to pay. Our appetite for revisiting decisions made by our predecessors seems to be growing. Our appetite for visiting upon our successors the bills we run up today is growing too. Backward-looking moral judgments and the forward-loading of state spending are two different ways of copping out of the costs and controversies of the present. We should not be fooled.
There is neither sacrifice, repentance nor courage in “apologising” on other people’s behalf. Our political class grows ever more adept at devising ways of seeming to say sorry without really saying so. To “I’m sorry if you took offence” (insinuating that your own thin skin or misunderstanding was the problem) they are now saying they are sorry one long-dead set of individuals wronged another long-dead set of individuals. Whether it is Tony Blair apologising for the Irish potato famine, the Australian Government declaring a “National Sorry Day” for the treatment of the Aboriginals, or the Ministry of Defence’s posthumous quashing of decisions made by First World War courts martial, the strategy costs the politician nothing and requires no practical action, while making him look good.
But what are the logical limits to this practice, once the underlying philosophy is allowed? Should Oscar Wilde be posthumously pardoned because we now think the laws under which he was convicted were unjust? In the past decade most of the laws against homosexual behaviour have been swept away. In the past century tens of thousands of lives were wrecked by convictions under those laws. Should we retrospectively pardon all those men? Those who think we should ought to consider the implications for the sea of ghosts once proceeded against (for example) under anti-Catholic legislation, or for attempted suicide, or escaping slavery, or witchcraft, or any one of scores of crimes no longer on the statute book.
Logic is expendable to a politician looking for cheap applause or a way of getting an insistent lobby off his back, but the logic of these objections is unanswerable. It has been voiced often enough, and greeted by silence.
But as yet unrehearsed (so far as I know) is a consequence for our own epoch’s decisions. We can hardly deny to the future a right we are content to confiscate from the past: the right for each generation to reach decisions according to its own moral lights. If our grandfathers no longer have autonomy over their own epoch, what autonomy can we claim over ours? Are we too, then, to be posthumously tried, or retried?
Are we too to be posthumously convicted, or pardoned? Will future prime ministers have to say sorry for things we did — and did honestly believing them to be right? Understand that I am not denying to our successors the right to take a different view from us, to impose altered standards for their own day. So they may. Nor am I denying that where new evidence emerges in a new generation, then judgments can be revisited. This happens all the time in law, and any generation would wish its successors to reopen such cases. Nor am I arguing against restitution when a wrong has been done. These are things we do in the present and for the present.
But what the future has no right to do to the past is to rehear its judgments in the light of altered morality, and indict (or pardon) according to values different to those of men and women who had to judge according to the values of their own day. Morality changes. It may in future move in a permissive or reactionary direction; we cannot know which. But I should be outraged to think that the way I live, which is lawful now, or the decisions I take, which are properly taken by the moral lights of my own generation, should be put on some kind of show trial in a century’s time. To deny our ancestors autonomy in the judgments they reached is to cede our own moral autonomy to our successors.
You may think this rather Jesuitical. It may look arcane to argue against the secret erosion of meaning, the erosion of what it means to say sorry, of what it means for a court martial to have made its judgment; but these meanings are the philosophical underpinnings of the way we live and understand our responsibilities.
Less arcane is the objection to a different sort of raid: this time a raid not on the past but on the future. Borrowing from the next generation for this generation’s public services is a disgrace, for which the appropriate outrage is not being expressed or felt. The whole idea of mortgaging this generation’s public investment, for repayment by the next, is immoral. The two main political parties — the Conservatives, who thought of the idea, and new Labour, who have placed it at the centre of their policies for financing public services — have colluded in keeping the matter from debate.
For public sector construction, there is no case at all for raising money through private sector borrowing. Everybody knows that, but few in politics wish to talk about it. PFIs are a device to keep the borrowing off the books that record public sector debt, so that this generation of voters can be spun an impression that their new hospitals, or academies, or army training schemes have been provided without the State needing to go into the red to provide them. Indeed, the State hasn’t. A private sector company has, paying more to service the debt. Indirectly, these costs will be charged, mostly to the next generation.
The next generation may bitterly resent the costs, and the postponement of their own public investment, with which we have landed them. Ah well, maybe they can organise a show trial of Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown, for fraud; and convict them posthumously.
