Interesting comments raised by a recent post by Harry Hatchett on Barry Legg's comments about compassion at a Tory fringe meeting:

What a revealing insight into Tory thinking IDS's former chief of staff Barry Legg gave at a meeting of the far right Freedom Association:

I believe compassion is a very fine virtue and characteristic for an individual, and many in the Conservative Party show their compassion by working for voluntary organisations and helping people in need.

But governments should not express compassion. The amount of pain is unlimited - governments cannot create happiness and if you pursue the agenda of compassion in government you are pursuing unlimited government.

My initial reaction reading Harry's post was to think that it's yet another example of where the left gets it so wrong. I rate Harry. I think he writes a lot of sense, and even where I disagree with him, I respect his arguments. But on this, I think he's simply wrong, and falls for the sentimentalism which infects the left. The idea seems to be that if you look and talk - and, above all, feel - compassionate then somehow you are, and that that means you are both taking the moral high ground and, by definition, acting in the best interests of those to whom you feel compassionate.

And since it is Barry Legg, on the free market right end of the Conservative Party, who makes such a remark, then - QED - it shows how left equals compassionate equals good, and right equals uncaring equals bad.

Well for a whole variety of reasons, I think Harry's plain wrong. I was about to write a mini-essay when - as always - Oliver Kamm put his finger on it:

It is not the task of government to be caring or compassionate, and it shouldn't try. Conservatives of all people ought to know this, for theirs is a philosophy that defines the limits as well as the role of government. Once you start mapping a role for government in 'caring', you greatly expand the definition of its proper functions. Government sets the rules we live by - impartially, so that everyone is subject to the rule of law and all are equal before the law. It also provides public goods that can't be delivered in individual amounts, such as defence, the legal system - and, I would argue, a measure of economic redistribution (though without altering relativities) and welfare provision in order to enable citizens to exercise autonomous decisions. None of this is to do with caring or compassion: it's to do with equity.

Barry Legg is talking the merest common sense. I should add that the principles he enunciates seem to me even more apt for the Left, which believes in equity rather than 'compassion', than they are for Conservatives.

That said, I'm not sure - I mean that literally; I'm not sure - if Oliver is right about these principles being more apt for the Left. I think it is to some extent a defining characteristic of 'leftishness' in practice, if not in theory, that one regards the idea of government action as being somehow compassionate in itself, and private action as being somehow less morally pure. It may have compassionate side-effects but, ceteris paribus, government action is the more worthy and, by definition, compassionate.

Yes, there are plenty of examples of 'left' politicians and policies which are based on the idea that the private sector is better suited to achieving a certain end than the public sector, but those who espouse them - Clinton, Blair, Keating, Lange etc - all shared the same belief that in using private mechanisms they were adapting to reality, rather than using what would in any circumstances always be the most just, efficient, worthwhile and decent. If circumstances permitted it they would still see public sector action as being preferable; because experience showed in some areas it wasn't, then they adapted.

Bit of a rambling post, but there you go,.