Over the coming weeks, CapX will be running a number of perspectives on the future of the Conservative Party. If you have an idea you would like to contribute, get in touch at [email protected].
Both of Britain’s main political parties are rudderless. Both lack a clear sense of their identity, of what their core beliefs and values are, and of what their purpose is. At least, there is no idea of their identity in either case that is widely shared among the public, as opposed to the political and chattering classes. The serious problem, for both Labour and Conservatives, is that their members and activists no longer have an idea of the purpose of their party or of its values and ideals that is widely shared or reflects an organic popular culture. This is a recent development. It has been getting ever more pronounced over the last thirty to forty years but has really become visible in the last ten or so. It is most obvious in the case of the Tory Party but is also true for Labour, despite its recent massive but unenthusiastic victory. There are people in the wider Labour movement who still articulate the older identity of the Labour Party, but they are not near the leadership.
A major cause of this is the impact on their respective parties and British politics more generally of two outstanding politicians – Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Both of them transformed their parties and their associated political subcultures into something very different from what they had been before. In doing that, they cut the links between high politics and wider culture and two of the most important and deeply rooted political traditions, the labour and conservative ones. (There are others and indeed it is one of these that in a changed form has gained greater prominence as a result of Blair and Thatcher.)
We can identify a Tory or conservative tradition in politics and popular culture all the way back to 1671 and the Exclusion Crisis or even beyond that to Clarendon. If we look at the speeches and writings of a succession of figures, from as far back as Bolingbroke through Pitt, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, to people such as Eden, MacMillan, and Macleod we can see persistent themes, images and ideas. The same is true in representations of this in popular literature – Squire Western is as recognisably a Tory figure of a certain type as he was when Fielding created him. This conservative tradition and identity can be distinguished from others, notably the Whig one and that of the kind of reactionary radicalism that appeared with Joseph Chamberlain and Tariff Reform and most notably from its main historical opponent, dissenting liberalism.
The major themes are recognisable. They include the importance and value of tradition and established institutions as opposed to abstract ideas, loyalty as the foundation of the political community and as expressed in adherence to the ancient institutions, particularly the monarchy and the church, the importance of the law as established over the centuries by precedent, property as a central social institution, adherence to traditional moral codes and values, scepticism about the capacity and applicability to actual life of abstract reason and idealism, scepticism about change and its costs while welcoming reforms as changes that preserve and carry forward the old and established, the importance of the local and particular, the centrality of the family and ‘small battalions’ and of natural and organic relations as opposed to contractual ones, and a valuation of the eccentric and unusual with a lower regard for the claims of rationality and utility.
If you asked people what they now associate with conservatism and the Conservative Party, the resulting word cloud would have these themes at its edges, if at all. This would be particularly true if you asked people active in Conservative politics. Rather than the list just set out, you would find free markets, capitalism, lower taxes, entrepreneurialism, dynamism and innovation, as well as patriotism, nationalism, and both national identity and sovereignty. This is a kind of politics dominated by ideas of change and dynamism rather than the preservation and conserving of the established; it is a politics where economics and the opposition of capitalism and free markets to socialism takes centre stage rather than being (as it is in the conservative tradition set out) an important but subordinate theme; above all it is a politics strongly influenced by the tradition of liberal individualism – national liberalism is probably the best label for it.
This way of understanding what conservatism is is of course the political legacy of Thatcher. It also reflects the way the world changed after the 1960s, mainly because of technologies such as television and, latterly, the internet and social media, as much as politics. The point though is this. Thatcher’s impact on politics, particularly Conservative politics, was so profound that she has left a legacy that is very hard to escape. Her own strongly liberal influenced and economic variety of conservatism has crowded out the mainstream and long-established conservative tradition, in the minds of the politically engaged in particular. Now people online and in print will complain that the Conservative Party has abandoned ‘real conservatism’ and needs to revert to it. What they almost always mean though is that it has taken up ideas from the other transformative politician, Tony Blair, and needs to revert to the politics and ideas of Thatcher and the 1980s. The idea of recovering the tradition that goes back to the seventeenth century and applying it to the challenges of today does not register. One part of that would be downgrading the central place of economics and thinking more about statecraft and other conservative concerns but too many people cannot free themselves from the economics-dominated politics of the 1970s and 1980s.
The point is that the politics that looks back to the 1980s and the Thatcher government as its ideal is a dead end. It does not command enough support – only about 20% maximum of voters support the combination of conservative nationalism and free market economics – and it does not address the major questions of today, such as the decay or complete uselessness of major institutions, the decline of both high and popular culture, the challenge to ideas of human identity and humane ways of living of novel technologies, the breakdown of the global order put together after 1945, and the effects of the progressive derangement of money since the 1970s. The conservative tradition has a great deal to suggest about all of these. Moreover, it still commands far more support among the wider public than the combination of economic liberalism and national conservatism.
Conservative or, if you prefer, centre-right politics is not going to truly recover and become effective until it moves on from Thatcher and the 1980s. It now faces challenges not only from the technocratic Blairite centre but also from a new insurgent politics of national collectivism and revolutionary national renewal. The Labour Party and the wider labour movement are in a similar position. They need to move on from the kind of truly novel technocratic managerial politics introduced by Blair, which was a sharp break with not only the democratic socialist tradition of Benn and Bevan but also the social democratic one of Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson, and people such as Roy Hattersley and Anthony Crosland. Both of the UK’s major political traditions still survive out there in the provinces among the mass of the public. Both wings of the political class have moved away from them, due to media driven politics and the impact of two remarkable and transformative politicians. They need to go back to their roots if they are to reconnect the public to the political world.
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