Some 30 years ago, Conservative intellectuals dominated the British policy landscape. Today, by contrast, people ask ‘Where are the big ideas? Has the Right run out of intellectual energy?’
The answer isn’t that the intellectual Right ran out of ideas. It’s that the Conservatives stopped listening in the early 2000s, attempting to copy Tony Blair’s trick of defining himself partly by opposition to the theories of the hard Left by, instead, seeking to define themselves partly by opposition to Conservative intellectuals. Then, having eschewed interest in the policy ideas and principles of the Right, they never found a way back.
Starved of relevance for the concepts they most wanted to push, the Right re-diverted its energies to the European debate, where it eventually made a breakthrough despite the outright opposition of the Conservative leadership. But even then, the intellectual Right’s preferred option – renegotiation of our position within the EU, not leaving it – was rejected through the lack of any central support.
Now the Conservatives are in opposition again and supposedly in the market for ideas. At the same time, Reform are attempting to define a philosophy and policy agenda for itself on the Right that goes beyond reducing immigration.
What might some of these ideas of the Right be? We don’t have space here to offer compelling arguments for them, and I shall try to present some I disagree with rather than just my own favoured theories. So doubtless, some features of this list will seem crazy and all will be by definition only half-formed. But nonetheless, we can sketch some general shapes.
A central interest of the Right when it used to dominate the intellectual landscape was reform of the welfare state. That included schemes for making contributions to the state pension portable into other savings vehicles, making unemployment insurance a genuine insurance scheme by having it replace a higher portion of income but pairing it with job search, genuine sick pay insurance, mandating family support for the elderly or siblings (on the model of child support payments) or workfare involving social action (eg. helping with soup kitchens, litter gathering or recycling).
Another key concern the Right used to have with the welfare state was the lack of additionality. The rich could get private healthcare or education because they could afford to pay from scratch. But middle earners could not add to the payments they made for state provision to get more than the minimum standard the state provided. Sometimes, that involved the concept of vouchers that could be used in the private sector. Others proposed that people should be able to purchase additional provision from the state itself (eg. buy an upgraded state health insurance package with shorter waiting lists, more expensive medicines and personal beds in hospital).
The Right was concerned that the British constitution was atrophying or even decaying. There were proposals for reform of the Lords, enhancements to the powers of the monarchy, changes to the roles of Cabinet ministers vs the Prime Minister, the re-establishment of traditional principles such as non-retrospection or delimited geographic scope for legal claims (both outwards and inwards – eg. not extraditing people to the US for ‘crimes’ committed while in the UK that weren’t UK crimes), or replacement of international impingements upon domestic law (eg. the ECHR) with UK alternatives or with traditional English law principles. Measures such as control orders, extended detention without trial or the admissibility of evidence obtained under torture would have been considered anathema – beyond even debate – by the intellectuals of the ‘90s, let alone the abuse of civil liberties committed during the Covid pandemic or the two-tier justice of the BLM age.
Conservative intellectuals would ask that explicit objectives be set out indicating when equality legislation would have achieved enough of its purpose that it could be repealed, with the primacy of private property rights being reasserted. They would ask what the trade-offs and assumptions involved were in our policy choices about the balance between adaptation, mitigation and reversal in climate change policy, why it was assumed that there would be no innovation and why changes in market, social or ethical practices weren’t taken into account?
They would ask how we would promote economic growth in ways that would benefit both citizens’ and future governments’ revenues, versus other objectives such as helping the sick or the poor, and how that trade-off should change in eras when natural growth slowed or accelerated, and consequently challenge the assumption that public spending relative to GDP should grow regardless of economic conditions. They would ask why we assess a government’s ‘performance’ in terms of providing public services by the inputs – the amount spent – rather than the outputs – the amount of public services provided.
Similarly, they would ask what systematic efforts the state has made to strip away obsolete regulations or to remove regulations that time had shown to be flawed. Some proposed automatic sunset clauses or ‘one in one out’ principles (an unsuccessful version of this was in fact briefly implemented).
Road pricing schemes; huge annual auctions for moving windows of train track access; flat taxes; a higher basic income tax rate with a higher starting threshold; removal of the tax shield for debt interest; reform of the financial system to permit or mandate 100%-backed banks; and a cornucopia of defence and foreign policy schemes.
I’m sure many readers feel I’ve missed the most important proposal. And that illustrates the point. The Right never lacked policy ideas and it doesn’t lack them now. Indeed, for almost any area of policy there are probably already three contradictory right-wing schemes – which in some cases will be terrible, in others otherworldly, in others brilliant and in others mundanely uncontroversial. The Conservatives and Reform do not need right-wing intellectuals to provide new ideas. We’ve already answered all these questions. You just weren’t interested in listening to our answers. What is needed is a genuine appetite among right-wing politicians for engaging with right-wing intellectuals once again, instead of treating us as the bad guys.
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