Blimpish || a Tory

Long and windy, even by my standards…  Be warned.

I voted for the other Dave in the 2005 Tory leadership election.  I was suspicious of Cameron and the siren calls of Blue Labour.

Since then, I changed my mind, and am now a loyal and dedicated follower of the Leader of the Opposition.  Why the change?  Partly, history since then proved him right and me wrong.  Partly too, I guess I changed in my view on certain points; conservatives above all should be accepting of new lessons from experience.  And finally, he showed himself to be a genuinely conservative Conservative – his 2008 conference speech is a truer Tory statement than has been uttered from that stage in many years – and that, I liked.

All the while political progress has been slow but steady, resulting in a solid polling lead which withstood Gordon’s surge at the end of last year, I’ve had a lingering fear.  The Cameron project is an elite project; it is driving the Party, but the Party does not embrace it.  There’s no cynicism there – the Party is bored of losing and follows the lead; much like Labour in the 1990s, and to some extent, the Tories in the 1970s.  Change is like that.

There’s one, big difference with those two historic precedents.  When Thatcher took the leadership in 1975, she wasn’t on her own; there were plenty of intellectual backing in the think-tanks and in the press who could circle the wagons whenever the Thatcher campaign came under attack.  Their work was of sufficient quality that some of it can be read with interest and relevance today (I did so the other day).  The same applies to Blair in 1994, for whom there were plenty of opinion leaders who had been hankering for some years for a “Thatcherism with a human face” – and plenty more who were sufficiently annoyed with the Labour Party’s descent into lunacy that they would back Blairite political realism to advance their own goals (Giddens, say).

The Cameron project has no such intellectual hinterland.  Much of the Right-leaning press remain unengaged, and occasionally sees outburstsof naked hostility (have you read Heffer recently?); the think-tanks too tend to fellow-travel but not buy – Policy Exchange used to be close, but perhaps too close, and has since distanced itself.  ConservativeHome’s support is strongest where Cameron’s priorities coincides with Montgomerie’s hopes for an American-style movement conservatism; the goals are clearly different though.   The general chatter on the Right seems to be shot through with a sense of “yes, yes, Dave – but when can we have tax cuts?” – even the broadly sympathetic seem only to add “but it’s great that we’re nice now.”

The leadership might argue that it doesn’t matter – if we lead, they will follow, especially in power.  I’m not so sure, especially amidst troubled and turbulent times.  What’s more, the leadership’s articulation of what I take to be (and support as such) its broad case is weak, with concepts poor and underdeveloped.  The idea of a “post-bureaucratic age”, but when it amounts to eBay Government, colour me unimpressed.  It’s all very well to call for an end to target culture – but what comes after?  Outside schools policy, the arguments seem thin.

So, it is in that context that I welcome the discussion in this month’s Prospect, around an article on ‘Red Toryism’ by Philip Blond.  It’s an attempt at genuine critical engagement with the leadership, to give an exposition of Toryism for the years ahead.

I’ve been aware of Blond’s writing for some time, and I think he has an interesting, although as yet incomplete, argument to make.  I also find it interesting that he seems quite a pleasant chap (I saw an interview with him on-line a while ago, can’t find it now), but isn’t averse to harsh critique, cf. “contrast the potential of Cameron’s civic communitarian conservatism with what it aims to transcend: the corrupt and rotten postwar settlement of British politics.”  A bit of bloodiness is always to be advised in making the Tory case, and this is all to the good.

The good stuff

There is lots that I agree with in Blond’s piece, which I’ll summarise before moving on to the criticisms and points of difference, starting with the diagnosis:

• The embrace of community as a core conservative concept – that we are a people, not just a co-located mass.  (As Newman said, Toryism is “loyalty to persons.”)
• The modern conception of liberal autonomy is antithetical to any conservative vision of order; for conservatives, society is what gives us our individuality, not the other way around.  We are not liberals.*
• That liberal autonomy becomes a licence to egoism, which then more and more comes to rely on raw power to contain it – the self-fulfilling logic of Leviathan.
• That class matters; while it was convenient to forget this while fighting socialism, conservatives above all should understand the pervasive nature of hierarchy and vertical obligation.
• That meritocracy and the promotion of social mobility as such is a liberal principle, which conservatives should not embrace, as it undermines social order – as I set out in more detail here.

Or, as Shakespeare put it, once you break the basis of order,

“Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”

… and then on the prescription, I like (there will be some caveats in due course):

• The promotion of competition.
• The focus on assets and ownership as an important goal for alleviating poverty; and the focus on savings.
• The attention given to corporate power as well as political power, and the recognition of the task of containing the worst abuses of such power.
• The attention given to creating vehicles for investment in local economies.
• The encouragement of employee ownership and co-operative associations.

I’ll also deal with a few of the criticisms made on the Prospect site:

• Rupert Darwall’s argument is a brief for Right-libertarianism; if only we are free to trade, all will be well.  Anomie is a product of welfare dependency; every man has his price.  Darwall makes some fair(ish) points on policy matters, yet seems completely blind to the questions of culture and society Blond raises.
• Catherine Fieschi’s argument is good, honest Leftism; I agree that communitarian conservatism is no driver for modern progress (or “decadence”, as Nietzsche preferred).  Neither though is it about going back – if you hit a dead-end, you make a turn. Her point about the Welfare State’s emancipation refers to the dividing line Blond seeks – emancipation also meant alienation.
• David Green’s argument is that Blond is wrong about liberalism; that what Blond wants is part of the liberal tradition.  We can’t though define liberalism as frozen in (early) Millian aspic.  And one can support existing liberal institutions without accepting liberal values for the future.  Our constitutional tradition includes a strong modern liberal thread; but it also includes ecclesiastical, aristocratic and other threads.

Kieron O’Hara’s response seems to me mostly fair; that an analysis of modern liberalism’s upsides is needed to avoid Blond over-reaching – and that part of that is in achieving support from those who have gained most from the liberal tide.

My criticisms are as follows…

Economics

The economic analysis is pretty hackneyed at times.  Try:

“Yet the great disaster of the last 30 years is the destruction of the capital, assets and savings of the poor: in Britain, the share of wealth (excluding property) enjoyed by the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 12 per cent in 1976 to just 1 per cent in 2003.”

This is picking data to fit the theory.  The critical words are “excluding property”; bearing in mind the increased opportunity for home ownership in the 1980s (mortgage deregulation and council house sales), one might expect that poorer people might have shifted their balance sheets into property, and so it did – the share of wealth including property didn’t actually change all that much over the period, even if non-property assets did (it went from 8% to 7%).

People might be insufficiently diversified now; but that’s a different matter, and as a result of choices people in the bottom 50 per cent have made for themselves.  The ability to put your money in a wide range of non-property assets is fairly open and widespread, after all.

More important, Blond’s distributivism goes too far for my tastes.  Global capitalism might be a bitch, but it’s hear to stay; if we turn our back on it entirely, we condemn ourselves to economic stagnation.  Saying that we’ll break up all major national retailers and mobile phone companies, and that we’ll have a long-term state-run mortgage lending arrangement is a recipe for just that.  And here’s the thing; for me, conservatives should want their country to be successful, as well as well-ordered, that we should want prosperity because we know it’s important if we’re to achieve great things as a nation – Blond’s Red Toryism at times seems to say, let the world go hang, as long as we’re all arranged happily.  But eventually, as we fall behind the world economy, we’ll become discontented as well as poor.  (I can’t find the New Economics Foundation research he refers too, but it sounds dodgy, to be blunt.)

Instead, what we need is to shape the economy to allow for space for community, and for people; that space should allow them a greater degree of choice between risk and security.  Some people want security, some people embrace risk for its rewards; we should allow people to make informed decisions but then insist on their responsibility for them – if you want to make risky investments, fine, go ahead…  But no bailouts – all clear and up-front.  Equally, if you want to live in a localised economy with secure jobs, fine – but don’t be surprised if other people are earning more.  The task is not to turn our back on global capitalism, but to make it work for people.

(The attraction of employee co-operatives, as Blond alludes, is in allowing people to balance risk and security more directly, without relying on the State – I agree that this is a critical area for policy development, although I wonder if Blond realises how middle-class it could become, as knowledge workers may often have most to gain by such arrangements.)

Needs work on the State

In common with virtually all conservative thought since Thatcher’s ascendancy, there’s a yawning gap where a positive conception of the State needs to be.  In fact, because of the more conservative, less liberal, nature of Blond’s proposition, this seems clearer than ever – a communitarian vision needs to be balanced by a clear idea of how, where and why State authority will be wielded.

By this, I don’t mean more government – in fact think Kieron O’Hara’s right that the agenda needs a State (and a polity, too) willing to accept fewer areas of competence claimed for the State – a willingness to say that it’s the community’s problem, not the State’s problem. But I do think that where the State does claim responsibility, it should act and do so swiftly and strongly.

Such a State cannot also limit itself to the Leviathan role, of managing and mitigating conflict.  Central to Blond’s proposition is the need to spur and enable communities to organise themselves.  And here is a point where, if the Tory Party were serious about all this, the term ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’ should be parked – in a serious critique of what the ‘public sector’ actually means, such that self-financing local bodies – for-profit, not-for-profit, or plain municipal – can find their own way of working together, while the central State (the purest public sector) is much more restrained, allowing a genuine mixed economy to take shape in different forms and different places.  Communities are shaped by people coming together around a common good, which they feel they can affect – by politics with a small ‘p’; there is no one way for it all to end up, and people should be allowed to find their own way.

Responsibility, please

The critique says that we have stripped away much of the intermediating, organic institutions and practices which made capitalist society work in the past, leaving nothing but ego-driven individualism under the raw power of the State; the task is to regenerate, for new times, those institutions and practices.

Blond’s piece says nothing about the obligations for people in all of this.  Instead, it is a long litany of guilty institutions which will be changed and adapted, to create opportunities for people.  Yet if all of this is to work, it means getting people themselves to change – if there are “divided families, unparented children” then we are asking people to unite their families and parent their children in ways they aren’t.

What we’re asking for is people taking responsibility for themselves, and for their community.  There’s a whole agenda here about civility, and one that links to the resurrection of emphatically political life I mentioned above.  There’s a challenge of creating a sense of obligation at all levels of society.

Rights-talk

The other side of the modesty about a call to responsibility is an insistence on talk about including the marginalised.  This is dangerous territory; while I agree with Blond about the ends, and I think we do need to be clear that what this means is conservatives accepting that inequalities are not to be ignored, communitarian conservatism should be about creating strong communities and inviting people to participate, but being clear that participation involves responsibilities…  And those who don’t live up to their responsibilities don’t share the benefits.

Conservatives can get dewy-eyed over old working class communities, and for good reasons.  We forget that we remember what were called the respectable working classes – not all of the working classes.  When we talk about assets, we would do well to remember that the respectable working classes held most of their most valuable assets in common – social capital in their solidarity, their mutual support in times of need, and even their pride in their neighbourhood, with housewives scrubbing their steps to ensure their environment was good.  The dark side of all this was that those who did not live up to their responsibilities were not a part of these communities; and it was through mechanism that that they derived their strength, and that the numbers of irresponsible people was kept to a minimum.  If we think about all this in terms of rights for inclusion, it makes the ultimate outcome we seek that bit more difficult to achieve.

In closing

Well, for now, anyway…

Progressive ends are not the same as conservative ends, although there is common ground.  Despite the name of his project at Demos, I think Blond’s article does recognise this basic fact, which is an advance at least from recent discussions led by Tory politicians talking about “progressive ends, conservative means”.  (Don’t get me wrong, appealing to the elite classes in terms of progressive values can sometimes just mean speaking to them in their own language – but let’s not sell our souls here, people.)

The problem is, after a decade of Heath (when old Tory thinking withered away), and then three decades of Thatcher and successors (where it was all but killed off and replaced by market liberalism), there’s a long way to travel down this road before we will see genuine resurrection.  Thinking with genuine difference about the nature of how we govern to regenerate community from the bottom up, while not compromising our prosperity and achievement, offers a rich seam of thinking for the Right; but making it work is difficult.

Good luck to Blond.  British intellectual conservatism has perhaps been at its lowest ebb in many decades; probably since the 1950s; we’re reduced to Roger Scruton (more popular in America) and, extremely distantly, John Gray, and some commentating historians.  It’s not entirely clear why.  French intellectual conservatism seems healthy.  American intellectual conservatism has the potential to get over the implosion of the Republican party with enough time.  Britain – which alongside France pretty much invented conservatism as a coherent set of political ideas – seems to be lost for now.

* That doesn’t mean we can’t be liberal – we can just distinguish between the virtue liberality and the ideology liberalism.