Managing the Nation
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Conservatism: The Fight for a
Tradition
by Edmund Fawcett.
Princeton, 525 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 17410 5
Since 2008, the LGBT Labour merchandising department has had massive
success selling ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ T-shirts. They have generated so much
fuss that in 2018 Owen Jones had to make clear: ‘If you want to kiss Tories,
Momentum are not going to stop you.’ However, to large swathes of the left, the
idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield
ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for the city). Tories are comedy
material, like Rik Mayall’s fictional creation of the late 1980s, Alan B’Stard MP. Googling ‘Tory MP’ throws up a rich
array of associations, from ‘rapist’ and ‘jailed’, to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’
(a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).
Tories, however, have tended to have the
last laugh, because, as Edmund Fawcett suggests early in his book, the left has
been a ‘rash chess player’, too cocky and blinkered to strategise effectively
against its opponents. Fawcett, a veteran Economist journalist
who describes himself as a left-wing liberal, seeks to understand conservatism
as a historical phenomenon. He surveys political practice and political thought
in Britain, the US, France and Germany since 1800, with
authority and perspective. For him, conservatism is about defending core values
against the encroach of liberal modernity. He shows that many conservatives
have taken ideas more seriously than is generally supposed, and summarises the
arguments made by dozens of them – from de Maistre to Maurras, Schumpeter to
Scruton. Conservatives have ‘fought for a tradition’ against the excesses of
liberalism, but also against rival strategies on the right. They defend the
status quo, but have often rebelled when forced to accept its compromises. This
tension is long-standing and unavoidable, but has allowed for renewal and reinvention.
Once conservatism is seen in its proper historical context, Fawcett claims,
there is no such thing as a ‘new right’: there are just different emphases and
priorities, which each generation has repackaged to suit new circumstances,
enabling it to cope with, and triumph in, the democratic political order.
Conservatism was created by a series of
interlocking challenges: the French Revolution, industrialisation, and the
insistence of late Enlightenment thinkers that human reason could make a better
society than that ordained by traditional religious worldviews. In the 19th century, liberals fashioned a new political world,
one founded on representative principles and the idea of public discussion.
Legislative assemblies reflected religious pluralism, critical thought and
newly powerful capitalist interests. Liberals presented this as a dismantling
of the oppressive, arbitrary powers of an ancien régime. They were not hostile
to order, but believed that a more supple, just and acceptable form of it would
emerge from discussion and consensus-building in national political
institutions.
Fawcett’s argument is that conservative
political thought emerged from an attempt to warn these liberals that their
untested idealism about human nature threatened stability and social harmony.
He depicts generations of conservative writers celebrating the values that
liberalism endangered – social unity, authority, custom and property – and
redefining each of them as necessary over time. Social unity was originally
seen mainly organically, as constituted by a hierarchy of ranks and estates,
but class tensions made this increasingly inappropriate, so cultural ideas of
nationhood have become more common instead. The first authorities to be upheld
by conservatives were local gentry and clergy, and sometimes the military, but
the objects of defence are now more likely to be the nation-state’s legal
authority, the market’s economic authority, and occasionally ‘the people’, an
invention by particular elites for particular purposes. Custom could be
interpreted as religious belief, social deference or loyalty to established
institutions and normative ethical and cultural standards. Property originally
meant land, then more broadly the interests and profits of economic
corporations and individual shareholders, as well as human capital and skills.
This range of aspirations has often created tensions. Ever since conservative
parties forged an alliance with capitalist interests to defend their property,
the most awkward faultline has been between the defence of community and
convention, on the one hand, and the liberty to innovate and create wealth, on
the other.
Conservatives began by being resentful
of the new forms of politics that liberals had created. Many were aristocrats
who were used to giving orders. They were suspicious of public argument, and
slow to see the need for an intelligentsia and media of their own. Some –
especially in 19th-century France and Germany – entered politics hoping to
guarantee their own authority by restoring past practices, or by experimenting
with authoritarianism. In Britain and the US, this was impossible:
representative assemblies were already well-established and in the process of
being further democratised. In these countries, conservatives had to enter the
marketplace of political ideas, accepting that political argument would be
endless, and that victory or defeat would never be permanent. In time, they
came to realise that this world of elections and debate was not as unattractive
as they had assumed. Most propertied interests gravitated to the conservative
side, fearful of plans to tax or reallocate it. Most organs of the state – the
legal system, the churches, the armed forces – tended to sympathise with
conservative objectives. And much public opinion still identifies with
traditional cultural values and the defence of existing privilege. As a result,
conservatives have dominated Western politics since the 1950s, certainly in
Germany and Britain, but also in France and the US.
The price of this victory has been
compromise. In particular, conservatives have had to accept a welfare state.
Conservatives originally stressed the limits to government power, in order to
defend property rights and the authority and status of local landowners, and
still instinctively do so. However Fawcett sees, more clearly than many of
conservatism’s opponents, that few conservatives have made hostility to the
state a first-order principle, despite their relish for anti-socialist
rhetoric. The idea that far-reaching political discussion should take place in
national legislatures with the aim of imposing nationwide political solutions
was contentious until at least the second half of the 19th century.
But it was also from the outset an idea with a conservative aspect, most famously
articulated by James Madison in the debates about the United States
constitution, when he argued that a national government was better placed than
individual state legislatures to mitigate the petty selfishness of local
interests and popular pressure groups, and that therefore the fetish of state
independence from central ‘oppression’ should be challenged. Between the first
Reform Act of 1832 and the third of 1884, British Liberal governments sought to
extend state power, but took care to reassure property-owners that the aim was
not to undermine them but to strengthen social stability, through national
policing and prison reform, state education and increased powers over poor
relief and drunkenness.
Many books have tried to get to grips
with the 20th-century British Conservative Party’s views on state
intervention. One of the more interesting, Ewen Green’s Ideologies of Conservatism (2002), was concerned
with two debates in particular – the argument in the first decades of the
century about whether a return to tariffs would reduce unemployment and develop
imperial markets, and the historical discussion about how far the policy of the
Thatcher governments differed philosophically from that of previous Tory
administrations. He concluded that Thatcher’s economic agenda seemed to have
killed British upper-C Conservatism, defined as an ideology of organicism,
traditionalism and intellectual imperfection. This seems too sharp. Fawcett
stresses the continuities: Thatcher was able to manage her party’s internal divisions
by drawing on its various traditions. She presented herself as a defender of
open markets, free trade and limited government. Her language rallied those who
distrusted ‘socialism’ as practised by local government and overmighty trade
unions. She broke the power of both and claimed to be reversing national
decline in doing so, but concentrated authority instead in Whitehall and on the
boards of large companies and banks. Thatcherite ‘liberty’ left some people
distinctly freer than others. She burnished her reputation as a freedom fighter
and strong leader by standing up to some convenient foreign opponents – petty
dictators in Argentina and moribund Russian gerontocrats.
Fawcett might have added that Thatcher
also understood that ‘responsibility’ is an even more potent political concept
than ‘liberty’. Prime ministers practise hands-off government at their peril.
Modern governments inherit a complex set of duties, and cannot avoid blame for
failures that arise on their watch. In the mid-19th century,
Disraeli hoped to exploit this: he began a Tory tradition of berating Liberals
for selfish and divisive market-oriented individualism, a tactic that would
have paid more dividends had the Liberals been willing to play up to the
caricature. The unpredictability of foreign affairs brings particular risks:
the 1982 Falklands campaign aimed initially to avoid the humiliation of loss,
even though there was always a chance of electoral gain. As for Europe, Fawcett
astutely remarks that Thatcher’s strategy was an amalgam of rival 18th-century approaches: Whiggish participation in
Continental affairs and Tory isolationist rhetoric of the kind that appealed to
the English shires.
Political historians increasingly
appreciate that the effectiveness of any political language is contingent on
circumstances. The cry for smaller government has historically depended on its
ability to rally a coalition of supporters against the forces that are seen to
have captured the existing state. In Thatcher’s case, the most useful ‘socialist’
enemies were union bosses and high-spending left-wing councillors. In the first
half of the 19th century, a similar role was assigned to the
beneficiaries of ‘Old Corruption’: the vested interests who, it was alleged,
controlled the levers of power and squeezed the taxpayer dry in order to fund
lucrative jobs for favoured individuals in church and state, while levying
heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like
Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better
against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the
Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be
identified as irresponsible high spenders, and set the agenda for coalition
with the Lib Dems. It became widely unpopular in 2012, when George Osborne made
clear that high-income earners would endure less austerity than everyone else.
The polarising effects of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then
conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to
the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and
David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If
free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small
but boisterous and essential entity within a Cameron-led coalition, on the
model of the Liberal Unionists after 1886, it is possible to imagine a
different balance of forces in government after 2015, with significant
consequences for the direction of British Conservatism.
Ronald Reagan did much the same as
Thatcher, forging an effective coalition out of the various traditions of the
American right. He made a pitch to former Democrats who felt threatened by
urban crime and the expanding ambitions of the civil rights movement, as well
as to fundamentalist Christians and inheritors of the self-reliant
Jefferson-Jackson tradition. His rhetoric warned of the evils of big
government: he rallied businesses and banks against regulation, family-minded moralists
against permissive laws, and the vestiges of the America First lobby against
expensive foreign intervention. He attacked waste and high taxes, but never
sent Congress a balanced budget. His greatest achievement was to leave office
before the balancing act became too difficult, and he died an American hero.
Successful governments use a national
pulpit to proclaim an uplifting narrative which explains the policy needs of
the moment while at the same time flattering the political traditions and myths
endorsed by their support bases. The message needs constant revision and
renewal; Thatcherism long ago outlived its usefulness. As Fawcett remarks, few
now remember the last Tory privatisations, of the railways, for example, which
have since been renationalised by stealth. The contingent nature of political
appeals creates snares for parties, because many of their members continue to
admire past heroes whose agenda no longer suits present requirements. Few
things in politics are sadder than a nostalgist unaware that the circus has
moved on. In Britain, the main function of the works of Friedrich Hayek and his
school now seems to be to supply a Zoom backdrop for the increasingly forlorn
public interventions of the backbench libertarian MP Steve
Baker.
The political – as opposed to the
philosophical – parts of Fawcett’s book are most sophisticated in their
handling of the last fifty years, when the perspectives offered derive from his
ringside seat as a journalist. In particular, he analyses the re-emergence of a
‘hard right’ in reaction to the failure of political leaders in America, France
and Britain to keep delivering the goods, especially after the financial crisis
of 2008. One part of the right yearns to escape the compromises that
governments have had to make with welfare capitalism and multiculturalism.
Another part appeals to unhappy voters who have suffered from the limited
economic imagination of established centre-right leaders, neatly satirised by
Pierre-André Taguieff as ‘Bougisme’ and encapsulated by Norman Tebbit’s
injunction to the unemployed to get on their bikes if they wanted to survive in
the market economy. Fawcett’s ‘hard right’ is an alliance of these two
theoretically incompatible groups, those who want to set the economy free from
interference and high taxes, and those who seek economic and cultural
protections from globalisation. This ill-matched marriage is held together only
by the identification of common enemies: elites and experts, whether MPs,
judges, or ‘woke’ influencers who preach the virtues of cosmopolitanism. It
invents a ‘people’ for whom it claims to speak, and a body of vested interests
that seeks to obstruct the popular will. It promises to rebuild stable,
cohesive neighbourhoods organised around the exclusion of alien influences, but
without damaging international big business, which provides its funding. Donald
Trump, the Brexiters, Marine Le Pen and the German AfD all use these tropes,
while also borrowing from the traditions of right-wing rhetoric in their
respective countries.
Fawcett’s comparisons across the West
are so suggestive that it would be churlish to criticise him for not exploring
more fully the impact each country’s political system has had on the trajectory
of its brand of conservatism. As he remarks, the identity of the French
centre-right is so unstable that it frequently changes name from one
uninspiring acronym to another – UDR, RPR, UDF, UMP. The German right has not used the label ‘conservative’
since 1918. In both countries, governing usually involves cross-party
coalitions. The conservative movement has faced different challenges in Britain
and America, where one party has been able to represent it continuously, so
long as it accepts the discipline that unity requires. The dominance of two
competing parties in these countries has limited voter choice, facilitated
elite control and made elections relative judgments, in which the trick is to
paint your opponents as less reassuring, more extreme and less patriotic than
you are. There is only one right on offer at the ballot box, and its leaders
need to be adroit and flexible if they are to emerge victorious.
In trying to understand
the culture of the British Conservative Party, one might take Fawcett’s history
lesson further and reflect on the significance of its extraordinary longevity
and success. Its peculiarity as a party is that its roots are too deep to be in
party at all. The people who formed the first Conservative Party in the 1830s
were the heirs of the Whigs and Tories who had come together under William Pitt
the Younger and his successors to govern Britain almost continuously in the
wake of the American and French Revolutions, until the Reform Act made changes
of ministries commonplace. They defined their creed in terms of the king’s
government: they would uphold the authority, legitimacy and virtue of the crown
against its enemies. They stood against party, in the form of the
self-interested factionalism of opposition Whigs. They also stood against the
threats posed by British and Irish popular radicalism, French revolutionaries
and Napoleon. The Conservative project has always been a project for governing
– and saving – the country.
When the party had to mobilise to win
elections in a semi-democracy, from the 1870s, it established a highly professional
organisation, with a hard-working membership. But whereas the Liberal Party,
and later the Labour Party, felt that they had to involve their members in
discussions about policy, the Conservatives did not. The party’s leaders
assumed that the return of a government devoted to the maintenance of
authority, stability, property rights and national interests was what
Conservative members wanted, and so there was little policy to discuss, and
little appetite to discuss it. Debates in the public sphere were tricky enough;
there was no call for such things at home as well. Instead, organisations like
the Primrose League offered Conservative workhorses entry to the world they
wished to defend: garden parties at local country houses, formal dinners to
toast the monarch, lantern shows to celebrate imperial greatness. In theory,
this risked taking members for granted – as Robert Peel had done in 1846 when
he felt a responsibility to repeal the Corn Laws and failed to listen to shire
Tories who, he sighed, ‘spend their time in hunting and shooting and eating and
drinking’. But few issues were as stark as the Corn Laws, and all subsequent
Conservative leaders learned from Peel’s rapid fall. In recent years, aspirants
to the role, like Michael Heseltine and Theresa May, have spent Friday evenings
eating and drinking with Conservative constituency associations on the ‘rubber
chicken circuit’. This interaction is much more than gestural; so is the
requirement that the party leader face backbenchers regularly at the 1922 Committee.
But the dialogue is rarely profound. R.A. Butler failed
to become leader mainly because everyone knew that the members distrusted his
intellectualism and his fondness for guying core values. Party conferences are
for letting off steam, but debate and dissent are not in the party’s character.
The ease and ruthlessness with which 21 Conservative MPs were expelled in 2019
for voting against Boris Johnson’s revision of the Brexit arrangements should
not have been surprising, and few inside the party were surprised by it. Nor
are Conservative members fazed by their occasional duty of choosing a new prime
minister.
In other words, the Conservative idea of
party has always incorporated the idea of managing the nation. The important
battles within the party have not been over economic doctrine, but about how to
craft an idea of the country with which Conservatives can feel at ease. One
Nation Conservatism has been shorthand for any number of ways of presenting the
Conservative agenda, and defining its ideal audience. In Fawcett’s taxonomy,
Enoch Powell is a divisive figure, which of course he was, in terms of British
social relations. But, as Andrew Gamble showed nearly fifty years ago in his
classic account, The Conservative Nation, Powell
offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria
in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory
backbenchers and members have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders
to provide the inspirational direction they crave, though they have often
struggled to define what that might involve.
Unsurprisingly, a party preoccupied with
an idea of nation has had a lot of difficulty with overseas affairs. Foreign
policy has posed an existential threat to Conservative governments several
times: during the Napoleonic Wars; in the 1870s, when Russia simultaneously
threatened Britain’s Mediterranean and Indian prestige; in 1938-39 after
Munich, and in 1956 over Suez. Conversely, its claim to defend national unity
and power has been of great electoral benefit to it, particularly after 1886,
when the Liberals could be accused of making a pact with violent Irish
nationalists to undermine the Union. Opposition to Irish Home Rule, and defence
of the empire, were fundamental to the Tory appeal for the next few decades.
But after 1922, with the Conservatives in office and responsible for imperial
matters, and southern Ireland lost, the empire card gradually became less
effective. Tory diehards complained about the drift to imperial self-government
in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, but could not raise much interest among
the electorate. In the 1980s, Thatcher was tempted by hardline positions, but
managed to avoid being boxed into a policy of ‘no surrender’ on Ireland or Southern
Africa. Faced with the complex realities of decolonisation, Conservatives have
preferred to rally against more easily defined external bogeymen, namely the
Soviet bloc and then the EU.
Every step of the Brexit saga has been dictated by the
Conservative Party’s struggle to save itself: to prevent voters defecting to
the more uncompromising Ukip, and then to check the paralysing internal
divisions that arose after the party realised the issue would not go away. It’s
pointless to complain that its tactics have put ‘party before country’; most
party members do not see the distinction. In fact, they are not good at making
distinctions more generally. The Brexiters never resolved the fundamental
tensions within their project, between global free-market aspiration and
protective nativism, and between an outward-facing nationalism and an internal
unionism. They also refused to tolerate Theresa May’s attempts, as a cautious
Remainer but devoted party loyalist, to paper over the cracks by making careful
and defensive policy compromises, based around membership of the customs union.
The aim was to save the union with Northern Ireland, and as many trade benefits
as were compatible with leaving the single market. Johnson has chosen instead
to paper over the cracks by denying that most of the difficulties exist, except
at a petty technical level which time will resolve. His effrontery has been
more effective than many people, including me, believed possible, and this has
been a political education for us all.
However, rhetorical sleight of hand will
only achieve so much. Choices have been made. The government has prioritised
sovereignty and distinctiveness over trade benefits. It will not accept any
deals that make Britain look like a client state of the EU (in the way that Norway and Switzerland are said to
be). In the meantime, bureaucratic obstacles to trade with the EU will be slow to disappear, and many Continental
purchasers of British goods will decide to buy elsewhere. Britain will have to
try to prioritise other markets for goods and financial services. Cakes cannot
be had and eaten, and it turns out that there is no cake at all for the owners
and employees of many small businesses, some of whom bought into the Brexit
dream and are now living a nightmare. One day, if the Lib Dems position
themselves more astutely than they have managed in recent years, it’s possible
that they may be rewarded for their party’s consistent hostility to Brexit, but
this will take time and some major crisis. Until then, opposition parties are
probably best advised to concentrate on building a reputation for competence on
other matters.
If sovereignty means anything, it means
taking responsibility for national policy. In this sense too, there is now
little scope for Conservatism to take a free-market direction that would hardly
be compatible with talk of ‘levelling up’ and helping ‘left behind’
communities. In a pandemic almost everyone prefers a nanny state; moreover,
major reconstruction will be needed to tackle the social devastation it has
caused. The Conservative project may or may not work. If it doesn’t, Labour has
a number of trusted tropes of its own to fall back on. It can charge that the
Tories are after all just irresponsible libertarians. And it can revive the
allegations of private greed, vested interest corruption and class favouritism
that were levelled against North, Pitt, Sidmouth and Wellington, as well as
John Major, Neil Hamilton and Alan B’Stard, and that did most to destroy the
Tory regime in 1830 and again in 1997.
The new trade border in the Irish Sea
may well prove difficult to remove, especially since the government seems
reluctant to admit to it, and it’s hard to see how Northern Ireland’s politics
will integrate effectively with Britain’s. The Democratic Unionists have no
loyalty to the Conservative Party; for most of the 2010s, they looked
irreconcilable. Though May’s brand of Conservatism put loyalty to the Union
very high, the defence of Ulster didn’t become a Tory cause until Edward Carson
and Bonar Law in 1912-14 made it one. The original argument for Irish unionism
in the 1880s was framed much more broadly, against radicalism, ‘lawlessness’
and imperial disintegration; defence of Northern Ireland today cannot carry the
same associations. Historically, unionism in Scotland has been much more
straightforwardly a Conservative cause (dating from the late 18th century). The need to show Scots some benefit of
London rule, despite Brexit, will be another nail in the coffin of a
laissez-faire policy. Again, it is far from clear whether this strategy will
work (or what it will actually involve). If it fails, it will be a catastrophic
failure of governance.
But even Scotland is a second-order issue for the
Conservative nation, whose spiritual centre remains the associational culture
of provincial England, its golf clubs and women’s institutes. The rhetoric of
Conservative leaders has sometimes been nostalgic, sometimes plodding and
mundane, and sometimes boosterishly patriotic. But, in all these guises, they
have aimed to offer Tory England the reassurance that the people in charge of
their party and country are people with whose values they can feel secure, and
who can take the responsibility of national leadership. Now, the Conservative
Party must also show that it can respond to the opportunity, or duty, to
redefine its nation to include those ‘left behind’. It remains to be seen how
far these two strategies are reconcilable.
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