There is a tension at the heart of conservative thinking today – one that the Conservative party must address if it wants to win again at the next general election. The National Conservatism conference, being held in Westminster this week, is a bold attempt to speak to this internal struggle: how to strike the right balance between the right to be free and the right to belong.
Karl Marx was right in the 19th century when he said that capitalism causes all that is holy to be profaned and all that is solid to melt into air. John Gray was right in the 1980s when he said Thatcherism would eat itself – that the free market depends on social institutions and habits that the free market itself undermines.
The job before us is to rebuild our society on the basis of the responsibilities we owe one another
But it is also true that in a well-organised society, the free market – and personal responsibility, and private property – are the things that help sustain the social order. They make possible prosperity and the virtues that we need to maintain the old ways and adapt them to the present.
Conservatives will always argue about this. But let’s not argue about which came first. We were not born free. We were born attached. Before we make our own way in the world, we belong to a family, even if for many of us that family is fractured. We are related before we are alone.
And so conservatism is not a philosophy of liberation. It is grounded in a recognition of our responsibilities to each other. In my view, our many present discontents can be traced to the abandonment of this principle in recent decades. The Brexit vote of 2016 and Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 were reflections of a fact: that the 21st century so far has failed the people of this country.
Both those votes were rejections of the great millennial package: globalisation, liberalisation, modernisation. The progressive promise was that we should abandon the nation – abandon the family and the neighbourhood too – and everyone would get richer. Everything would get nicer. We’d be more equal, more at peace, more free.
In fact, we’re all poorer, less equal, less free, and less at peace. The progressive promise has given us 20 years of cheap credit, cheap labour and cheap imports. We’ve had an economy (the ‘butler economy’ as Michael Gove describes it) based on professional services, especially financial services: servicing the wealth of others without being too scrupulous about how they made it.
For the first decades of the 21st century, the people beyond the City were useful only as consumers. The pound was propped up by the City of London so the public could afford foreign goods while our own manufacturers suffered.
And for the jobs that need doing – in hospitals and factories and shops – we imported cheap workers from abroad. Eight million more people have been added to our population in this century because of immigration, depressing wages and imposing huge demands on the health system, on housing and on our future pension bill.
This is the economy of the 21st century so far: stagnant living standards, low growth and chronically poor productivity. We are the most spatially unequal – in terms of rich areas and poor areas – country in the developed world.
The government recognises all this and I applaud their efforts – on skills, on capital investment, on public services – to ‘level up’ the country. They’re doing the right thing, and tackling problems decades in the making. The job before us is to rebuild our society on the basis of the responsibilities we owe one another. I suggest three home truths that will help us do this, three political facts which are rooted in the attitudes and habits of the people of this country. They are national and they are conservative.
The first truth is that the job of government is to defend the interests of its citizens and indeed to privilege its citizens over those of other countries. We have our foremost loyalties and obligations to people we know. That means we cannot give sanctuary to all the world’s poor or even to all those rich or strong enough to travel to our shores. The basis of our generosity to the world – and I want the UK to be the most genuinely generous country in the world – is that we control our own borders.
The second truth is that the family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society. Marriage is not all about you. It’s not just a private arrangement. It’s a public act, by which you undertake to live for someone else, and for wider society; and wider society should recognise and reward this undertaking.
The third truth is this. Government can’t fix society. It can’t deliver social justice. But it can strengthen the conditions for justice – the conditions of virtue, that make us behave well to one another. And so the job of government is to build an economy and a civic realm, a civil society, that nurtures good people.
That means an economy built around the household and the community. We see this happening – fitfully and in part, but unmistakably. I see it in Wiltshire, where thanks to the internet and to new tech-based businesses, towns and villages left behind by industrialisation are becoming viable economic centres once again: places of trade and craft and innovation, and all the ordinary jobs that sustain a community.
We need young people to be encouraged and incentivised to seek meaningful, useful, practical trades: the vocational jobs our society needs. That means switching from funding nearly half of all school leavers to go to university and instead paying more young British people to be plumbers, electricians, and engineers.
We need public services that are accountable to local people, built on relationships, where prevention is better than cure, where we can reduce the size of government – the vast bureaucracies of the welfare state – because we have reduced the demand for government help: because people are better, families are stronger, society is healthier.
These home truths are popular because they reflect the values and aspirations of the majority of the British people. Politically, therefore, the Conservative party needs to lean into the realignment. Both 2016 and 2019 were an instruction from the public that they expect us to govern with their interests and their values in mind. Our loyalty must be to the people who brought us to power. If we honour those people, their interests and values, then they will vote for us again and we will win again.
This is an edited version of Danny Kruger’s speech at the National Conservatism conference yesterday.
Comments