It is impossible to deny the sense of gloom and pessimism in Britain today. The economy is stagnant, and our society is divided. The opinion polls convey what many of us know: that the public do not trust the mainstream parties to steer us away from our predicament. The conversation around many family dinner tables is dark: parents worried that their children will miss the opportunities they enjoyed, and young people contemplating emigration. Even the spectre of civil war is being discussed – not just in private but online and in the media.
It is easy to list the individual things that are going wrong. But to really understand what is happening and why – and what we must do to save our country – we have to go a little deeper. For what we are experiencing is not only a set of overlapping and interconnected crises, but the complete failure of an ideology – the collapse of a paradigm accepted unthinkingly by those who have governed us and have run big business and the media for decades.
Liberalism on the Right reinforces liberalism on the Left, and vice vers
We have grown used to believing the world in which we live – the world of globalisation, international governance, mass immigration, multiculturalism, radical diversity, racialised politics, net zero, managed decline, two-tier justice, and the rule of judges, lawyers and technocrats – is just the way things are.
But there is nothing inevitable about any of it. Our world – and the problems it produces, like a weaker West, lost economic opportunity, rising crime, a diminished public realm, squandered social trust and growing collective anxiety – is a construct of ideology. That ideology is not as extreme as the systems of belief our leaders find easy to reject, such as communism or fascism, but it is an ideology nonetheless. And like all ideologies, as its contradictions and failures mount, liberalism is retreating into delusion and denial, growing illiberal and intolerant towards dissenters, and bestowing privilege and prizes upon its favourites.
For some years now, I have argued that conservatives need to reject liberalism and rediscover true, philosophical conservatism. We need to develop a new conservativism that respects personal freedom but demands solidarity, understands the importance of individual agency but requires responsibility, reforms capitalism and founds a new national economic model, and rebuilds community and our shared national identity.
It is important that conservatives do not become reactionaries, and true conservatism can never be illiberal. Conservatives must be careful to defend the essential liberalism that stands for pluralism and our democratic way of life. Essential liberalism is what makes liberal democracy function. It requires not only elections to determine who governs us, but protections to prevent the tyranny of the majority. It demands good behavioural norms, including a willingness to accept the outcome of election results.
And it requires support for free markets. Essential liberalism does not seek to turn every aspect of life into a market, but it knows that economic freedom is closely related not only to personal freedom but other values, including dignity, justice, security and recognition and respect from our fellow citizens.
The power of essential liberalism is that it does not pretend to provide a general theory of rights or justice or an ideological framework that leads towards the harmonisation of human interests and values or a single philosophical truth. It respects political diversity and allows for all manner of policy choices, from criminal justice to the tax system.
And it understands that human values and interests are often in conflict. My right to privacy might undermine your right to security. A transsexual’s right to be recognised as a woman might undermine the safety of women born as women. We need institutions, laws, and a limited number of legal rights to handle those conflicts. We need customs and traditions to maintain our shared identities and build up trust. Keeping the fragile balance between conflicting values and interests is a delicate and difficult job. As liberalism has grown more ideological, its failure to maintain this balance has become more dangerous.
Of course there is no single liberal agenda. There is an elite liberalism, which tends to cross party boundaries. This is how, despite public opposition, and changes in ministers and parties in government, Britain continues with policies including mass immigration, asymmetric multiculturalism, only limited support for the family, and a naïve belief in international free trade and globalisation.
Successive governments have pursued a worst-of-all-worlds approach to labour markets, for example. They have failed to train young British people in the skills and trades that the economy needs, preferring instead to throw huge subsidies at higher education. They have made it more and more difficult and expensive to recruit and invest in local workers, culminating in Labour’s new employment rights laws and equalisation of the minimum wage for all employees, regardless of age.
But at the same time, governments have offshored jobs to foreign countries through trade liberalisation and the policies that have given us the most expensive energy in the West. Through mass immigration, they have made it far easier to allow foreign workers into the country to undercut British workers at home. And by allowing the cost of housing to spiral, they have allowed migrant workers willing to share overcrowded accommodation to live off lower wages. In the case of Labour’s trade deal with India, Indian workers will even attract lower payroll taxes than their British competitors.
Liberals sometimes differ, but even then liberalism keeps moving forward thanks to a ratchet effect caused by those on the Right and Left. On the Right, liberals think mainly of the economy, while Left-liberals pursue cultural liberalism, destructive diversity, equality and inclusion agendas, and militant identity politics.
With the ratchet, there is no consensus, but that does not stop things moving forward. One side might attempt to reverse some changes made by the other, but in the end most remain. And both take us toward the same outcomes: economic dislocation, social atomisation and a state left trying to pick up the pieces. Thus liberalism on the Right reinforces liberalism on the Left, and vice versa.
The trouble with all these forms of liberalism is that they are based on a conception of humanity that is not real. Right from the beginning, liberal thought was built on the false premise that there are not only universal values but also natural and universal rights. Early liberals made this argument by imagining a ‘state of nature’, or life without any kind of government at all. They argued that in the state of nature – life in which was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ – humans would come together to form a social contract setting out the government’s powers and the rights of citizens.
This meant, from the start, liberalism had several features hard-wired into it. Citizens are autonomous and rational individuals. Their consent to liberal government is assumed. And rights are natural and universal.
This is why many liberals fall into the trap of believing the historical, cultural and institutional context of government is irrelevant. Institutions and traditions that impose obligations on us can simply be cast off. All that matters, as far as government is concerned, is the freedom of the individual and the preservation of their property. Liberal democracy can therefore be dropped into Iraq, and made to work like in Britain. At home, even illegal immigrants and dangerous foreign criminals can be given legal rights without any corresponding responsibilities. Our duties to others are merely unjust hindrances, and the state is happy to remove them.
Liberals ignore the relational essence of humanity: our dependence on others and our reliance on the institutions and norms of community life. They take community and nation for granted, and have little to say about the obligations as well as rights of citizenship. The nation state can therefore hand over its powers to remote and unaccountable supranational institutions. The rights and privileges can be bestowed upon foreign nationals. Public services should be freely available to those who have never contributed to them.
Liberal ideas have undermined our economy, damaged our shared identity
With later liberal thinkers came further flawed ideas about humanity. The great Victorian, John Stuart Mill, devised the harm principle, in which the liberty of the individual should be restricted only if his actions risk damaging the interests of others. Even then, there could be no encroachment on liberty to ensure conformity with the moral beliefs of the community, to prevent people harming themselves, or if the restriction was disproportionate.
The problem with the harm principle is that it fails to acknowledge that all our actions and inactions to some degree affect those around us. And, precisely because human values and interests conflict with one another, we will never agree about what clearly constitutes harm. Yet liberals today echo Mill’s harm principle when they behave as though the use of hard drugs has no consequences for anybody but the individual user, or when they are reluctant to force fathers to meet their obligations to their families or refuse to take action against serial tax-dodging individuals or businesses.
Mill and other liberals sometimes made the case for pluralism and tolerance on the basis that the trial and error they make possible leads to truth and an increasingly perfect society. It is this fallacy – this assumption that one’s own beliefs stand for ‘progress’ – that can lead liberalism towards illiberalism: its intolerance of supposedly backward opinions, norms and institutions can quickly become intolerance of the people who remain loyal to those traditional ways of life.
This illiberalism is a particular problem with Left-liberals, who are influenced not only by older liberal thinkers but by post-modernists such as Michel Foucault and the mainly American thinkers behind the rise of identity politics. Discourse, Foucault argued, is oppressive. People are not in charge of their own destinies. Their social reality is imposed on them through language and customs and institutions, and even the victims of the powerful participate in their own oppression through their own language, stories and assumed social roles.
Because oppressive discourses work to favour those at the top of exploitative hierarchies, we should not simply remove the hierarchy but penalise those who subjugate others. Equal political rights are therefore not enough: because historically power lay with white men, today whiteness and masculinity must be attacked. Because we do not understand how our social roles are constructed, we do not understand the meaning of even our own words. Those who hear us – particularly if they are members of marginalised groups – understand better than we do the true meaning of what we say. Because discourse is itself a form of violence, free speech is no longer sacrosanct, and it is legitimate to meet violent language with violent direct action.
Among liberals on the Right, support for the free market can sometimes turn into a careless libertarianism. Struggling communities shorn of social capital, deprived of infrastructure and lacking opportunities for young people can be ignored, in the belief that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market will come to the rescue.
A similar refusal to engage with reality when it contradicts ideology can be seen with globalisation and theories of trade like comparative advantage. Liberal economic theory says it does not matter who owns what, nor what is made where. Comparative advantage says we will all get richer if countries do what they are good at, and buy what other countries provide.
But this ignores the facts. For international trade is never free: just look at all the subsidies and hidden support given to strategically significant industries by China. And governments do not just influence production but distribution: consider the role of OPEC in trying to control oil prices, and the EU’s attempts to confiscate Covid vaccines that had been bought by Britain. And comparative advantage has become an intellectual cloak for offshoring industry and exporting jobs, while leaving the British regions outside the South East poorer and weaker.
The belief in free market principles can also lead to the creation of ‘fake markets’ that end up doing more harm than good. Attempts to marketise the NHS, for example, like the Lansley reforms during the coalition government, have created more bureaucracy and inefficiency while failing to recreate the magic of a real market. Regulated monopolies – from water companies to assets like airports – have been treated like ordinary markets even though they lack competitive pressures. Private ownership and private investment might well be a better alternative to public ownership, but conservatives should know that these are not free markets. The decision to allow foreign private equity firms to take over companies like Thames Water – extracting much of the value while failing to invest – has been a disaster not just for British infrastructure but public confidence in capitalism.
Conservatives can cling to liberal ideas, and go down with it. Or we can be honest about the crises our country faces, and accept that the many interconnected problems we have are not a coincidence, nor even something brought about by external forces. They are caused by the complete collapse of the ideas that dominate our system of government.
The collapse is not simply about economic insecurity, or only about cultural anxiety. Ideological liberalism has brought about both. Through globalisation and the destruction of our productive capacity, and through mass immigration and the imposition of radical diversity and radical identity politics, liberal ideas have undermined our economy, damaged our shared identity, weakened us internationally – and brought about the end of their own dominance.
After a period in government in which different Conservative leaders have taken the country in very different directions, the very meaning of conservatism may seem confusing even to those who march under the party banner. It is certainly bewildering to many voters – some of whom had only until last year lived their adult lives under the Tories – to hear that we consider the tenets of conservatism to include a commitment to social mobility, to home ownership and lower taxes.
Deprived of the ideological template provided by liberalism, conservatives must rediscover their own philosophers and thinkers and practical politicians. Conservative thinkers like Burke agreed with liberal theorists about the importance of individual freedom, and they also believed that the proper authority for political power is popular sovereignty. They argued, however, that liberty is the happy consequence of a well-ordered society, in which citizens have obligations as well as rights. Inherited traditions and institutions protect us from an over-mighty state and encourage us to be good and trustworthy citizens. The law is written with experience and wisdom in mind, not abstract theory, and it evolves gradually through time.
Burke’s best articulation of conservative philosophy was written just as liberal principles were being applied ruthlessly and violently during the French Revolution. Today, liberal ideas are not being imposed through violence and disorder, but violence and disorder are the result of the ideas. Burke argued government should be grounded not in abstract ideas, but in experience. Traditions and institutions should be defended, as they encourage trust, reciprocity and good behaviour. Community life, and local civic organisations – the ‘little platoons’ – help us to help one another. There is an important role for the state, but a strong society protects the individual from arbitrary government. Rights are not universal: citizens acquire them through gradual legal change.
Of course this is no wholesale rejection of essential liberalism. But conservatism is the politics of paradox. Our individualism is most endangered when the customs, institutions and obligations of community life are eroded. In a complex society, it is only by accepting limits to our freedom that we end up truly free.
And what those limits are matters. As Burke explained:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
In other words, we are better off policing ourselves through restraint and norms. But if we cannot do that, the state will have to do it for us. The liberal attack on anything deemed to inhibit our freedom has been truly disastrous.
Above all, to be a conservative is to reject abstract theory and ideology. It is to be sceptical about the inevitability of progress, and to be mindful of the risks of losing what we already enjoy. It is to know that we are not solitary individuals, but social animals who belong to families, communities and nations. It is to believe we must cooperate as much as compete with one another. It is to respect individuality and personal freedom, but also accept constraints on freedom and our obligations towards others. It is to understand that the culture and institutions we inherit represent knowledge and wisdom that we must preserve for future generations. It is to appreciate that we understand the world not from grand theory but from the experience of life as it is lived.
Conservatism is the politics of paradox
This rejection of ideology makes conservatism a uniquely human enterprise. Ideologists are engaged in a rebellion against human nature. They want to make the world something it is not, and something it can never be. They want to force people to conform to the expectations of their theories. And they hate the people – and the communities, traditions and institutions they hold dear – when they fail to conform. The ideologist, as Burke said of Rousseau, is ‘a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred’. Their utopias – socialist, fascist or liberal – are inevitably oppressive, because anybody who challenges their actions and principles must be irrational or nefarious. Ironically, given the ideologist’s complaint that it is the conservative who opposes change, it is the ideologist who refuses to tolerate change, because his system, he believes, is built on perfect principles.
Respect for people as they really are, and respect for the significance of place in all our lives, is therefore at the heart of conservatism. And because the conservative learns from life as it is lived, he understands that human values and interests are diverse and conflict. He understands that we are born into communities, but when communities decline or die, we seek out new identities and groups – not all of them constructive or positive – from which we can meet our need to connect and relate to others. The conservative understands that institutions are necessary to manage and reconcile conflicts of values and interests. And he recognises that communities that are capable of uniting people – such as the nation – are necessary if we are to avoid smaller, exclusive communities based on more uniform identities and interests that pit us against one another.
Conservatism does not place one value above all others. Individual freedom alone does not trump our obligations to others, for example, when it comes to security or solidarity. Correspondingly, conservatism does not err too far in the opposite direction. It should not stifle or intrude upon our personal freedom. The whole is important, but so too is the individual, which is why conservatives have a respect for individuality and a tolerance for quirkiness and eccentricity. It is also why no true conservative is a puritan who tries to limit people’s enjoyment of life.
So what does this mean for conservatives today? These timeless ideas can be applied to the problems we face in the 21st century precisely because they are philosophical insights, not a rigid ideological template. This is my starting list of principles for today’s conservatives. We believe in:
1. The sovereignty of parliament, with its authority provided by the people, and any legal framework that inhibits that sovereignty is illegitimate.
2. A market economy, which allows for a fair and efficient allocation of finite resources, innovates and creates wealth, rewards enterprise, and lets citizens make decisions for themselves and their families.
3. A fair and balanced approach to trade that increases prosperity, but does not lead to the destruction of our productive capacity or offshoring good jobs.
4. The family as the basis of our community, respecting the choices parents make for their children, and knowing that love and stability provide the best foundation.
5. A common culture and shared identity, understanding that they create solidarity and social trust. This is why immigration must always be carefully controlled, and the failures of recent years – the Boriswave – reversed.
6. National institutions, which bind us together and help us to resolve conflicts of values and interests.
7. Norms and laws to shape and constrain us, because we understand that life in a civilised society requires us to subordinate our impulses.
8. Balancing values and interests, so freedom for example is balanced with security, justice and fairness.
9. Our responsibility to others, because while we believe in individual agency and self-sufficiency, we also know we belong to something bigger, and owe our successes not only to our own talents but to all those who made it possible.
10. Dealing with the world as it is, because there will always be countries that seek to dominate us, and we avoid war by being strong enough to fight, although we cannot and should not want to remake other countries in our image.
A version of this article originally appeared on Nick Timothy’s substack
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