Bonus post on the Tory leadership contest: immigration policy and the need for a better Tory intellectual life
Building a party filled with activists, councillors and MPs with intellectual heft, training and skills needed to take the fight to the damaging ideologies of socialists and the progressive left
This is something of a bonus posting so I can get some stuff out of my email inbox.
The last thrashings of the Conservative Party leadership election seem likely to end in a fractious spat over immigration policy and whether the UK should or shouldn’t leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) so as to get a grip on this vital issue. Given this debate (and the ongoing debate about immigration in the USA ahead of the presidential election) I recommend this article by Will Solfiac about what he terms the ‘pantsuit model of migration’:
“The crucial question is whether the pantsuit model does represent a change in the mainstream stance on migration policy, or whether it is just a slightly less extreme and more orderly version of the system we already have. If the former, the issue’s effective handling and depoliticisation would be a positive for all except for pro-migration ideologues and useless anti-migration grifters, both of whoms’ careers I would be eminently willing to sacrifice. But if the latter, then it would be a largely symbolic and deceptive sop by the mainstream to stop the bleed of their electorate to the populist right, and one that in the long term would actually prevent the problem being tackled effectively.”
Solfiac looks at how first Denmark, then Sweden have got a degree of control over migration despite being governed by respectively centre-left and centre parties. The political driver in both cases was the success of populist right parties (Danish People's Party and Sweden Democrats) but the policy changes were set by moderate leaderships. This better management of the border and immigration took place within the aegis of the ECHR and perhaps sets a direction less divisive and confrontation than leaving this body.
Another aspect of the Conservative leadership contest (one I’ve touched on before) that matters more than the attention it gets is the organisation, funding and administration of the Party itself. There is an urgent need to look at the membership model, the way candidates are selected and trained, the intellectual life of the party and how the party campaigns. There was a time when the Conservative Party and associated conservative-inclined groups took the intellectual development of right wing politics really seriously. Bonar Law established Ashridge House in 1921 as a ‘College of Citizenship’ to provide academic, intellectual and training firepower for conservatives. After the war this role fell to Swinton College in North Yorkshire and a generation of conservatives, initially under the direction of Rab Butler, developed the thinking and ideas that lay behind the manifesto created at Selsdon Park in 1970 and the programme that came to be called ‘Thatcherism’.
The depth of Tory thinking during the 20th century, at least up to the 1970s is very clear in an article by Nick Pearce in the English Historical Review about the cultural and intellectual legacy of Disraeli:
“For the group of conservative historians active at Ashridge College and close to the Conservative Party’s leaders in the inter-war years, Disraeli thus occupied an important role. He was a leader who anticipated the twentieth-century world of mass democratic politics and social reform, and gave contemporary conservatives principles with which to renew their political tradition. He offered an account of the nation, and its enduring institutions and character, that could be championed against the cosmopolitanism and abstractions of liberals and socialists alike.”
And:
“Writing in the Swinton College Journal in 1951, Rab Butler argued that, ‘To steep one’s mind in the writings of Disraeli, Burke, Shaftesbury, Oastler and others is to realise the essentially constructive character of Conservatism, and to perceive trends in the next generation’.103 Butler had a particular view of the ‘Tory Tradition’—the title of his uncle’s work, which strongly influenced him and to which he supplied a new preface when the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) republished it in 1957.104 He embraced an Oakshottian view of the conservative political tradition as ‘neither fixed, nor finished’ but a mature and human form of political behaviour that could be absorbed from close historical reading of Tory politicians—attentive to change, empirical in method, and popular in idiom.”
It isn’t clear what has become of Paul Goodman’s endeavour to rediscover at least the spirit of Swinton College but one task for a new leadership must be to get some in house intellectual heft rather than rely on, often flaky, think tanks. And this should be a programme, like Ashridge and Swinton, of training activists as much as a place for the development of and discussion around policy. Each year dozens, sometimes hundreds, of new Tory local councillors are elected but the Party makes almost no effort to train them or provide the tools needed to build effective groups in local government. And we gave up the opportunity to help develop leadership within the voluntary party and local associations.
As Andrew Gimson observes of Ashridge and Swinton:
“Is it conceivable that so many senior figures would today be found lecturing at a college devoted to the political education of Conservative party workers and others? Yet within living memory, this was the case. For although Ashridge (whose history is told by Clarisse Berthezène in Training minds for the war of ideas: Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the cultural politics of Britain, 1929-54) was soon lost to the party and became a management college, it was replaced by Swinton Conservative College, at Masham in North Yorkshire.
Here between 1948 and 1975, 54,000 Conservative activists, agents and other students took courses. Lord Swinton, who provided his country house for this purpose, is the Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister mentioned above, who was a minister in all Conservative and National governments between 1922 and 1955, except for the period 1938-43.”
It is often commented that there is a serious lack of intellectual rigour in our politics. Perhaps a new Conservative Party leader can play some small part in changing this by building a party filled with activists, councillors and MPs that have the intellectual heft, training and skills needed to take the fight to the damaging ideologies of socialism and the progressive left.
Some unrelated reading:
Henry Jeffreys on how the nannying fussbuckets and public health puritans have created a system of wine duty that may stop the importing of stronger red wines. Henry’s substack is worth reading too.
Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley on how Californians may be about to make their housing crisis a whole lot worse by, in effect, allowing cities and counties to reintroduce rent controls.
Neil O’Brien (who I think is mostly wrong about housing) provides a good review of the new Labour government’s housing targets - pointing out that they are almost entirely upside down by focusing new housing in places far from where economic and jobs growth demand new homes.
Robin Hanson has a rant about how the west is getting more decadent, “less effectively investing in our future”