British conservatives must remember free trade and capitalism made the nation rich

We witness the likes of Miriam Cates telling us, like reborn 1980s socialists, that the problem is Thatcher, free markets and trade despite the party having dumped most of that in 1990

With Donald Trump getting re-elected as US President, I fear we are about to enter another period when thinkers in and around conservative parties elsewhere tell us that to win elections those parties have to adopt the Trump programme. Here’s former Tory MP, Miriam Cates, setting out this view:

“Farage will struggle to recreate Trump’s success at least for now, because unlike US conservatives, the economic doctrine of the British conservative movement - including Reform - has not yet broken free from 1980s global free market liberalism.”

Cates is an intelligent and considered political figure, not for her are terms like ‘globalist’ or ‘WEF puppets’ but this is the core of the argument presented by the Very Online Right. Indeed this tendency looks at Trump and, instead of seeing a bombastic man with an old school Democrat economic agenda, believes he’s an avatar of their Very Online Right obsessions with George Soros, Davos and, too often. International Jewry (on this last obsession check out the Very Online Right’s heroes like Candace Owens).

Back in 1970 British Conservatives set out an agenda for change:

“We want...personal ownership, greater freedom of opportunity, greater freedom of choice, greater freedom from government regulation and interference." 1970 Conservative Manifesto

Today these ideas seem in one respect commonplace across the political right but the Very Online Right and more considered commenters like Miriam Cates have decided that, in the manner of earlier conservative nationalists, the protection of perceived national interest is more important than the prosperity of the nation. We have to ‘break free’ from global free market liberalism if we want to win elections.

Although the British Very Online Right would have palpitations knowing this, the truth is that their economic approach derives mostly from Michael Heseltine. And Heseltine, with John Major, enabled Blair to pretend he was the ‘heir to Thatcher’ by running an economic policy founded on the dumping of free market liberalism in favour of a managerialist mercantilism. Weirdly, the right’s thinkers then supported Brexit thereby making such a strategy - ‘intervene before breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner’ as Heseltine described it - even more likely to fail than it would at a European level. And we know it has failed at that level.

Trump will get away with tariffs because the economic damage they inevitably cause is far less in the USA than it is in most other nations:

“A World Bank analysis using data from 2022 found the U.S. trade-to-GDP ratio — the value of imports and exports as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product — was 27%. For comparison, the global average is 63%.”

The comparable figure for the UK is 69%: Britain is between two and three times more dependent on international trade than the USA. The first item in the international and economic policy trolley for Britain should be more free trade. Yet increasingly so-called thinkers on the right want Britain to cower behind tariff protections for ‘key industries’ while an industrial strategy crafted by bureaucrats is used to, they claim, drive growth. As policies go dumping global free market liberalism is close to the most foolish imaginable. This doesn’t mean you can’t sanction Russia, China or Iran but it does mean that Britain needs to maintain open trade relations with countries everywhere.

The UK is trapped in a myth about continued Thatcherism combined with managerialist economic policies founded more in regulation than free markets. We dumped gung ho internationalism under John Major and UK economic policy has looked the same ever since. The idea that the dominant economic doctrine of British conservatism is free market liberalism doesn’t stand up to even a cursory glance at economic development choices over the period since the party threw out Thatcher. Even while Thatcher was prime minister, she couldn’t get through anything but the mildest reforms to the planning system and part of her legacy is a collection of departmental and semi-detached agencies trying to micromanage nature, transport, schools, universities and local government.

Back in 1970 the Conservative Party set out its beliefs. And nothing has changed since:

“We want a country which makes the fullest use of all its human and material resources to build a new prosperity. A country which uses that prosperity wisely and well, helping the elderly and those in need, providing new educational opportunity for our children, investing for the future as well as giving us a fuller life today. A country confident in itself, playing a full part in the world's affairs, accepting and meeting its responsibilities to others.

We want a society in which material advance goes hand in hand with the deeper values which go to make up the quality of life. A society which cares for its cities, towns and villages, its rivers, its coast, its countryside.

We want people to achieve the security and independence of personal ownership, greater freedom of opportunity, greater freedom of choice, greater freedom from government regulation and interference. A responsible democracy based on honest government and respect for the law.”

The task isn’t to change what British conservatives believe, to pretend that Britain is like America and to ape Donald Trump. The task is to take what we’ve believed for nearly 200 years and craft an agenda for government that will make our nation stronger and our people richer. Claiming that our decline is down to free market liberalism when the Party and the nation dumped that idea in the 1990s will result in us crafting an economic policy based on fiction rather than one based on the truths of our society and economy. With two-thirds of our economy dependent on trade, we cannot afford a policy that weakens trade. Our economic stagnation is the result of regulation, an overmighty state and a persistent belief, born in the minds of 20th century socialists not conservatives, that Whitehall can manage the economy and society. Add trade war to this list isn’t going to help.

What we can learn from Trump is the same lesson that Bill Clinton was given by James Carville. People’s voting is based on self-interest and, in most circumstances, that self-interest is economic: job security, the cost of the weekly shop, how the rent’s too damned high and why household bills are through the roof. Add to this wanting good schools, access to healthcare and less fussbucketry, and we have the basis for a winning agenda.

But this agenda needs conservatives to be honest about the reasons for economic decline: over-regulation, too much planning and a crazy Net Zero energy policy. Instead we witness the likes of Miriam Cates telling us, like reborn 1980s socialists, that the problem is Thatcher, free markets and trade. Over the last fifty years we’ve tried free market capitalism, technocratic modernism, big government conservatism and reactionary managerialism. And the only one of these ideas that drove growth and prosperity was free market capitalism. Maybe we should try it again.