Conservatism is not going to die but it needs a mission - some thoughts

Not new thinking, just a return to the compact between broadly liberal economics and conservative social policy - because it is right and it works

I’m a conservative. I joined the party as a teenager in the 1970s. I’ve been a young conservative, a student Tory, a party agent, a branch officer, a local councillor and a parliamentary candidate. The Party left me behind in December 2019 when it was clear we’d no idea what we were doing. ‘Get Brexit Done’ was a great slogan and we needed to do that thing but beyond the tactical need to move on from Brexit, we’d no plan other than a sort of scattergun boosterism from Boris Johnson.

Today it isn’t that the party doesn’t know what it is doing but that it is lost in the deepest thickets of the wild woods. As Peter Franklin told us in Conservative Home, the Party had a void where there should be economic thinking. Franklin thinks it is all Liz Truss’s fault of course, this is the latest coping mechanism for the sort of conservative who is, for some bizarre reason, uncomfortable with the idea of free trade, free enterprise and free markets. But saying there’s a lack of good economic thinking is correct but not sufficient to explain just how bad things are for the Conservative Party. At least Liz Truss had a plan, nobody else in the Party does.

So what’s the problem? It isn’t that there’s no thinking going on, indeed we’ve almost a surfeit of speculation about conservatism as every other pundit - present company included - holds forth about what it means to be a conservative and what this means for the Party’s political agenda. The rest of the pundits are carefully explaining why the Party is dying, indeed it might already be dead. Doom is spread about the next election with people suggesting that the Party faces a 1993 in Canada style meltdown.

I’m here to tell you two things. The first one is that the Conservative Party is utterly bereft of ideas, trapped between the desire to please the liberal media and the need to do some actual conservatism. And the second thing is that conservatism isn’t going anywhere even if the Party does have a historically bad election result in the General Election expected in 2024. Although there was some shifting of names, Canada’s main opposition is a conservative party and it is currently ahead in the polls. There is nothing in Britain that suggests it will be any different here since we remain an essentially conservative nation.

The problem for the Conservative Party, however, is that Liz Truss was right. Not in the way the mini-budget was delivered but in the analysis of Britain’s economic problems. Without economic growth we can’t have the best healthcare, we can’t have better roads or shiny new trains, we can’t have better schools and more support for mums. And the way we are governed is, it seems, designed to sustain a sclerosis - we are a NIMBY nation and unless we fix that we won’t be able to have the good things we want. Don’t come over all “net zero” either because for most of its advocates that’s just cover for opposing economic growth.

A few months ago I wrote a short rant about being government by  and for NIMBYs - here’s a flavour:

“We live in a society where any form of personal inconvenience or responsibility has to be removed by government. No you can't build those new houses there - build them somewhere else. No I won't let you drill for gas near our village - there might be lorries and smell, we don't want that. No we won't pay for our own care from the 100s of 1000s in property assets we own because we've stopped new housing - get workers to pay with their taxes. No you can't pedestrianise the high street - I want to park right next to the shop. I won't let you build a cycle way or a bus lane, it might add 90 seconds to my journey. What do you mean, you want to allow people to use the street to eat dinner when I might want to drive my car down it twice a year?

Don't build that new prison to replace the overcrowded, violent mess of a jail in the city - it might disturb some birds that we're told live there. And we won't let you build a bail hostel or a children's home near us - think of all the burglary, the anti-social behaviour. This is a nice community - this sort of thing won't fit it. Asylum seekers? We're going to march and petition to stop them, you know, we don't want dark skinned foreigners round here - no to a refugee centre!

I don't care what happens to the rubbish that I put in my bin, the bin the council empty every fortnight. Except that you can't build an incinerator that will put that rubbish to good use by generating electricity. And I don't want a wind farm on the hill up there either. Or a nuclear power station. Or any kind of generation. That can go somewhere else. What do you mean, of course I expect the lights to go on when I flick the switch.”

As I’ve observed so many times it became a mantra, Britain needs to reform the regulations that mean we’ve spent over £250 million for the government to ask permission from itself to build a new bridge across the Thames Estuary. The inspections, plans and reports mean that it costs over £100m, in the case of HS2 over £200m, to build just one kilometre of new railway. And the barriers to building anything that mean we haven’t built a new reservoir for 30 years despite a near doubling in water demand. This pattern is repeated for new electricity supply and distribution, for new public buildings like courts and prisons, and of course for any sort of housing.

On top of this inability to build anything new, we also have a problem with the infrastructure we’ve already built. We spend too little, as pothole dodging cyclists will attest, on looking after local roads. Our water pipes leak, we have street lights that are twenty years over their normal lifespan, and we have public buildings that are an embarrassment. The public, quite rightly, asks where all the money has gone. We look at the huge public debt, we squeal about the higher taxes and the bigger fees, and we wonder why it is that everything is falling apart, everything is tatty, and nobody involved in running these things seems to care.

Right now nobody is offering anything that doesn’t look like variations of ‘carry on with what we’re doing now but paint the doors a different colour’. We get a glimpse of a civil service that is both supremely arrogant and also so fragile that its best paid leaders run out of the room crying when anyone suggests something they’ve done isn’t good enough. Meanwhile out in the world of local government, we see council bosses building property empires by paying over the odds for 1970s shopping centres or setting up business enterprises that end up losing millions. And none of these public servants is prepared to take any responsibility for the failures of these crazed schemes and daft policies.

So what’s to be done? Conservative Party leaders right now seem convinced that there’s no need to change anything and the opposition largely agree. Especially on the matter of those things - the ones the NIMBYs and Greenies hate - that need to change. Take energy policy. We are, as James MsSweeney reports in Critic Magazine, headed for disaster:

“There must be a plan, right? You would think turning off 73 per cent of the grid whilst forcing everyone to buy electric boilers and cars isn’t the sort of decision a politician makes on a whim, or for the sake of a press release.

Having looked into this extensively, I can confirm that there is no plan.”

What’s odd though is that this, if McSweeney is right, ought to be a huge national scandal with the great minds of the media raising it at every opportunity. But no, the media are, instead, reporting on the endless saga of Boris Johnson’s birthday cake and on how much Rishi Sunak is spending to go to international summits. We get stern reports about some gossip-filled report into what the Chairman of the BBC might have said to Boris but almost nothing about how we might build more houses, fix the prison system, get the NHS in better fettle.

Politicians, of course, are going to focus on what the media want, and they aren’t interested in laboratory space in Cambridge, buses in rural Yorkshire, or how Dean and Hanif run their plumbing business now you’ve banned their van. Far from making doing things like running a business or building a house easier, we are actively engaged in the opposite - new barriers, new bans, new restrictions, new limits and new regulations. Pubs in the vibrant heart of London’s West End, now run by Labour councillors, are forced to herd everyone inside after 8pm, only to throw them all out at 10.30. And the Conservative government, in a gesture of monumental selfishness, is about to make it even more difficult to build any houses anywhere near anyone.

So how do we - and by ‘we’ I mean conservatives - find our way out from these thickets and build the sort of growing, healthy and happy nation the public wants? Can we escape the sluggish world of the NIMBY and Net Zero? I think there is a way out and it involves us starting with what we believe in, the values we hold as conservatives - family, community, nation, personal responsibility, trust. Then adding to these values the conservation of those institutions and ideas that preserve social strength and support economic growth - marriage and markets if you want a simple slogan. Above all we have to recognise that those who have roots in our communities owe a duty to the next generation and to newcomers, a duty to help them get their roots set in the soil we’ve come to love.

So if we want a strong future for everyone we need to accept regulatory reform including reform of planning and the green belt. It means we need to set aside our preference for personal licence in favour of a more disciplined society including promoting marriage, making divorce harder, and insisting on better disciplined children. We need to remember that manners maketh man and good behaviour goes a long way to making for a better society. We need a new chivalry, a renewal of the idea that men should use their physical strength to protect the weak, the idea that to use this strength for personal gratification is wrong and should be punished. We should start moving towards a society that is based on trusting others, perhaps by helping create the idea of community again. The 15 minute city may not be so terrible if it comes to be based on choice rather than the authoritarian urge of the petty official. Above all we should place a greater value on family and children than we do at present.

Amidst all this conservatives should take the pragmatic route, recognise the limitations of government dictat and the importance of taking the public with you in the long term development of policy. We should remember that the good bit of liberalism is liberal economics not liberal social policy, indeed the latter is destructive, selfish and damages the things we cherish especially family and community. When Disraeli spoke at Crystal Palace all those years ago, he set out the basis of what conservatives do in government - protect the institutions of nation and society while securing improvements to the conditions of all the people. In modern parlance this means broadly open and liberal economic policy based on free enterprise, free trade and free markets combined with the protection and conservation of the basic institutions that make society work: family, marriage, community, good local government and our constitutional monarchy.