God, race and abortion aren't the defining features of National Conservatism or the debate in Britain

The mainstream left - this time in the Financial Times - wants to discuss a caricature of the debate around national identity, family and society within conservatism across the world

John Burns-Murdoch, the data wizz-kid at the Financial Times, has stats to prove that the cunning plan by right wing Americans to take over conservatism in the UK isn’t working. Our data guru has done a whole article explaining how the “...US right is trying to bring US right-wing politics into the UK, specifically centred on the issues shown here, and it’s not working and I’m showing why”. 

And the issues? A binary distinction between tradition and change, abortion, race and God. Burn-Murdoch mashes together some polling from Pew Research, the World Values Survey and You-Gov (something that probably isn’t best practice) to present a series of charts covering these ‘social issues’. Unsurprisingly, given the selective nature of Burn-Murdoch’s data analysis, the charts seem to endorse his assertion that the importing of US ‘culture war’ tropes into the UK’s conservative discourse isn’t working because Brits are so much lovelier than Yanks.

There are two questions here: firstly whether the charts show what Burn-Murdoch says they show, and secondly whether the issues selected accurately represent the discourse Burn-Murdoch is criticising (or indeed any actual discourse in UK right-of-centre politics).

The headline says ‘most social issues’ but then Burn-Murdoch’s charts don’t show that, do they? There’s no polling cited on the LGBT/Trans rights issue, on family policy, on marriage (and gay marriage), on school discipline, on crime or anti-social behaviour, or on child protection and safety. To claim that the Financial Times chart covers ‘most’ social issues is clear a false claim. What it does is cover those social issues where, Burn-Murdoch believes, there is a stark difference between US and UK social issues.

And even on living next door to immigrants or people from a different race, the differences between the UK and USA really aren’t that great: put simply we are most fine with living next door to immigrants and people from a different race. Burn-Murdoch rightly points out that the USA has a far more troubled history around race than Britain, and that some of that history plays out in social circumstances over there. Mind you, issues such as family policy, marriage and school discipline don’t run counter to mainstream black opinion in the USA.

It does seem, at least superficially, that the Financial Times has chosen questions which match its narrative and by mashing together polls with different sample bases (and probably different questions and prompts), raises a host of issues about the reliability of the analysis.

Which brings us to the issues themselves. The Financial Times claims the issues selected (traditionalism, God, abortion and race) encapsulate the so-called ‘culture war’ in US politics. A war Burn-Murdoch claims is being conducted by the US right thereby making it a distinctly one-sided war. The problem is that the discourse in the UK right isn’t around those issues but focuses rather more on the work of UK researchers like Matt Goodwin, Phillip Blond and Nick Timothy who do not stress god, abortion or race but rather a cultural divide between the UK ‘elite’ (a contested term but nothing to do with the USA) and the working class.

Take abortion, for example. Although I’m sure there are UK politicians who support tighter limits on abortion, there is no evidence at all from UK conservatives of a desire to see a winding back of provision. If there are politicians seeking to make abortion a left-right wedge issue they are all on the left - campaigners like Stella Creasey helped get a dramatic liberalisation of UK abortion laws into Labour’s 2019 Manifesto and the same campaigners successfully got strict rules on protest - even silent protest - near the premises of abortion providers. In political terms the UK has had a stable and widely accepted law on abortion for 40 years based on legislation first enacted nearly 60 years ago - no party and no obvious faction within any party (other than the aforementioned Ms Creasey) see abortion as a campaign issue. Yet the Financial Times chose it as a critical social issue?

I agree that some voices on the National Conservative right speak more about God than we are used to hearing but even then this is more often to emphasise the significance of Britain’s Christian heritage than to talk about whether “to be truly British it is important to be Christian”. None of Britain’s conservative discourse, other than from a few marginal figures, focuses on the centrality of Christianity, preferring to stress the importance of family, marriage and community, none of which are exclusively Christian concepts. What the Financial Times does is to echo the horror at any British politician who tells us how important Christianity is to them personally and politically. The irony, of course, here is that the two politicians that have fallen most foul of this horror are Tim Farron and Kate Forbes, neither of whom are conservatives.

Which brings us to the Financial Times third ‘social issue’: race and immigration. As with abortion, it is hard not to see, as with abortion, that the primary culprits for importing the US ‘culture war’ aren’t the American right but rather the UK mainstream left. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that followed the killing of George Floyd has been enthusiastically endorsed by left of centre UK figures such as Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London and debates around slavery, statues and reparations all arrived fully-loaded from the US progressive left in the mouths of Labour politicians and assorted media-friendly academics or campaigners. The idea that the US ‘culture war’ around race is coming to the UK because of conservatives simply doesn’t stand up to even cursory examination.

Returning to Burn-Murdoch’s chart, we find a curious but commonplace conflation between immigrants and immigration. British people in the main are not against the immigrant family living next door but they do think that immigration is too high. For the mainstream left this has always presented a problem since they instinctively see supporting immigration as an act of anti-racism whereas the wider public (and conservatives) see immigration as a problem in terms of jobs, services and integration rather than as an issue of race. Even as someone who is broadly in favour of higher levels of immigration, I recognise that the approach to the issue from the mainstream right is far more mature than anything we see from the centre-left, let alone those still further to the left of politics. It must be possible to see that ‘how many’ and ‘how much room’ plus ‘what about schools’ and ‘are there enough houses’ are all legitimate questions when we debate immigration and, moreover, that these questions do not make the person raising them isolationist, anti-immigrant or racist.

Understanding the discourse within conservatism is probably important and it is right that the Financial Times and others seek to analyse this discourse. The problem, however, is that the narrative (‘the US-right is seeking to influence UK conservatism’) runs ahead of the evidence with Burn-Murdoch carefully curating polling information so as to claim truth for his assertion of that narrative. Indeed this assertion and selective analysis makes a further mistake by implying that the ‘culture war’ is something manufactured as a ‘wedge issue’ by the US right when the evidence suggests that, at least around issues like abortion and race, it is the mainstream left that pushes these ‘culture war’ tropes.

It would have been more interesting had the FT and Burn-Murdoch looked at polling around marriage, family policy and community (as well as perhaps LGBT, the trans debate and gay marriage) rather than simply plump for a convenient set of charts that (barely) support the narrative that American right wing organisations are seeking to capture conservative debate in the UK and that this isn’t working because Brits don’t support that agenda. This simply doesn’t stand up under even the most superficial examination and we should be disappointed by the use of data-journalism to prosecute a partisan narrative rather than to widen our understanding of the actual debate within conservatism in the UK as well as in the USA, Canada and Europe.

I happen to share Burn-Murdoch’s doubts about National Conservatism. Not because the NatCons are a US import but because their ideas fail the economic policy test every time. I’m all for a more assertive family policy, for supporting mums who choose to stay home, and for backing marriage through the tax system, but this cannot come as a package with protectionism, isolationist foreign policy and an overtly interventionist state. We can have free markets as well as a strong social framework based on family and community. Getting that is what should exercise conservative minds.