"It starts with what you see from your doorstep" - the idea of conservatism

Being conservative is about a set of values and a way of living, not philosophy or ideology

My last speech as an active politician opened with a quotation from my favourite writer, Giovannini Guareschi who created the “Little World of Don Camillo”, evoking this idea that we each live in our own little world just as did Camillo and Peppone his communist protagonist and friend, I went on to say:

“I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful.

Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better. Some of those stories were about stopping something – the ten year campaign, ending in the High Court, to stop a landfill blighting Denholme – but most were about improvement, little acts of betterment. A new kids playground, some traffic lights, a crossing – small things that matter to people far more than the big things we usually talk about in these Council meetings.

Bradford is a place of a thousand little worlds, each one different and each one precious to the people who live in them. It is those little worlds that my motion is about. First, we should celebrate the ordinary folk who, every day, do something to make those places better or the people in them stronger. And secondly, even in these financially constrained times, us councillors – individually and collectively – can do something to help those good people with their betterment.”

Conservatives don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a conservative. After all, politics is boring, political philosophy, doubly boring. So we don't spend hours discussing the nuance of our ideology, preferring instead to talk about the garden, the football or the state of the gullies on Bingley Road.

The problem with us conservatives not thinking much about conservatism, however, is that others decide to do it for us. And they really don't get it at all. A thoughtful consideration of conservatism gets replaced by a set of negative stereotypes depending on who is doing the defining.

To our right we get faux-conservatives who pretend that they're the only real conservatives. These folks chatter about 'conservatives in name only' and present, as the only True Conservatism, a sort of warmed over nationalism peppered with sub-literate on-line memes and old-fashioned racist tropes. They rail against national institutions - church, parliament, courts - seeing them as corrupted by liberalism, and insist that people cannot be trusted with honesty in simple things like collecting a parcel or voting in the council elections on a bright, windy Thursday in May.

To our left are a bunch of folk who range from considering us sad and thick to really, genuinely hating us. No chance of a positive press here, we're greedy, uncaring, elitist and even murderous. Conservatism is a bloated, red-faced man in a pin-stripe suit. Worse, because the left see everything through a lens of cheapened economics they consider that conservatism includes the Koch brothers, the Cato Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, all splendidly and classically liberal institutions. 

As conservatives we've allowed these oppositional stereotypes to dominate people's understanding of the ideology (insofar as it is an ideology - but more of that later) because we spend almost no time considering what we do believe and, more importantly, what conservatism means to the millions of people who live out regular and conservative lives.

Conservatism is ill-defined - it's felt rather than analysed, emotional rather than intellectual. Unlike the left there is no ur-text, no 'Capital' that provides a bedrock of religious certainty to ideological discussion. We have a set of populist aphorisms - 'hand up not a hand out', 'people who do the right things', 'choice and opportunity' - but these don't help except as a set of hints to what we believe.

The advantage, of course, with all this is we can, like the White Queen, believe almost anything if we try hard enough. This is the problem that some absolutist free marketers (and those confused libertarian nationalists) have with conservatism - it doesn't preclude a role for the state or assume that there is some perfect model of government that, if introduced, will lead us to the Fields of Elysium.

The disadvantage with the lack of that ur-text or even a recognised corpus of accessible conservative thinking is that there's no obvious ideological filter through which to assess policy. Conservatives literally wing-it much of the time at least in ideological terms. When people speak of some sort of conservative ideological mission they largely miss the point - it's mostly this is what we do not a case of this is what we believe. I appreciate that many will start by talking about Burke at this point, claiming that his philosophy of ‘woah, not so fast now, let’s maybe not destroy all the good alongside the bad like they did in France’ is a conservative ur-text, but Burke merely joined the tradition, he didn;t create it or set out its mission.

My starting point in understanding conservatism is that emotional meaning is more significant than philosophy, at least in its role as an ideological source. Place, people and values matter more to conservatives than the words in a book written in the 18th or 19th century. Where there are central texts to liberalism and socialism, there is no source book for conservatism - we can't get ideological reassurance from Marx or Smith or Mill.

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Chesterton, Tolkein and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy - perhaps even instead of philosophy. We perhaps need to take a leaf from Arthur Balfour and embrace the importance of doubt. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

In seeing the significance of society, conservatism stops being an ideology and becomes a way of living, a set of values and choices that are moderate, polite, personally responsible and trustworthy. If you spend time with conservative people - and as a Conservative Party member and activist of forty years, I can say that I have done just that - you soon realise that the stuff of national debate and headlines is not the stuff of conservatism (not, as I've noted, that conservative folk spend that much time talking political philosophy). Boil it down and the core of our belief is about nation, community, family, neighbourhood, friends - social capital, sociology. Yet we bang on as if economics is everything, dry and dusty emotionless numbers.

Because of this and because we don't think enough about what we're about, conservatives become pragmatic, technocratic and seem uncaring. If we don't ground our policy in community, family, neighbourhood and home, we end up sounding like the young man with the spreadsheet trying to tell the old publican why his business is dying. Or worse that it would be an improvement to close that business and turn the property into a convenience store or some flats. Apply this thinking to how we see the poor. Not as benefits scroungers. Not as immigrants. Not undeserving. But somebody's family. Someone's neighbour. Someone's friend.

There was a time when the folk bothering about their neighbourhood, the town, the country were mostly conservatives. The sense of social duty and that 'we can't let things like that happen here' was what drove my grandmother and two friends to start delivering meals on wheels in the years after WWII - ferried round by the local curate who had a motor-cycle and sidecar. Political conservatives seem to have lost sight of this idea - David Cameron saw it clearly when he spoke of the Big Society, of the space filled with community that wasn’t business and wasn’t the state, but we have lost it again.

In Britain, conservatism doesn't need a relaunch, we just need to literally go back to our roots as conservatives. To understand why we are what we are and to start talking about those conservative things - few of which, once we've got past thrift, have much to do with economics, at least in that Hayekian or Marxist "we've a prescription for the perfect society here in this book" sense of economics.

Firstly, everything is local. This is what matters most to people. Their family. Their friends. Their neighbours. Their community. Their place. As Kipling said:

GOD gave all men all earth to love

But since our hearts are small,

Ordained for each one spot should prove

Belovèd over all

Admitting our hearts are small is just the start - we must then be able to answer the questions people have about their school, their hospital, their road, their house, their family. It's not that people in Sevenoaks don't care about school and hospitals in Wilsden, of course they do. It's rather that those small hearts make them care much, much more about the things in Sevenoaks than they ever will about things in distant (even five miles away) places.

Today this means giving people control of the answers to these questions, at the very least a say, a chance to hold the people running the services to account. So when we say we don't like the EU, it's not because it's evil or stupid but because it's simply too far away to understand what our neighbourhood, our community and our family needs except as numbers on a spreadsheet or a footnote in a think-tank report.

Even the local council is too far away to really understand what matters in our communities, to our families and for our neighbourhood. Yet the flattening of everything - creating Harm de Blij's 'flat earth' in the pursuit of Max U - makes that council just an outpost of the distant regime. And people know this and feel excluded. For some there's enough money to escape (or even to be an 'Anywhere' person, a 'Flat Earther') but for most people that's not an option.

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours' lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

This is the starting point for a conservative mission. We're not about grand schemes for the perfect society but rather for places that people love. I quoted Kipling's 'Sussex' above but I could equally have used Casey Bailey's 'Dear Birmingham' because it's exactly the same sentiment - I love this place for all its flaws, mistakes and problems. It's my place.

This is where we start - with home, friends, family and the places we love. You want a conservative manifesto then it starts with how we give folk the power and the tools to turn the places they love into great places. For sure there are lots of other things about keeping people safe, about nation and stuff like that - even macroeconomics if you insist, but if we don't start with what we can see out of our front door we've missed the point.