'Make Conservativism Great Again': a project doomed to fail

Onward's future of conservatism project seems to be about dumping the ideas that gave conservatism its glory years in favour of a less brash version of the Donald Trump agenda

Conservatives, or at least some of them, have discovered neoliberalism. And it isn’t looking good.

“All I would say is that the UK has had a 40-year experiment with neoliberalism in various forms (from Thatcher through Bair-Cameron to Truss) and the outcomes are dire.”

This is from the “Future of Conservatism Project Director” at the think tank Onward, Gavin Rice. When pressed a little Rice tells us that neoliberalism is “...a cluster of economic policies which essentially embrace unilateral laissez-faire in trade, financialisation, offshoring of industry, indifference to import dependency and regional inequalities, indifference to hostile trade partners like China” followed by comments about the decline of “...productive manufacturing industry…” and apparently an “...ideological approach to globalisation”.

It seems, and I fear this is borne out in the emerging discussion around a new-found US import called ‘National Conservatism’, that the future of conservatism is about dumping the ideas that gave conservatism its glory years (free trade, assertive foreign policy, strong defence, sound money) in favour of a sort of less brash version of the Donald Trump agenda. A sort of ‘Make Conservatism Great Again’ approach that, in economic terms, centres on protectionism, picking business winners and an industrial strategy owing more to 1920s Italy or 1930s USA than to ideas we would usually term ‘conservative’.

The agenda of National Conservatism and the work Rice is leading at Onward seems to have two aspects: the repudiation of free enterprise culture and the prosecution of an aggressive culture war. There is, admittedly, a welcome return to conservatives discussing social issues and presenting the case for marriage and community but too much of this draws us towards the crass neo-traditionalism of pundits like Calvin Robinson and Melanie Phillips especially in its obsession with the primacy of Christianity (with the occasional patronising nod towards Judaism). One of the prominent features of Robinson and Phillips politics are ignorant and offensive attacks on Islam. But even without this bigotry, the focus on Christianity is, in a largely secular society, a complete dead end.

The US National Conservatism project has a website where it publishes essays of interest and relevance to the debate as well as some videos and recommended books. As far as I can tell not a single one of these essays, videos and books touches on economic policy, National Conservatism seems entirely contained within discussions about what we mean by nationalism (important so we don’t look too fascist) and attacks on ‘woke’ progressivism. Yet outside the bubble live ordinary people and those ordinary people, especially right now, are much more interested in their job, the wages and their families well-being than the pronouns used by a short-haired person on the telly. If conservatives are not talking about what conservatism offers the ordinary worker, they are not talking about what matters.

It isn’t enough, however, to just talk about economic policy, we have to talk about why so many countries in the capitalist world have sluggish growth and especially why Britain has done worse than most other places in delivering betterment for those ordinary workers. Borrowing the word ‘neoliberalism’ from Marxist university lecturers, as the Onward project has done, really doesn’t help with this debate and, worse, simply puts conservatives in the same confused economic pool as the left of the Labour Party.

The problem with neoliberalism isn’t its supposed policy agenda but that it is fundamentally a straw man with people attributing to the neoliberal creed all the policies they dislike. We can find an argument that:

“...climate change deniers and opponents of the European Union are neoliberals. And that the essence of neoliberalism is opposed to taxation, to international co-operation and state intervention. Indeed that neoliberals are ideologically wedded to greed and short-termism. OK I've got that - neoliberalism is about rent-seeking and protectionism.”

But then people like George Osborne and David Cameron get called neoliberals (plus if you are Gavin Rice, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) so I guess neoliberalism isn’t about opposing climate action or international trade after all.

Onward seems to have an incomplete economic strategy wrapped around positioning statements around food or energy security, interventionist industrial strategy and manufacturing industry. The economics is little different from the import substitution policies that did so much damage in Latin America and Africa. I can hear people, in the exceptionalist manner of all nationalists, explaining how of course it will be different in Britain because, you know, reasons. But it never has been different, whatever the nationalists say.

We have become quite good at identifying problems but much less good at finding policies that help resolve those problems. Onward’s Gavin Rice tells us that the problem is the economic policies of the past 40 years, all those free markets, international trade and easy flow of capital. Presumably the proper response, according to their diagnosis, is to have regulated markets, protectionism and capital controls. All directed by a strong central government which may (or may not) be committed to fiscal sanity.

The Onward argument appears to be one that is very supportive of regulation as a central component of an industrial strategy. Plus the sort of important substitution strategy that used to be a feature of every development economics textbook (Onward is quite keen on the USA’s ‘chips act’ which plans to spend loads of money seeking to replace microchip imports from the Far East with home made microchips). To make this argument Onward point to places like Taiwan that have developed high technology industries with government support. What they never mention is that Taiwan and South Korea focused on exporting industries, not on using subsidies to replace imports. The former is a pro-trade strategy whereas import substitution is always an anti-trade approach.

The biggest barriers to improving productivity in the UK (which everyone accepts is critical to economic growth) are not, as seems to be argued by Onward, international supply chains or trade but poor infrastructure and bad regulation. If we are interested in economic development we should be asking why we can’t build the water infrastructure we need, why we haven’t got enough energy generation, and how it is that four councillors in Huddersfield can block 1700 jobs to preserve a dozen people’s view? We should be asking whether the regulations, licences and reporting requirements loaded onto firms act as a disincentive to growth, and whether we have a tax system that encourages businesses to invest. Instead of talking about energy or food security in protectionist terms, we should be helping build a Europe-wide energy grid and flexible supply chains that prevent the problems we saw early this year with the supply of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Presenting a set of technical and managerial solutions to productivity and levelling up that don't acknowledge these barriers is a recipe for another failed regional development programme. The Make Conservativism Great Again project at Onward and the emerging idea of National Conservatism fall at this first hurdle by focusing on the structure of the economy (all the developed world’s economies are predominantly service economies so just talking about manufacturing doesn’t wash) and the role of trade rather than on the regulatory and infrastructure barriers to growth in the UK. That we have spent nearly £300m on plans for a new Thames crossing without giving the go ahead to build one is indicative of our problems. We are at least 4 million homes short of existing housing needs, we haven’t built a new reservoir for thirty years and it takes a minimum of ten years to give ourselves permission to build a nuclear power station. We are closing down regional airports, can’t expand Heathrow and the only new railway we are trying to build is probably going to terminate a tantalising mile or so from the centre of London. These, not government-led industrial strategies or the woke agenda, are the issues that need to be fixed. Right now nobody (with the tragic exception of Liz Truss) is proposing any ideas to get these problems sorted out. Maybe that’s where we should start?

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