What do you want to conserve? Thoughts for conservatives

Not just community, family and nation but free enterprise, free trade and open markets

The English Folk Song and Dance Society and the English Folklore Society were set up so England didn’t lose its traditions of song and story in the white heat of economic growth. I’ve long held the view that Ralph Vaughan Williams biggest contribution to our culture wasn’t “The Lark Ascending” or “Variations on Christmas Carols” but rather his dogged travels up and down the country collecting songs and music. As acts of conservation the efforts of the men and women who set up these two institutions perhaps, Vaughan Williams aside, do not receive the recognition they deserve.

For the English, such acts of conservation seem slightly stuffy and pointlessly conservative. When the then culture minister, Kim Howells remarked that his idea of hell was “listening to three folk singers in a pub in Somerset”, Steve Knightley took this comment and observed that the English - his people - had lost their roots:

For 'Duelling Banjos', 'American Pie'

It's enough to make you cry

'Rule Britannia', or 'Swing low...'

Are they the only songs we English know?

Knightley was right. Most of the English probably can’t even hum the tune of even the most well known of English folk songs. The Irish equivalents of songs like “The Lincolnshire Poacher”, “Early One Morning”, or “The Derby Ram” would be belted out on the terraces of sports grounds or sung by maudlin drunks in the pub while someone scrapes a fiddle. In England, Classic FM will play Vaughan Williams “English Folk Song Suite” while our community singing consists of choral adaptations of Michael Jackson songs or the half remembered words to a negro spiritual. More English people can sing “Black Velvet Band” or “Wild Rover” than know the words to “Broken Hearted I Will Wander” or “There is a Tavern in the Town”.

In the great scheme of things all this doesn’t really matter. What matters is that those stuffy Victorians and Edwarians took it on themselves to collect the songs, dances and stories, to store and catalogue Britain’s fairy stories meaning that when someone does want to revive what we once had, to sing, dance and tell tall tales, there’s a dusty archive lovingly maintained by those slightly stuffy folk societies.

This work is the essence of private conservatism. People think it important not to lose our connections with past generations and the roots of our cultures. I’ve talked above about song, dance and story because they are important to me, but there are hundreds of other societies, clubs and organisations dedicated to other parts of that cultural heritage. We have people scrabbling through old diaries and manuscripts to preserve the best of our food and drink. There are others lovingly preserving old fruit and vegetable varieties or carefully sustaining ancient breeds of cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens. And there are groups saving walls, vicarages, pubs, pack horse trails and even more new-fangled things like buses or cars.

Political conservatism sometimes stumbles onto these activities but too often gives the wrong reaction. We get, as Steve Knightley witnessed with his song “Roots”, the worst sort of racism and the false assertion that our collection of folk culture is lost because of foreigners, especially foreigners with a different skin colour. Or else people echo Kim Howells’ comment (to be fair, Howells was a Labour MP), a sneering dismissive “this is naff” attitude to the preservation of our culture.

Conservatism as a political idea is not about the preservation of culture. We celebrate the activity of the private conservatives who do the great work saving songs, pubs, cheeses and buses, but that isn’t the political mission of conservatism. That mission is, I think, the idea that we want to better the lives of everyone while keeping the thread of spirit, story and culture that connects us to the men and women who shaped the land where we live: “His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid. Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made”.

Every conservative gets asked at some point what they are conserving. Part of it is all those things we’ve spoken of in describing what I’ve called private conservatism. But there’s a bigger deal here, we are also conserving the means to better the lives of ordinary people. P J O’Rourke, the great American humorist, once described his position as being personally conservative and publicly libertarian. O’Rourke saw no conflict in this outlook but we probably need to pick at it a bit to understand what such an outlook means in terms of practical politics.

Personal conservatism relates to a set of beliefs and behaviours that we all recognise - politeness, chivalry, self-reliance, sobriety - that are positioned in a framework of family, community and faith. The first task of political conservatism is to conserve this framework and the values they engender. It is no surprise that the rich and powerful overwhelmingly lead such a personally conservative life. Madelaine Grant, writing about the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, describes this phenomenon:

“Then there is what the social theorist Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs”; in public, elites preach anarchic values; critiquing marriage, claiming all family structures are created equally. Yet in private they opt for small-c conservative ideals. Just as tech moguls invariably ensure their offspring enjoy screen-free childhoods, stable marriages and two-parent households are the norm in elite liberal circles”

Hyper-liberalism, the “me me me” culture of social media, of modern society, is an aberration. Every human society until our own has had something we can call marriage. My father took the view that the reason for this, in most societies, was in order to stop men leaving once they’d impregnated a women - by putting a social restriction on male behaviour, we got a better environment in which children were raised, less murder, less rape and less violence. In parts of our modern culture, this idea of male commitment has been replaced by that idea, encapsulated by the dreadful Andrew Tate, that might is right and women are either wives or whores.

But this, even with a renewed idea of chivalry, isn’t enough. Family and community are the bedrock of a good culture but we also need things to get better, we need to end the tendency in some conservatives of rejecting progress in preference for a sort of neo-feudalism where the purpose of public policy is, in the manner of “Brave New World”, sustaining a contented, uncomplaining peonage. We see this outlook in green politics as well as in the politics of contentment typified by NIMBY opposition to any form of change. It is no surprise that opposing change is the dominant tool used to gain votes by Green parties in Britain.

Betterment isn’t simply an economic consideration but economic growth has been the biggest reason behind us being healthier, wealthier and happier. Preventing growth, even if you wrap it in environmentalist clothes, means that people’s lives don’t get better. Yet much of modern conservative thinking seems to concentrate on this sort of stasis, taking the anti-growth path implicit in the oft-repeated idea that the majority of people are socially conservative and economically socialist.

Since political conservatives want betterment for everyone, what we should conserve is the means by which that betterment happens. Just as we want to conserve family, community and tradition, we also need to conserve the idea of an open society, free enterprise and international trade. Not because these things enable us to be healthier, weather and happier but rather because they are good things worthy of careful protection from those who would destroy them.

A short while ago, for a fleeting moment, we had a prime minister who stated unequivocally that the British government should go for growth saying that the things we care about - safe streets, good health care, pleasant transport and the preserving of environment, tradition and community can only happen if we have the wherewithal to pay for it all. Liz Truss may have made a huge tactical error but her diagnosis was right. What was wrong was that Truss failed to get across that free market driven growth fits within the tradition of conservatism. I’ve a feeling that Truss was ten years too soon and that saving the idea of free enterprise and open trade is the next great conservative mission.

Free enterprise and international trade are entirely compatible with conservatism. Indeed, I would argue they are closer to the heart of political conservatism than the isolationist, anti-trade and anti-choice ideas that emanate from protectionists, NIMBYs and populists. This isn’t a blank endorsement of absolutist free trade - the coming confrontations with China illustrate the problems with such absolutism - but a recognition that we can and should get huge benefits from an open approach to trade.

The same goes for the use of land and the space to do business, to exchange and get the mutual benefits that free markets bring. So much of what Liz Truss called the “anti-growth alliance” is about people telling others what they can do with their property and business. Conservatives, for all that we are not instinctively laissez-faire, have always seen property rights and the sense of us having a stake in the community as the making of a strong society. We seem, too often, to have extended this sense of ownership far beyond the bounds of what is ours with the result that church bells are silenced, cricket clubs closed and pubs shut. Worst of all, our proprietary attitude to things we don’t own like views, farmers fields and birdlife, has made the sustaining of community nigh on impossible except as what looks like a well-stocked old peoples’ home.

Last month the governors of Hovingham Primary School in North Yorkshire announced their intention to close the school. The reasons for this were, as the BBC reported, pretty straightforward, “...it has operated for the last decade with 40 pupils or fewer - but those numbers fell from 33 in May 2020 to none in September.” Local councillors took to the airwaves in protest at the loss of the school and locals reflected sadly at no more Christmas events. But nobody asked why it is that the school has no children to teach?

If, as conservatives, we want to preserve institutions like the village school, the local pub and the parish church then we need to do more than protest when closure looms for the school or pub or chapel. We need to support the things - like new homes and new businesses - that serve to sustain a community. If a small community like Hovingham consists almost entirely of wealthy empty nesters comfortable in their well-appointed homes then there is no need for a pub or a church or a school. A quick check on Right Move reveals just two homes for sale in the village, one at £650,000 and the other at £750,000. This doesn’t feel like a sustainable community.

This pattern spreads across England as wealthy communities pull up the drawbridge on new homes, new infrastructure and new investment to bring growth. But that isn’t what we get - here’s the urging of one councillor for Ryedale, the authority containing Hovingham:

“If you want your village to become a commuter village for York, Leeds or Middlesbrough, and its character to change beyond recognition, sit on your hands and watch the service villages explode.”

Without growth many of the deep rural places will decline. It will be a slow, genteel decay not the sudden collapse that came in other less bucolic places from the closure of the pit or the shutting of a sawmill. But as the pub, shop and school close, the places that form a community cease to exist leaving behind a sort of emptiness - the very thing conservatives don’t want.

The character of a place isn’t its buildings but its people. And the exchange between those people. If the institutions that sustain exchange close from lack of use or need then the place stops being a place and becomes just a collection of unconnected homes clustered in one location out of historical happenstance. As political conservatives we want to sustain community not merely the physical identity of a place. Apply this principle to a larger community, the community that is the nation, as we can see that sustainability means accepting, encouraging even, change and growth. Without this, that national community loses its way.

Because an open and free society built on the mutual gains from trade is how we get change and growth, how we better people’s lives, conservatives should seek to conserve these ideas. Yes, we want to conserve family, community, faith and tradition but we also need to conserve the values that make preserving those things possible - property rights, the rule of law and free, open markets built on trust and the mutual gain from trade.