The Purpose of Conservatism

Conservatism must be about more than the creation of wealth.

By Barney Hagan

The Conservative Party has arrived at a crossroads. Exhausted and fractious after twelve years of power, it calls to mind Douglas Hurd’s famous verdict on the Heath government, ‘stumbling across the battlefield looking for someone to surrender to.’ The sheen of Rishi Sunak’s accession has, for now at least, halted the slide in the polls that under Ms Truss pointed the way to electoral oblivion, but the underlying problems still remain – indeed, thanks in part to Ms Truss’ policies, they have got worse. As the Conservative Party prepares itself to try and win a fifth successive general election, the predominant question has to be: why? I do not ask this glibly. What is conservatism for? What is its purpose? Many conservatives themselves seem to be unaware of it, beyond keeping anyone else out of power. But conservatism, despite its anti-intellectual nature, has a rich intellectual heritage to draw on and renew itself with. There are two strands of conservative thought, one newer but currently exhausted; the other older, but lately less followed, that was promised at the 2019 general election and won a large majority, but has yet to be put into practice.  

The older form of conservative thought, commonly known as One Nation Conservatism, has its origins in the writings and policies of Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister in 1868 and again from 1874-80. Disraeli was profoundly sceptical of laissez-faire capitalism, or at least sceptical of the moral dimension imbued to it by Cobden, Bright and Gladstone that held that business was an unqualified good, and increased business would lead to increased happiness. This was, of course, achieved at the expense of the worker, for whom the great Liberal governments of the Victorian era did surprisingly little. For Disraeli, on the other hand, it was the duty of the rich and successful to ameliorate the condition of the poor and unfortunate: otherwise, inequalities would grow too wide, too many people would lose faith in the socioeconomic system, and social upheaval and possibly even revolution would result. Disraeli’s governments introduced moderate and practical social reform – not applying a rigid ivory tower dogma, but dealing with practical issues that had arisen as a result of industrialisation. As one labour leader admitted, ‘the Tory government has done more for the working man in the last four years than the Liberals have in the last twenty.’ Combined with the extension of the franchise to most working men in the 1867 Reform Act and a performative embrace of patriotism and the Empire, Disraeli built an electoral coalition that delivered Conservatives majority after majority for almost a hundred years.

The newer form hews far closer to mid-Victorian Gladstonian liberalism. (Mrs Thatcher once declared ‘if Gladstone were alive today, he would be a conservative’; which implies that, had Mrs Thatcher been alive in Gladstone’s day, she would have been a liberal.) Determined to release Britain from the morass of economic stagflation in the 60s, Margaret Thatcher and her intellectual antecedents such as Milton Friedman, Sir Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell, believed that in removing barriers to free trade and privatising businesses, industries would be unleashed, profits would grow and wages would rise. To achieve this inflation would have to be defeated and moribund businesses, hitherto propped up with government money, allowed to go bust. Hence Thatcherism undertook the historic shift to combat inflation rather than unemployment. Unfortunately, for all that Mrs Thatcher’s work was necessary, little has been done to address the defects of such a system, especially after the decades it has had to embed itself into the fabric of the nation. Inequality is at its worse level since the late nineteenth century, when Disraeli began his social reforms.

The Conservative Party contains both worldviews today, two horses yoked together to the same harness and pulling in markedly different directions. Firstly, there is a Gladstonian liberalism (minus Gladstone’s belief in a balanced budget): a rigid advocacy of a small state, low taxes and the moral superiority of success. Secondly, there is a Disraelian conservatism that believes in a paternalistic state, taxes commensurate with responsibility, and recognises the moral equivalency of material success. One need not be Einstein to work out that it is the Gladstonian version that has held sway in the Conservative Party since the 1980s And yet, as the Truss premiership and countless opinion polls show, this Gladstonian worldview, however popular it may have been a generation ago, currently points the way to electoral oblivion.

The great disruptive policies (in the Truss sense of the term) of the 1980s, Thatcherism and Reaganomics, have come to an end. The paradigm has shifted. Whether by luck or judgement, Boris Johnson understood this, and went into the 2019 general election on a platform promising ‘levelling up,’ a quintessentially One Nation pledge. He won by a landslide. Disraeli’s vision appeared to have returned. The Covid lockdown, and Mr Johnson’s own unsuitability for government, prevented anything from really getting off the ground. Ms Truss came in and reversed the direction of the party, into a neo-Thatcherite, libertarian direction. Very swiftly the polls pointed to electoral annihilation. Of course, it did not help that Ms Truss had all the political nous of a lobotomised goat, but the policies themselves were fundamentally unpopular. And even if one could argue they were the correct policies, they will be associated for a generation with the Truss fiasco. It is cursed territory for the Conservative Party now.

Electoral concerns, then, would suggest a re-engagement with One Nation Conservatism; but they are not the only reason for the Conservative Party to embrace the Disraelian worldview again. Here the question I posed at the start must be confronted: just what is conservatism for? What is its purpose? On the one hand, the Thatcherite worldview emphasises economic growth, and that a rising tide lifts all boats. As Mrs Thatcher said, ‘I would rather the rich were richer, as long as the poor were richer as well.’ On the other hand, the Disraelian worldview emphasises the reciprocal duty of rich and poor to one another. This is surely the heart of conservatism, etymologically rooted as it is in the verb ‘to conserve.’ The key tenet of conservatism, the still heart of its turning world, is social stability: a belief that the safety of people and enterprise is best secured, and their freedoms best defended, by a settled, ordered society. Economic growth is therefore desirable insofar as it leads to this social stability. Where economic growth creates social instability, it is the duty of those who benefit from this to mitigate the adverse effects on those who do not. As Disraeli put it, ‘the tenure of all property shall be the performance of its duties.’ 

To make a fetish of the rights of the individual, whether social, cultural or economic, is to undermine that social stability. That word duty – the sacrifice of one’s importance to the needs of others – sounds today as though it comes from a foreign language. It is a virus that runs rampant on both sides of the political argument. Both left and right, as a society today we speak, in different ways, of rights and representation: we do not speak of duty and honour. And yet any society is an exercise in reciprocity; and to sacrifice this reciprocity on the altar of an exalted individualism is to undermine it. The left does so culturally and the right, at the moment, does so economically. It is no wonder we are in a mess. 

Ms Truss spoke of disruption as a force for positive good. She meant, of course, economically. There are others who speak of disruption – of cultural, social, familial disruption – that conservatives quite rightly deride. We should apply the same standards to ourselves. After all, in Britain, the freedom these disruptors desire is not found in the tabula rasa: it already exists, in our history. As the historian Herbert Butterfield wrote, ‘freedom amongst Englishmen is not a frisky thing which romps and capers in the spirit of April. Rather it sits into the landscape and broods there like the trees of autumn, streaked with red dyes, and mellow with the stain of setting suns.’ Freedom in Britain ‘is an ancient possession, itself a legacy from the past, almost even the product of tradition.’ Conservatives should remember and celebrate this. Freedom in Britain is not birthed anew: rather, it is renewed instead, in the observance of tradition, the stability of our social structures, and the connection to our history.

This summer the Conservative Party turned away from this, to the siren calls of Ms Truss and her libertarian clique, to the supposed freedom promised by creative disruption. It cannot afford to do so again. The purpose of conservatism surely lies in its conceptions of duty: that our rights are not a form of emancipation from responsibilities, but are rather guaranteed by our responsibilities. This has to be enforced not just on the woke, but also the business community, the trade unions, civil servants: everyone. It is this conception of duty which creates our social stability and has made ours a country of evolution rather than revolution. It is this social stability that guarantees and renews our prosperity and our freedom. 

 Conservatism must return to its Disraelian roots, to a concern and care for the people of this country, to a mitigation of the harsh excesses of capitalism. At the same time, it must make clear those excesses and inequalities are almost always unintended, and that capitalism is, for all its faults, the best economic system that has yet been operated. It must emphasise the reciprocity of social and economic interactions – the duty and responsibility we all owe to one another – and oppose the short-sighted individualism of both the identitarian left and the libertarian right. It should recognise that principles are far more important than policies. It should appeal not to the spirit of selfishness but to the spirit of self-sacrifice. It should be self-consciously serious and judicious in its application of power. Above all it should seek, as Disraeli exhorted it, to ‘elevate the condition of the people.’ There is here a deep well of tradition here for the Conservative Party to draw upon and renew itself from, as the country draws upon and renews itself from its ancient freedoms year after year, generation after generation. If it does not – if it does not rediscover its true purpose and justify it convincingly and eloquently to the British people – the Conservative Party will be annihilated at the next election. And there is no purpose in that.

Barney Hagan is a third-year reading History at st. Hugh’s College.