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.

Birbalsingh: a national hero

Katharine Birbalsingh is a national hero. It’s time we treated her accordingly.

By Connor Boyle

It’s not popular in conservatism today to give any credence at all to those associated or involved with the Bush Administration (2001-9). To be fair, this is not without reason. In many ways the Bush-Cheney era showed the worst face of conservatism. The crony capitalism, the corporatism, the big state mentality of federalising issues which out to be left to the community or the fifty states (take the No Child Left Behind Act). The cherry on top is of course the glee with which the Bush-Cheney Administration, and their Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld went galloping off to the Middle-East. In Afghanistan, excusably in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, but Iraq however, was a different ball- game altogether. Looking at the makeup of the top of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy team - Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell - it is not an inexcusable thought that George Bush the younger was, in Iraq, finishing the job his father was persuaded not to complete in the early 1990s. After Bush the elder had successfully pushed Saddam out of Kuwait in the Gulf War, he was persuaded not to send forces into Iraq to take him out completely. The son was determined to see daddy’s will done finally. For these reasons, not to mention the leaving present of the 2008 great financial crisis, the Bush dynasty is not held in high regard by many of today’s conservatives. Conservatives, however, ought to put education at the heart of our mission for the future. Education is the biggest driver of social mobility, and social mobility is something we conservatives should be driven by. Giving people the tools to improve their lot in life; allowing them to get on and do better and better in life is a core conservative principe. Nothing allows us to achieve this better than education. 

And on education, the second Bush Administration had a lot to say. It was George W. Bush who coined the phrase that low expectations for poor and ethnic minority children in schools is “little more than soft bigotry.” He was undoubtedly correct. There is a belief in the educational establishment that teachers cannot be expected to turn out brilliant results in the case of every child. The idea goes that certain children, by way of their circumstances, cannot be educated. This disgusting attitude permeates the educational “blob”, and is cheered on, in-fact hammered home, by the teaching unions whose only purpose, it appears to me, is to protect the bad and lazy teachers, at the expense not only of all parents and students, but of the many great teachers too. Take the issue of pay. The unions detest the idea of payment by performance in teaching. They do so because they are incensed that the bad and failing teachers may lose out to the teachers who actually bother to put the effort into educating our children. The result is, of course, that there is no incentive to go above and beyond for their students, and the children suffer under the system that teaches the teachers themselves that extra effort is just a waste. Similarly, on the issue of school inspection, where they refuse to entertain the idea of no-notice inspections or the dismissal of failing teachers. Go into a school, I dare anyone, and threaten to listen in on a lesson without a few week’s notice or propose that a teacher who fails their students be sacked, and watch as the union card is rushed out of a pocket with threats of industrial action of some sort or another. Who, though, does this help? Apart from the dead wood of the teaching profession, no one in society is a beneficiary of this behaviour. Our schools are too important to just be a source of employment for the lazy or unwilling, but the unions do their best to make it so. I have never met a “failing child”, the idea is alien to me; a failing teacher however, I have seen. There is no excuse for a child leaving school ill-prepared for life, the orthodoxy of the educational establishment would have us believe that some children just end up being the margin of error, no big deal. Wrong. Or that some children require too much effort, or the best of all; 'some children just can’t learn, they can’t retain information. I shouldn’t be held accountable for their exam performance.’ If the establishment in education spent half as much time putting the effort into educating the nation’s young as they do making excuses, maybe we’d be in a much stronger position strategically as a country. 

Another key architect of the W. Bush Administration, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, gave a wonderfully inspiring speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. She talked about how while you can’t control your circumstances, you can control your response to your circumstances. On this she is correct. I will not deny that some circumstances of birth are mind-numbingly challenging. It is the job of conservatives in politics to design a system whereby these conditions of birth matter less and less to your prospects of life. This is where education becomes the biggest and most important issue we can grapple with. But even without this, in the classroom at least, it is wrong to suggest that less can be expected of those who are born into a trying existence. On a purely sociological point, it is, in the long-run, cruel. Giving young people an excuse in school, on account of being, let’s say, impoverished, will give a child a cushion on which to fall back onto. Give children the credit they deserve; they are quick learners, they will realise that they can fail and rely on their plighted circumstances to explain away their poor performance. This, by the way, is not their fault. It is the fault of the system and operators who allow it to persist. A child who lives in poverty fails their spelling tests every Friday, say. The teacher doesn’t come down on the child like a tone of bricks in the same way he might for a middle-class child, because, well, it’s not fair is it. Compassion at work here, isn’t it? Well of course, the attitude of, ‘awk, well he’s deprived’ won’t be the there for the child on the day he leaves school functionally illiterate, innumerate and devoid of any skills. What happens to the child then? Where does he go? 

Rice also said that “self esteem comes from achievements. Not from lax standards and false praise.” When I was sitting in my room watching this convention speech on a tiny phone, hearing this line I had to fight back the urge to stand up and exclaim in concurrence. Lowering standards for anyone, for whatever reason, will not help them in the long run. The simple truth is that the big bad world on the far side of the school gate is, at times, cruel and ugly, and there will be no hand-holding for those who cannot keep up. The job of the education system, so we thought, was to get everyone caught up by the time we’re sent out into the world. 

One woman who is doing just this is Katharine Birbalsingh. She has confronted the elite in education by proving them wrong every day of the week between 8:00am and 3:00pm. Her free school, the Michaela Community School, is proving that no child is unable to succeed. By demanding high standards, using traditional methods of teaching, emphasising personal responsibility, instilling a sense of community, high achievement and a strict regime of discipline, she admits a highly disadvantaged intake and churns out a highly qualified (some of the best inspection reports, not to mention being the fifth best in the entire country for progress 8 scores), highly talented, respectful and prepared flock of young adults. She fights the fight every day, and for the seven-hundred children blessed enough to be taught in her school, she makes an incredible difference. What a pity it is that others have not joined her in the crusade of excellence. Her work in education is truly heroic, she does a service to the nation by educating some of our most disadvantaged to levels we had been told was unattainable. This service has gone, shamefully, unrecognised. More children need the benefit of this ethos in teaching. The conservative movement must be there to help fight the crusade of excellence, and in doing so recognise Katharine Birbalsingh for what she really is; the classroom equivalent of Admiral Nelson.

Connor Boyle (The Whip) is a second-year undergraduate reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at The Queen’s College.

Wrecking the Constitution

The Plague of ‘Good Intentions’ in Constitutional Reform

By Franek Bednarski

The recent election of the Prime Minister was for many a moment of elation; for others, one of worry; for the majority, one of relative indifference.  The assumption, even among the most optimistic conservative commentators, was that at best the change in leadership would somewhat assuage the loss of seats at the next election; that the defeat which then seemed likely and now seems near-inevitable would be tempered and the new Prime Minister, while not renowned especially for economic ability, would at least present a relatively credible programme to replace the directionless economics of the Johnson era.

That, I think it is clear, has not happened.  It is not my intention, however, to brood and fulminate over my disillusionment with the government’s performance; nor do I intend to write about my horror at the fiscal restraint that ought to have been the guiding policy ab initio being reluctantly enforced by a Chancellor whom his Prime Minister cannot fire, whose position relative to her can best be compared to that of the Frankish Magister Militum Arbogast to the child emperor Valentinian II.

I intend rather to reveal and to analyse, to consider and to carefully sift through the root causes of these tragedies.  I do not mean, alas, the economic roots of our nation’s problems, or the personality traits that caused the hubris that led us to this precipice.  I mean quite simply the misguided ‘democratising’ principle: a false one, as I hope to prove: that meant that a politician who never commanded the confidence of a majority of her MPs; indeed, who never even commanded their respect; ended up wielding, though such a term seems unduly generous, the reins of power.

It was William Hague who first, following on from that cataclysmic defeat that was 1997, decided to separate the choice of the leader of the party, in good times the Prime Minister, from its natural roots, a ballot of the Members of Parliament.  It can easily be seen how such an idea could have been popular at the time: the party had just collapsed, after four terms in power, into an electoral position so dire that few alive could recall a similar electoral disaster, one that, indeed, made Michael Foot look like a competent politician.  It seemed like only huge change: immediate, comprehensive change: could ever elevate the party to power again.

If only such dark times, when great collapses fan the flames of demands for revolutionary change, did not have such uniformly disastrous results!  If only there had been even one man to stand up and oppose them!  Indeed, how many awful and damaging changes, under the specious pretences of ‘democracy’ and ‘transparency,’ have blighted the British constitution over the past fifty years.

Was it not under such pretences that the House of Lords was mangled and debased, that the horrid elevation of the patronage of politicians led to the filling of that venerable body with soulless technocrats and undeserving donors?  Was it not thusly that the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly were formed, notwithstanding John Major’s sage warnings, tugging at the very heart of the Union and threatening the country with imminent dissolution?  Was it not in this way, in a vain drive for ‘discarding outmoded ceremonies,’ that those symbols of the British Parliamentary system, the House of Commons opera hats, were discarded and a venerable ceremony vandalised and overthrown?

It is doubtless true that many of these champions of reform, those who wish to abolish the Lords and slim down the monarchy, to destroy, indeed, our very electoral system, would want nothing more than for the House of Commons itself be moved and the bland, European interiors of the Welsh and Scottish Houses be imported into the heart of British democracy. 

It is not my role here, and neither could it be in this setting, to establish, or indeed propose remedies for these developments; a conservative government must naturally do nothing to further them, must strive to maintain the traditional balance of our constitutional system.  However, I cannot see any clear remedy for a permanent protection of the constitution.  The best conservative instincts are, in the best sense, reactionary, and ought to be a stabilising influence that towers over the mad storms that occasionally affect society.

We are sentenced, tragically, like Stilicho trying again and again to save the Roman Empire, to stand as a bulwark against destructive reforms; to propose genuine, conservative clarifications, allowing our institutions to stand, in their essential form, strong forever.  We must propose bold solutions when it comes to grave crises and take bold action when the nation is at stake, but never disrupt the gentle balance of our organically formed constitution.

That the Conservative Party, usually so unswerving and persistent, has succumbed to the temptations of modernity; that we have unleashed to ordinary members a voting process for a position in which they ought not to hold primacy, where it is the people’s elected representatives who should rightfully dominate, is frankly a betrayal of our basic principles.  Members of the Conservative Party do not own the Conservative Party; they are not its principal mechanism of action.  The Party existed before mass membership and will exist after it: we have, in fact, no firmly entrenched tradition of it.

The authority of a Prime Minister is fundamentally, and constitutionally rooted in the authority he holds in the House of Commons.  Conservative MPs, selected by the local members, are the ones elected by the people in order to represent them there.  To steal the parliamentarians’ prerogative, to give it to anyone who pays a nominal fee to sign up is frankly unjustifiable.  It is what saddled our nation with the unconscionable burden of Jeremy Corbyn; the Conservative Party should be no party to it.

The membership, fundamentally, are totally unaccountable.  No one elected them, no-one can vote them out.  They already enjoy the immense honour of selecting local MPs, of choosing for the voters the candidates who will represent them.  It is then those MPs, and no one else, who ought to enjoy the universal and unassailable privilege of choosing the nation’s leader.

It is finally time we drive the reformist scourge, which has so blighted our nation, from our party.

Franek Bednarski (The Welfare Officer) is a second-year undergraduate reading Literae Humaniores at Jesus College.