We have work to do

I know you’ve all been waiting on tenterhooks with baited breath for this, my first post on The Sharpener – how could you not, eh? I hope it meets or even surpasses your expectations, and you tell your friends to read it. It is, as with most things now, a reflection on the implications of Thursday’s General Election. (Be warned, it’s a very long reflection.)

As you might guess from my oh-so-subtle nom de blog, I’m a conservative. For that reason, this piece is a bit of navel-gazing because we Tories have now a brief opportunity to do that, and an urgent need to do so. In what follows, I’ll make some observations on how it all went for my lot, and then where we go next, before closing with my own reckless suggestions on what that should mean.

To put the rest of this piece in context, I want to start with some shameless self-absorbed autobiographical stuff. I wasn’t born to be a Tory – I’m from what used to be the working classes in the Midlands, with a trade union member father and a mother who is a bit of a pacifist (neither were politically active). At some point, though, I got interested in politics and soon decided I was a conservative. Maybe I was dropped on my head or something, I dunno.

That would have been in 1994, or thereabouts. Good time to become a conservative. First elections I watched were that summer’s European Parliamentary Elections. We got thumped in the face and kicked in the balls – total meltdown. In the years that followed, local elections saw the Tory Party wiped out of whole parts of England, having already reduced to a bare existence outside England.

By 1997, I was a student and a Conservative Student at that. I wasn’t especially active, because I was a bit of a loner really, more interested in reading Hayek and Mises than elections. But cometh the General Election, I figured it was time to do my bit, and I went out with my comrades to campaign for Major. I wasn’t a huge Major fan, and I knew well that Blair wasn’t (in spite of what some of those comrades said) going to bring back the Winter of Discontent – but I thought that, on balance, we’d got a good Government and that Labour would be worse.

Even after the drubbings of the preceding years, we all had a sneaking hope that there was a fight to be had – even if only to get a hung parliament. After all, maybe our voters just hadn’t turned out before; we’d won ’92, so… That said, we weren’t under any illusions that we were likely to lose. It was just the scale that came as a shock – as it did to everybody, I guess. When Gisela Stuart swept Birmingham Edgbaston for Labour, we all felt a horrible sinking feeling…

Some of those comrades at the time rededicated themselves to the cause, to get back next time. They just didn’t work it out – there was no way back from this in one term; we were hated, not simply unpreferred. I returned to being a political spectator, and got on with life – which turned out to be a good choice, I saw in 2001. I still had my opinions, and remained happily and openly on the Right, but I wasn’t going to be a partisan hack when the Government genuinely weren’t that bad.

Incidentally, as I lived life I drifted away from the ideological libertarianism to which I’d subscribed since the age of 19. For a variety of reasons I evolved into a conservative (neo nor paleo, simply that), learning to love the joys of order and community. That started before 11 September 2001, but the events of that day and the years since only served to reinforce this evolution in my politics. One day – I’m not quite sure when – I even finally accepted the label ‘Tory,’ which I’d always resisted.

Reasons to be cheerful

As I hope my blogging shows (I’ll leave it to others to make the final judgement), I’ve resisted descent into hackdom, but I have gradually again become a partisan Tory. I rooted for my party to win a good result on Thursday, and by Wednesday was getting thoroughly depressed about the omens. As it turned out, things weren’t so bad at all.

That’s not to say they’re great, but I’ll come back to that. We gained one seat in 2001. In 1997, we lost around half our seats. In 1992, we lost nigh on 40 seats. Even in 1987, we lost over 20 seats. To win 33 seats in 2005 – to make progress, however limited, is good.

There are other good points. We showed some genuine, if only moderate, success in London, taking seats like Hammersmith and Fulham, Putney, and Enfield Southgate. Best of all, when head-to-head with the Liberal Democrats – who were the only party making real national gains in electoral support – we didn’t buckle, and we took more of their seats back than we lost to them. That’s a massive difference from ’97 and ’01 – a mainstream party not compromised with power was unable to hurt us simply through posing as the Anti-Tory. It seems, perhaps, that the generalised and passionate loathing of ‘the Tories,’ so damaging in ’97 and ’01, is now very much a minority pursuit.

The Party also showed itself much better at campaign presentation and party discipline. We managed to stay off the Europe stuff through the campaign, and there weren’t the damaging and public divisions. Howard Flight’s sacking served its purpose. Through these steps, we made it a much fairer fight. Still room for improvement, yes: but we’re not the enthusiastic amateurs we had seemed in comparison to Labour.

Gradually, too, the freakshow factor is being diminished. Although a Tory, I am actually a human being (no, really) and I do cringe at the sight of many of our frontbenchers. Many of them just aren’t fit for television, I admit. Every party has its share (Lib Dem Norman Baker is one of my favourites), but somehow we seemed by 1997 to end up with far too many in leading positions. This seems to be subsiding, and from what I’ve seen, the 2005 intake seems to be mostly human.

Not waving but drowning…?

So yea for the Tories, that’s the good news.

The bad news? Well, we’re still a long, long way from power. And power is what counts.

The first point on this, already repeated many times but still too true, is that we barely moved in the share-of-vote stakes. Yes, that’s on a slightly improved turnout, so we did gain some voters, but ultimately all we did was get out our base and win over a few people at the margins. That’s all fine in showing that our base is now safe and sure, but it’s not enough to take us anywhere near power.

The second point, made here by my fellow contributor Andrew, is one I think especially critical – that the only clear boost we got was in our traditional heartlands in London and the South, but without making any major inroads in the Midlands and North. For reasons I’ll come back to, I think this is an absolutely critical point for the Party, and failure to address it will mean failure to return to Government except for a lucky strike on a small majority.

The third point, mentioned in the same comment by Andrew and more widely commented on the Right, is that UKIP voters cost the Tories a significant number of marginal seats (Harlow, today, for example). On the national vote, their 2.3% vote share would’ve gotten us close to Labour’s share, too. This is a bit of a downer, but is more an irritation than a major issue.

The death of the old party order

The fate of the party cannot be seen in isolation from the changing political context. Comparisons with the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s are mistaken, because electoral politics in Britain has now changed radically. For the same reason, comparing the Tory situation to Labour’s journey back to power have always been mistaken.

Politics in the twentieth century started in 1922 and ended in 1994. They revolved around the economic policy debate between ‘free’ capitalism under the old economic class structure and the challenge from socialism and reformist social democracy. The breakthrough moment in that period came with the Attlee Government, and the end began with the election of Thatcher in 1979. The defeat of even a timid social democratic offer in 1992 led in time to Blair and an acceptance of the same ‘Thatcherite’ consensus as Major – sound money, broadly liberal markets, incremental social policy intervention.

Think of the Blair Government’s major changes and achievements in the traditionally-priority policy areas and ask yourself just how many were so unthinkable under a re-elected Major Government. Independent Bank of England? More police? Foundation hospitals? NHS Direct? Tuition fees? Free TV licences for over-75s? Cutting class sizes? The increases in public services spending aren’t so unthinkable – they received major boosts in ’91 and ’92, and were only constrained greatly thereafter because of deficit-cutting. Yes, there are things that would have been unlikely, like SureStart or the scale of tax credits or the extent of increasing Child Benefit, but few would be unthinkable (the Minimum Wage being one exception).

The advantage the Blair Government had was that they could do all this without being the bastard-Tories who’d been proven (mostly) right in all their lecturing the country about markets and efficiency and all that. Many voters had come to loathe the Tories for their hectoring pursuit of Permanent Revolution and really could no longer bear the sight of them. At the end of this particular History, they wanted management and not ideology – there was a job to be done, but it didn’t have to be so zealously pursued.

Government is not however reducible to sound management, because not every problem can be managed away – Government involves choices, and choices that involve painful, emphatically political trade-offs. This has been the cause of Labour’s steep decline, with Iraq as only one instance of a wider problem of political issues galvanising different groups of voters against them. In 1994, the Tory Party became an anachronism, and the Labour Party was the vehicle to bury it. In office, the Labour Party is now facing the same decline and death of support. This is why the Liberal Democrats did so well on Thursday – untainted by office, their managerial offer, packaged with some ‘goodies’ (free social care, free universities, no council tax) is all shiny and new. Woe betide them if they were ever to get into office – they’ll be caught in the same bind.

This isn’t a suggestion of historical inevitability, but that we are in the chaos of realignment: it is a recognition that the parties are stuck fighting an ideological conflict that (a) has already been ‘solved’ – and so there’s nothing really significant to fight over, making the election a particularly pathetic spectacle; and (b) is failing to connect to the higher priority concerns of a growing number of voters. As pointed out here, in the current climate you ‘win’ by being better at getting the votes of median voters, yet the number of median voters is falling all the time, leaving a growing number of disenfranchised voters on either side of the middle ground.

In this environment, the challenge for the parties is finally, genuinely to Get Over Maggie, to offer these disenfranchised voters a coherent vision of government and society that is not simply concerned with implementing the priorities set by Margaret Thatcher in 1987. Not that those priorities were or are all wrong – only that as much as they were right, they are now uncontroversial, and that there are other problems we want to address.

On Not Getting Over Maggie

It is for this reason that the debate within the Tory Party has so often proven uninspiring and futile. They are ideological fixations, within the Thatcher frame. Ideological fixation, by the way, is a very unconservative thing – conservatism is supposed to be about dealing with the world as we find it, and not how we wish it to be. Let me just point to the three ideological proposals that have been floating about, sometimes in combinations, and explain why they fail:

The Liberty Option – big on the blogosphere, of course, is the idea that the Tory Party will win by an appeal to a purer blend of economic liberalism, by becoming a full-blooded libertarian party – tax cuts, tax cuts, deregulation, and opposition to all government intrusion. The ideological hang-up here needs no description, but the problem with it is that outside of educated twentysomethings, mostly male, and mostly living in the South East, people aren’t that interested, and quite sensibly too – most people value other goods alongside freedom, and see libertarianism for the ideology (and therefore anti-political creed) it is. I’ve heard some libertarians suggest that my argument is wrong, and that people don’t choose it because they’ve yet to be offered it. A brief look at the political history of the 20th century suggests otherwise.

England, My England – this one basically died out at the 2001 election, and carries on perhaps in part through UKIP – it’s the wish for a Thatcher economic programme to be married to immediate commitment to withdrawal from the EU and an appeal to the ‘good old days’. Basically, it’s an appeal to keep society on hold while continuing the economic change, as if the Thatcher era would’ve happened if it weren’t for the individualist flowering of the 1960s, which can now apparently be put into reverse gear. Puh-lease. I’m a social conservative (and I confess that I’m also a bit of a perv – though I don’t live in the ‘burbs) and will happily explain the corrosive consequences of the 1960s – but the challenge is to find a way forward that will seek to repair the damage done without compromising what were also gains made for many people along the way.

Blue Labour – this is today the most dominant strain, with one of its leading figures (David Cameron) allegedly the favourite of Michael Howard to be leader. Blue Labour hold to the view that the Tories need to be ‘modernised,’ to show they’ve ‘changed,’ and find their way back to the ‘centre ground.’ The appeal is pure managerialism – the ideological fixation is that the policy consensus is now perfected, that there are no further choices, and that the political challenge is to show the right combination of virtues to be elected. Policy differences are to erased unless they play well for marketing to the median voter, so a bit of social liberalism is apparently needed to make sure the party looks ‘nicer,’ and of course we’ve already dumped any commitment to changing the scope of government.

These are not ways of Getting Over Maggie. They are each the pet fascination of different parts of the Tory Party, each one fighting a battle long since won and lost. Libertarianism or family values might’ve had their moments in the early 1990s, and Blue Labour managerialism in 1997; both those moments are gone. The most that any of them could do is provide an excuse to rally round if the Government’s popularity collapses. That isn’t to say that we should be against economic liberalism, or against family values, or against competence (though sometimes in recent years, it looked like we were trying to do so anyway…), only that focusing on any one as the route back to power is missing the point.

The vision thang and why we need it…

It is for this reason that, while I entirely agree with those (like here) who say that a problem with the Tories 2005 campaign was a lack of a positive vision to sell, I’m sceptical that this will be so rapidly resolved. The Party’s leading figures are all trapped in some combination of those ideological frames above – my guess is that too many of them will start to hammer one of them in the hope that it’ll get them victory, using the same old slogans to achieve the goal.

But about the lack of positive vision… On one level, if you think you can’t win, shoring up the base is no bad strategy, and it seems to have worked. The issue for me is that I think that that base is small and shrinking and hasn’t got a Blair-loving fringe that will return to the fold at some unspecified date. 1997 marked the shattering of the Thatcher-Major electoral coalition. Voters had left the Tory Party, many of them with no intention of ever returning. For one thing, many voted for Thatcher and/or Major because they liked Tory economics even if they disliked Tory messages on social and cultural issues – the arrival of Blair removed their reason for voting Tory ever again.

My perception is that this is probably especially true in the southern part of England, where Thatcher and Major had built their electoral coalitions. Prosperous post-sixties metropolitans simply don’t like the Tory Party – and though there’s probably a small number who would be won back by a commitment to full-blooded libertarianism, most are happy enough with the economic policy they can get from Labour or the Liberal Democrats. It is for this reason that I think that if the Tories are to rebuild a governing majority (by which I really mean, plurality) it is in the Midlands and the north.

This will be a long, hard slog, but is not impossible. There are two groups in particular that offer the Tories some potential. First, thanks to Mr. Prescott (opposed by the Tories, funnily enough), new commuter villages are being developed in a wide belt around London and some of the other major cities. These will be full of bourgeois voters who move there to get away from the hustle’n’bustle of the big cities, often with new families and bought into economic freedom alongside a certain type of social conservatism (law and order and immigration – not to say that there’s some ‘white flight’ involved in people moving out to such new developments, but… but…). The move of these voters to these new villages and towns represent a move of many Tory voters into more concentrated areas, which is a benefit if they can be properly cultivated – but if they’re not, then the Tories need to realise that the constituencies they move from will be lost anyway.

Second, and at once much more difficult but much more rewarding if achieved, are working-class Labour voters, often very Right-wing on social and national issues (for which, read: don’t like foreigners or criminals), but presently very Left-wing on economics. The challenge is to convert their disillusion with Labour on economics into placing a higher priority on those social and national themes where they fit better with the Tories. And that, of course, was what Crosby attempted to do with his dog whistles – and it didn’t really work; they detached them from Labour, but didn’t link them to the Tories.

It’s here that the positive vision is needed, then. To be fair to Howard, I didn’t think he did too bad at avoiding getting into an ideological dead-end of the types I outlined above. His problem was that in foregoing them, he didn’t have an alternative coherent narrative (except perhaps “vote for me, it’s my only chance of ever being Prime Minister”). Without a coherent narrative, an articulable theory of where the country is and what Government right now is for (and I do mean for), the Tories were unable to find a language that could inspire the electorate they couldn’t already, for the most part, rely on. Instead, they just had a ragbag of themes, mostly expressed in defensive terms (we’ll cut taxes a tiny bit but otherwise be the same; we’ll run the hospitals just as well, but a bit cleaner; we’ll keep immigration, but just make it controlled), and ended up focusing on the only one (immigration) that seemed to resonate.

Wanted: Coherent Narrative, Tory

Any Tories reading this, if you know the words say them with me: the liberals may dream their dreams; the socialists can scheme their schemes; we have work to do.

I am tired of being smacked in the face at every election, even if this time it was a little more playful than is normal. I hate being in Opposition, – being on the Right means you’re pretty much happy with the basic order of your society, and so complaining about it all the while is just bloody unbecoming. I don’t hate the Government, and I think they’ve done many good things. But I think my lot can do better, if we can convince people we’re worth a try. But it’s up to us to convince them.

To do this, we need to think again about what it means to be Tory today. Toryism is about reinvention; on that point, the Blue Labour crowd are correct. But reinvention doesn’t have to mean accomodating the present conventional wisdom; sometimes it means recognising and responding to the unmet priorities of the people, and sometimes (shock, horror) offering leadership to the country. Reinvention doesn’t have to mean aping a successful opponent; sometimes it means spotting where they simply aren’t able to respond. Reinvention doesn’t always have to mean lurching Leftwards.. Much better if we can still be ourselves, after all.

The first problem we have to address is the problem of being the Stupid Party, suspicious of too much thinking. In fact, it’s worse than that: we’re now the Stupid Party with an entrenched doctrine (‘Thatcherism’). Well, we need to drop the doctrine. Not to say that it’s all wrong, because it isn’t: it’s just not relevant as a package deal. Margaret Thatcher was (I’m speaking as a Tory here, not seeking a fight with people on the Left over this point) the best post-war Prime Minister, but she left office in 1990 and is about as relevant to the challenges of British politcs today as Andrew Bonar-Law is.

Without that doctrine, where next? Well, I don’t know. It’s not my job, guv. I do, though, have some thoughts on the matter, as you might expect. The critical point throughout should be that we need to get away from thinking in terms of ‘occupying the centre’ or ‘leading from the Right’ – neither is relevant or useful to the current situation. What we want is that coherent narrative, through which we can frame a new political centre ground and build a coalition to govern for at least two terms, and hopefully three (learning from last time, it might be best to lose gracefully at that point). If we can get that right, then everything else is sales, and we can get ad agencies to do that. So, in terms of forming that coherent narrative, some initial suggestions on do’s and don’ts from me:

1. Contend with modernity, instead of pretending to be comfortable with it. Just to wind up the stupidest elements of the Stupidest Party, I thought I’d start with this one. To me, to be a conservative is to be against modernity, but modernity has won its war with the ancient world, and there is no point pretending it didn’t. Conservatives should not hanker after the Reformation era, or some Victorian or postwar midpoint, or wherever, but seek to learn from modernity – first to absorb it and then move on from it. Modernity has destroyed many of our traditional social and political forms, and in so doing has begun to endanger some of its own achievements; but we can’t just recreate them as if nothing has changed (often for the better, too). Instead, we need to seek out new forms and build new institutions to embed them. This sounds all very esoteric and uninteresting to the voters, but it isn’t. Many people are extremely alienated by the consequences of modernity, but very few want to go backwards – to reach them, we need to offer them the hint of another, better future.

2. Quit with the museum curator act. If we’re to be genuinely postmodern conservatives in that way, then we need to put an end to the farce of ‘Traditionalism.’ All conservatives should revere tradition, the status quo, the tried and tested – but ‘Traditionalism’ is an embrace of the obviously outdated simply because it continues to exist. As Allan Bloom put it: “as soon as tradition has come to be recognised as tradition, it is dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the kids.” (p.36, The Closing of the American Mind) This isn’t a call for a Tory sans-culottism, but instead simply to realise that we shouldn’t be afraid to get rid of baggage. To give one example, why do we venerate the unwritten constitution after the damage that has been done to it over the past hundred years – if we want to protect sovereignty from further give-aways, if we want to protect our procedural freedoms, if we want to have better lawmaking, then constitutional reform seems pretty essential. On the other hand, where there are traditions we want to keep, we need to be willing to live them – how could we defend the hereditary peerage when we’d stopped awarding hereditary peerages four decades ago (except for making three Viscounts in the 1980s, as I recall – typically childless, too).

3. Being a republican doesn’t mean you hate the Queen, y’know. David Marquand wrote an essay in 1993, ‘The twilight of the British state,’ where he talked of the death of British political traditions, of Whig imperialism, authoritarian individualism, and democratic collectivism, and ventured the suggestion that Britain had never developed a true democratic “culture of self-government… of the civic or republican virtues.” He talked of it as a future for the British Left, and there have been vague references to it in the rhetoric of Blair and his acolytes, but nothing really noticeable. But political republicanism doesn’t need to be of the Left – we on the Right have just as much if not more to gain from a vision of self-governing citizens: economically independent, taking responsibility for the common good, and a part of their country’s political life. A considered conservative republicanism can offer a positive vision of nationalism and limited government against the Left’s charges that we appeal to xenophobia and greed.

4. What is Government for? The battle against state socialism has been won. The reds are no longer under the bed. Tony Benn is a living museum piece, of no risk to British business. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t still be advocating limited government – we should, especially if we’re working for a republican vision, because citizens need their space to run their own lives. But a republican vision means a positive vision of the State and its role – that it isn’t simply there as an unfortunate necessity until we’re ready to give the anarcho-capitalist Utopia a go, but that it performs certain functions that are valuable to community, and that we’re committed to doing well. What these functions are, we can debate – and then debate how we do them well, too. And then we work out how much we need to spend, rather than obsessively chasing arbitrary GDP percentages.

5. For politics and against bureauracy. Politics is the way people in a real community work out how best to live together, through compromise and trade-off and acceptance of imperfection. Only those believe in the possibility of rationally ordered societies who should dream of the end of politics – conservatives should know better. For this reason, for Tories to talk about devolving power ‘to the individual’ and yet rejecting decentralisation of political power is missing the point – the opportunity for citizens to participate in politics is as crucial to their taking responsibility for themselves as is sorting out their child’s schooling. It was this approach under Thatcher, continued since under Blair and Major, that has created a massive and unaccountable bureaucratic state – surely better to allow some chaos and diversity, and allow greater democratic participation and accountability in Government?

That’s yer lot for now, and yes – they are all general principles, and for good reason too. If we’re to develop that coherent narrative, we have to get the principles clear first. Follow those principles through, though, and you start to arrive at policy implications. For example, if we’re serious about creating a society of economically independent citizens, then we can say that our tax and benefits system should change radically, to favour people on low incomes – but less through tax credits than letting them keep their own money. It also changes how we view state welfare institutions – offering an alternative, of supporting independence and actively addressing unnecessary hardship, to the decayed egalitarianism that we simply let decline for lack of an alternative when we were in power before. Another example, much more far-reaching: if we’re serious about devolving power, and also want to develop that culture of self-government, why not develop a powerful level of devolved regional government, with powers over its own finances and its own public service delivery.

None of this means abandoning being conservative, or moving Leftwards. The kind of Toryism I’m trying (with whatever success…) to advocate here would still be very much on the Right. I’d say that it would probably be in favour of tight controls on immigration and locking up criminals in current circumstances, by the way. One area that I think might change is on foreign policy – the approach here lends itself to a constitutional (rather than nuns cycling to work and jumpers for goalposts) nationalism, grounded in who we are today rather than any inflated sense of global obligation or craving for ‘influence.’

Doubtless, many on the Left would still find this conservative nasty, but it would be a positive message around which we can begin to rally those new voters beyond our current core. Just as important, it has the potential to offer a coherent, reasoned, vision of government – and once we get that, we become credible for victory, and UKIP will no longer be an issue for us.

Well, anyway – that’s it from me. On election day I described my political creed thus, so what would I know?