Conservatives - what sort of society do you want? Some thoughts.

If the Conservative Party in the UK wants to thrive in the future it needs - as I've said before - to start thinking about sociology:

Because social issues now matter more than economic ones, for more people, there is a realignment coming at some point. The offer that the two parties give to the electorate will shift from being rival answers to how to cut (and bake) the pie. It will shift to a contest over which conception of society – diverse versus ordered – wins out. The precise mechanics of how this will happen are uncertain, but that it will happen just reflects the fact that one’s position on the social cleavage now matters to people.

The British political system makes this "realignment" difficult - or at least unlikely to happen in the convenient, media-friendly manner of a new political party or parties. The by-election result in Newport West, even if we apply the usual caveats about such things, show that the chances of another party - left, right or centre - superseding the two main political parties is small.

This doesn't mean, however, that the shift from economy to society as the main focus of public concern won't have a profound effect on our politics. And it does mean that conservatives need to begin to think about the sort of society they want to build while recognising that economic truths remain economic truths and can't be wished away.

When people accuse some conservatives of wanting "to go back to the 1950s", they fail to realise the significance of what this might mean in an actual policy platform. Nobody wants to go back to the real 1950s and lose the central heating, the cars, the mobile phones and the computers (or for that matter to get back the racism, sexism and homophobia) but people would like some things we have less of now that were normal in the 1950s.

What isn't to be liked about a crime rate that's less than a fifth of the rates today? Don't we like the idea of a job for life? And stable communities where people trust each other? When people hark back to better days long ago, these are sorts of things they think about. All of them are about the social environment, about the kind of people we are and the sorts of communities we live in. None of these things are incompatible with free markets, with social mobility or with economic growth. But they are less achievable in the centralised, one-size-fits-all, government by spreadsheet that we have right now.

When the spreadsheet wranglers talk about localism, they think of grand regional mayors wielding (quite vague) "powers" not district councils. And the focus of these mayors isn't community, family or neighbourhood but economic growth, regional competitiveness and the levering of central government decisions into local benefit. It is an entirely utilitarian focus on what Deirdre McCloskey called "Max U" - prudence only - and doesn't respond to those societal concerns about what people can see around their homes and in their lives.

Conservatives (with or without the big 'C') need to start framing their ideas about community and this means getting to grip with housing, with the manner in which the welfare system fails the poorest, with crime and justice. Conservatives need to start talking about buses rather than trains, about care workers rather than tech grandees, and about the environment we live in rather than the abstract finger-wagging of climate change. Above all we need to challenge the idea that everywhere is the same and can be treated the same - the managerialist ideology that has dominated our public administration for three decades. If it is our school, our hospital, our police service then this needs to be reflected in the way people relate to it.

I observed once that, at least in Bradford, the police appear to have retreated to huge, anonymous barracks that look more like something escaped from a Kafka-esque state than a local police service in a democracy. The convenience for operations management of such arrangements has outweighed the idea that the police are citizens in uniform protecting the place where they live.

The same assessment can be done for the NHS, where huge institutions with nameless, faceless appointed boards have replaced community hospitals, where (even in a comfortable place like Cullingworth) the doctors travel in from altogether grander, posher places to do their doctoring, and where the diktats of a distant bureaucracy determine what happens even if it is a really stupid thing to do in some places.

I might be wrong in thinking that the answer lies in a real localism, in actual, practical devolution of control over much of government to local communities. But I do think that, as the pathetic debacle of trying to leave the EU has shown, the current system we have has become so detached from normal society that its prescriptions - prepared by those men and women with spreadsheets - are at best annoying to and at worst actively damaging the neighbourhoods and communities that make up our nation.

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