‘Conservativism should be broad, not narrow; open, not closed; forward-looking, not yearning for a mythical past. .... We should seek to unite, not divide. In short, One Nation Conservatism.’So says David Gauke MP in an address to Onward, the latest pet think tank for Tory MPs (Onward does sound like the motto of a not very good prep school though). My botheration with this is that it manages to be, in one short sentence, patronising, self-contradictory and divisive. So much for 'one nation'.
That a successful political party in the UK has to be a 'broad church' is not a new idea or, indeed, one that is anything other than common sense given our 'first-past-the-post' voting system. But this game of setting a series of words in juxtaposition as a way to say that 'populism' or 'nationalism' isn't part of that broad church represents a break with the idea of a broad church. I might not be one of them but there are plenty of people in the Conservative Party, and even more among the voters, whose politics do reflect the idea of nationhood, queen and country, Rule Britannia. What Gauke says to these people - having said we're a broad church - is that we don't want any of that unswerving patriotism in our party, we're forward-looking, progressive, modern and slightly uncomfortable with all that nation stuff.
This is the problem with today's one nation tories - bear in mind that the original One Nation group in the party back in the 1950s included Ted Heath, Ian McLeod and...er...Enoch Powell. Now, One Nation Conservatives, even outwith the Brexit thing, represent establishment machine politics rather than, as was the case in the 1950s, an endeavour to grasp the essence of Disraeli's party by forging together social concern, robust finances and an open economy. Worse, advocates of this new One Nation like David Gauke have taken to positioning it as merely oppositional - not Thatcherite free markets, not populist, not reactionary, not traditionalist.
Conservatism may be a broad church and, indeed, a very flexible ideology but it has boundaries (or, at least, I thought it had boundaries). At the heart of conservatism, however, is the idea that our relationship with place matters more than merely maximising utility. And if you're going to call it One Nation then, unless the term is meaningless, it is absolutely a statement of nationalism. Yes you can modify this by saying 'civic nationalism' but it's still an idea founded on the importance of the place we call our nation.
Conservatism also seeks (the clue's in the name) to conserve and preserve, to recognise that while things change we should do it carefully and slowly so as to avoid losing the baby with the bath water. When David Gauke speaks of 'yearning for a mythical past' he's summoning up the idea, popular with the intellectual left, that 'populism' harks back to some golden era - how often have you heard or read some sneering representative of the intelligensia dismissing Brexit voters as wanting a return to Empire or some similar huffle. Yet that 'mythical past' is not what people hark back to, except in the understanding that people love the idea of a world with secure employment, stable families, strong communities, low crime rates and trusted institutions. And if a little less utility maximisation and a bit less globalisation is the price of getting closer to that mythical ideal then maybe populism isn't all that bad.
Disraeli wrote of 'two nations' - in simple terms, rich and poor. And he set the Conservative Party, in opposition to the Liberals, as the party with a mission of forging one nation again. In doing this, however, Conservatives recognise that the answer is not revolution or radicalism - you don't get one nation by tearing down the world of the rich and powerful but by allowing the poor to become part of that world. If you want to criticise the populism of Trump, you do so by pointing out - as the Conservatives came to accept after a great deal of pain - that protectionism is far worse for the poor than it is for the rich. You need to accept that moving people from poverty to comfort requires that the rich and powerful give something back and that the best way to do this is by them being part of the same community - sharing the same place and space.
Right now the David Gauke position - because it defines itself negatively - is losing the argument with what he calls 'populists'. It's no good standing there telling people you know better (you might of course, but they have to know that to believe you and right now they don't) when there are people prepared, sometimes cynically, to say to people 'I know you're angry, I'm angry too, let's go and knock some heads together'. The sort of thinking coming out from the rash of new (all London-based of course) think tanks like Onward is narrow, technocratic and ideologically rootless - we're fixing the window locks and installing alarms when the real problem is that the door's wide open. Lots of feel-good policy initiatives that friends in the media will love but no substantial thinking about what we want our world - or rather the hundreds of little worlds in which people actually live - to be like.
If your political idea is One Nation - united, strong - then you are a nationalist. Is David Gauke?
....
No comments:
Post a Comment