There is no such thing as social conservatism, there is just conservatism

Since the recent general election there has been an outbreak of writing about a thing called "social conservatism" best summed up in observations about tactical positioning for political campaigns - "move a little left economically and a little right socially". I am, if you forgive me, just a little bemused about this argument and how it has been characterised using a qualified depiction of conservatism. It's as if we can't take the whole package of conservative ideas, just the 'social' bits.

In one respect this terminology has allowed those inherently opposed to conservatism - liberals, fascists, socialists and communists - to attack the idea by describing 'social conservatism' as variously racist, sexist, homophobic and backward looking. This is mostly done by those opposing forces choosing to define conservatism negatively ('social conservatism is anti-immigrant', 'social conservatism is authoritarian', 'social conservatism is anti-LGBT') thereby allowing them to hack away at a convenient straw bogeyman.

The problem is that (and this is the source of my bemusement) there is no such thing as social conservatism, there is just conservatism. It's the idea that we're all in this boat called Britain together and we'd better get along, trust each other and work together if we're going to make a decent fist of the place. It's the idea - as Kipling told us - that, much though we want and try to love the whole world, "our hearts are small" and we focus on the places we know and love most. When people use the misleading term 'social conservatism' they are simply describing this central idea for conservatives - it is a reminder that conservatism doesn't see economics as the all-defining idea of human progress in the way that liberalism (and its corrupted half-brother socialism) see it.

Unsurprisingly Kenan Malik, writing in the Observer, engages in both of these falsehoods - creating that straw bogeyman and characterising social conservatism as somehow distinct from other forms of conservatism:

Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity.

Malik suggests, in what John Duffield on Twitter called "Left wing "orientalism" towards conservatism", that the working class is not socially conservative because we shouldn't "...confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism."

The problem here is that the loss of trust and those intangible things Malik describes - place, community, dignity - are the very things that conservatives wrestle with most. This is what Disraeli wrote about in Sybil - the idea of 'two nations' and the need to bring them together, the sense that the industrial revolution, for all its advances, had left a fragmented society - "atomised" to use Malik's word. Disraeli, as a conservative, had a closer understanding of the social purpose of Chartism than liberals or socialists because he put the need to improve the condition of the working man - socially as much as economically - as the central purpose of his conservatism.

For all the talk of policy platforms and proposals, the big challenges facing us are less economic than they are social - the decline in fertility, the rise in loneliness, cities filled with single people, the loss of trust in each other, the collapse of vital institutions like marriage and the family, and the focus on paid work as the only valued thing in society. Put these alongside a sense that we've lost the idea of personal responsibility, that chivalry is disdained and that we all have rights but not duties, and there's a clear description of the conservative imperative for change.

I don't know whether Boris Johnson's government will be able - or even intends - to start the process of rebuilding trust, strengthening communities and promoting personal responsibility and duty, but I do know that this is what we mean by conservatism. Yes it is, for reason of Kipling's small hearts, patriotic. Yes it is supportive of marriage and families because they're the base units of society. And yes it likes faith and the idea of the transcendent. But it is also right there with the idea of giving people voice, supporting communities and giving support to the vulnerable. The Conservative Party - an often uneasy alliance between liberals and conservatives - may not always put these ideas centre and front, we certainly didn't (at least rhetorically) during the Thatcher years, but this does not make them any less central to the ideology of conservatism.

It is ironic that "there is no such thing as society" became embedded in the left's idea of conservatism to such an extent that the truth of it - that society is built of "individual men and women" and "families" (the rest of Margaret Thatcher's quotation) - is lost. Thatcher's comment represents the balancing act in her party between liberalism and conservatism by putting the idea of society in the context of both individualism and families. What conservatives don't (which socialists and fascists do) see is that society is greater than the sum of its parts, it is a means to an end not an end in itself. And conservatives also believe that the institutions of society should, wherever possibly, be human in scale, accessible to all and trusted.

It was welcome that, on Disraeli's birthday, James Cleverly the Conservative Party Chairman shared some of his ideas. We seem to have escaped from a deadening, almost unhuman utilitarianism, the cold emotionless Hayekian world, and returned to where conservatives began, with the idea that community matters, that the base institutions of society like family, marriage and faith need protecting and preserving, and that our purpose is to make the lives of ordinary people better.

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