The Conservative Party is not neoliberal (and this is a good thing)

 There's a common view among ultra-liberals and those folk who, in an act of ironic etymological colonialism, call themselves 'neoliberals' that economic utilitarianism is the only creed worth following. Everything is subservient to maximising the utility we (as a collective) obtain from the use of resources while at the same time an absolutist adherence to individual licence becomes the sole justification for social policy. What's worse is some of these people believe - god alone knows why - that a political party calling itself conservative should sign up to this essentially extremist agenda.

This isn't to say that individual choice, open markets and free trade aren't good things - ideas and institutions that any good conservative would want to sustain. Rather it's to observe that not everything about people's lives is determined by economics, for all that economists want us to believe so. When people hesitate and ask, "is that right?", "have we thought through what that might mean?" or, more simply, "I don't like that idea?" they represent the essence - the doubting essence - of conservatism. For all that we recognise how the enlightenment's ideas led to betterment, we also see how ultra-liberalism is pulling down institutions - family, democracy, community - that we value and support.

Ultra-liberalism doesn't have real answers to the fragmentation - atomisation is the trendy word - of society, the growth in family dysfunction, and the loss of trust and faith among the general population. All it offers is either an almost feudal idea that what's good for the rich and powerful must, by definition, be good for the poor and powerless. Those of a left-wing persuasion then point to how free markets (they say) create this dysfunction and that our response must be to stop all that freedom, at least so far as economic choice is concerned (I appreciate that these left-inclined people don't quite put it that way).

What we've seen however is that, as the left's preference for identity politics (and the creation of new social sins derived from that politics) spreads, ultra-liberals - wedded as they are to an absolutist viewpoint on personal licence - make common cause with the left in promoting policies crafted from this 'intersectionality' because licentious selfishness appeals to their world view. And, living in a mostly urban, economically advantaged world, such selfishness accords well with their liberalism. What they don't see - because they seldom look beyond their world - is the damage these attacks on collective and communal elements of society do to less entitled or successful people and places.

Since the left has largely given up on family and community as the basis for society - preferring the bizarre world of intersectional top trumps - we are left with a Conservative Party that, after decades of pretending it was liberal (even neoliberal), has emerged blinking into the sunlight of its original purpose. And, while keeping with the idea of free exchange, free speech and good business, conservatives need to start struggling with the challenges that liberals simply don't have answers to:

Both white working-class and black inner-city neighbourhoods lack the civic institutions that allow for upward mobility.

...had the poor followed the success sequence, the U.S. poverty rate would have fallen by more than 70 percent.

“Youths who grow up with both biological parents earn more income, work more hours each week, and are more likely to be married themselves as adults, compared to children raised in single-parent families.”

...not only does controlling for family make-up pretty much eliminate differences between races but that the single best thing to reduce social pathologies like depression, alcoholism, suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence is to cut the rates of child abuse. And child abuse is dramatically higher where children are born outside marriage.

And, yes, part of the response to these questions is to understand the importance of employment and the employer in helping to provide the social capital that is needed. This might mean keeping a steel works or a car factory going for a while longer through subsidy if the alternative is tearing down the institution that helps sustain the local community. To rule such choices out as "mercantilism" is the act of rich and successful liberals rubbing the noses of ignorant provincials in the dirt of their supposed failure.

The same goes for policies that undermine the idea of marriage such as no fault divorce, civil partnership, ending tax or benefit privileges - these all seem fine to the wealthy liberal because it doesn't really seem to affect things much (they do but the other advantages of wealth and power cover this up). The pointlessness of the liberal attack on marriage is captured by the bit at the end of 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' - up to then a joyous appreciation of these rights of passage - where the Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell characters agree not to get married for reasons that aren't abundantly clear in the movie.

Public authorities talk a lot about community but, more often than not, they mean a particular view of community as a target for support or else a definition based on that familiar game of equalities top trumps - the gay community, the black community, the Muslim community as so forth. The reality of community, at least if one mixes it with the idea of neighbourhood, is that it isn't about these differences or even the fragments of society thrown up by intersectionality when we apply it to localities. Community is, quite literally, about shared experience, the things we do together.

Here in Cullingworth we're one of those pale, stale, white places the liberals sneer at but, scratch the surface a bit and that isn't quite so true - as I wrote nearly ten years ago, the village is filled with people who're, some more obviously than others, not from round here. It works, people get along, jokes are made, experiences are shared and stuff gets done - from grander schemes like building a new village hall down to the mundane everyday stuff like getting a decent set of Christmas lights (and putting them up in the teeth of council bureaucracy) or organising the annual gala.

When JRF came to the neighbouring village of Denholme to look at loneliness, one of their findings was damning of the manner in which public authorities behave - people believed that they needed permission to care and, in the words of the lead researcher, 'regulation kills kindness'. As I wrote back then:

That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

This isn't about not wanting rules but rather than those pubic authorities have decided that people - and the communities in which they live - cannot be trusted. Even worse, these same authorities further believe that those communities (and I guess the people who live in them) need development. Either because they are poor or else because there's some intangible social something missing. Government is not interested in community except as a vehicle for implementing the strictures that liberal technocracy has decided are good for them.

In the end neoliberalism - ultra-liberalism, liberaltarianism as Tyler Cowan recently dubbed it - ends up devouring its own illogicality. It wants free speech (bot not THAT free speech), is wants choice (but not THAT choice) and it wants family, community and the institutions providing that community's essential social capital to operate according to a set of rules that really don't suit society. And, as Cowan sort of accepts in that recent article on "State Capacity Libertarianism" it doesn't really work.

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