Community, good business and attention - conservatives and levelling up

"The Conservatives no longer represent the kind of metropolitan values characterised by the Notting Hill set, but their new coalition is highly homogeneous in terms of values – leaning marginally to the left on the economy and right on socio-cultural issues."

This observation is how Onward open their analysis of voting behaviour and demographics for the 2019 general election. It mirrors a long-standing observation from political scientists that the gap in the political market is for a party that leans left on economics and right on culture. It also, once again, exposes the problem with the binary left-right distinction than dominates political discusion and analysis everywhere. For me, it's a reminder why, as a conservative, I no longer consider myself 'right wing'.

Despite recent Blairite attenpts to corral the idea of community into a social democratic narrative, it has long seemed to me that community is the central concept in conservatism. Or at least in the sort of conservatism that prompted Disraeli to write Sybil:

“In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes;; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.”

This is not, as the socialists pretend, a rejection of capitalism and the idea of gain but rather that the utilitarian pursuit of that gain means that people are drawn away from community. This tension is a really important factor in modern society. Dig out a collection of cheesy Christmas movies and you'll get Disraeli's theme again and again - people are reminded about friends, family, community and even god. Conservatives see those "Notting Hill Values" as narrow, selfish and coldly utilitarian. I appreciate that the Notting Hill Set don't see their values in this fashion but they recognise people's innate conservatism - it's in the TV shows they make, the magazines they publish, and the adverts they write.

It's not new to say that there have always been two popular characterisation of business, of capitalism. It's the difference between Henry Potter and George Bailey. It's Larry the Liquidator versus Jorgy Jorgenson. It's the redemption of Scrooge and the scouring of The Shire. The difference isn't about, as that Notting Hill set too often think, noblesse oblige but about why we do business, about the purpose of it all, about the pleasure of betterment not the hedonism of accumulation.

These characterisations exist because business contains both dark and light. This isn't anything more than the reality of human nature - every occupation contains the selfish and the selfless, good and bad behaviour. There are bad doctors, corrupt lawyers, and sinful parsons just as much as there are greedy businessmen. Yet it is only business where the failings are seen as a feature of the system not a weakness of the man. For conservatives, however, while change does happen, Jorgy Jorgenson should get a fair chance at saving his business not get blown away by someone from Wall Street who has never seen the business, its people and its community.

While liberals can tell us, often with the sorts of graphs and numbers that Larry the Liquidator so loved, that everyone gains from the business being closed or broken up, it doesn't feel that way to the community. The thing that J D Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy, a broken, scarred place left high and dry by the closing of industry and filled with a sad flotsam of humanity. For sure, Vance's personal story also provides a classic sense of hope, that American Dream. But the idea of people still left behind stays lodged in our minds as we return to the same urge to act described by Disraeli.

At the opening of Robert Heinlein's 'Starman Jones', he places the hero, Max, firmly on the outside.

"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."

Those who see building a high speed railway as the way to bridge the gap between the shining city and the provincial backwater should, perhaps, read that passage and pause. Like J D Vance, Max escapes (by having a spacesuit and a photographic memory as it happens) and finishes the story on the train he describes at the start, but public policy shouldn't be about the few who succeed against the odds but about how to stack those odds better so the few become many. Building a high speed train probably doesn't do that.

Many conservatives have a conflicted relationship with business and capitalism. Ted Heath rather encapsulated this when he criticised 'Tiny' Rowland - “(i)t is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind.” Rowland was a real life precurser to the Wall Street asset stripper caricatured as Larry the Liquidator, he made himself (and investors) rich while have no regard to the communities trashed by the decisions he took. And Heath was right, for every Tiny Rowland there's a dozen like John Timpson:

Business leaders are in a privileged position. They influence more people’s lives than priests, politicians, teachers and social workers. Rightly, we talk about corporate social responsibility, helping charities in the community, but the priority is, in fact, to support your own colleagues, through understanding, appreciation and providing an environment that feels like home.

This is why conservatives support the idea of business. Not because we are cold, uncaring exploiters of the worker but because we know that a good business provides a framework for workers to thrive. And, if workers thrive their families thrive and the communities where they live thrive. So it matters that when things change, we moderate the rate this happens and mitigate the damage it does. The terrible thing with the closing of Britains mines wasn't so much their closing but that it left the communities affected with nothing but a sense of abandonment and betrayal. When I look at our high streets, I see the same scene repeated. Everyone knows they are changing, in many instances dying, but the only policy reponse is to shore them up while offering little hope for the businesses and their workers.

We are, partly because this is an inevitable consequence of living through a pandemic, trapped in an ever more technocratic box. Public policy is shaped less by community or economy than by health and well-being. This will change as the pandemic fades but the question, given the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus, is whether future priority will be community or economy. Back in January we expected that, with the concluding of the tortuous Brexit process, we would start focusing on communities, on a real localism with investment aimed at a long-term betterment for the places that feel left behind by the triumph of the Great City of the West. Now, as the economic pain gets louder, we can expect the economy and especially jobs to become the focus of attention. Just as Ted Heath completely changed his economic policy because unemployment reached 1 million, we can expect the 'levelling up' agenda to become the core of an economic strategy rather than a community strategy.

Despite this, I hope we get some attention to community. This, more than the so-called 'woke' agenda, is what 'leaning right' on culture means. Slowing the speed of cultural change will be welcomed but this is less important than investing in the new suburban communities, in supporting existing and helping create new social infrastructure. This requires a rethink of where we're directing local government, pulling back from the Heseltine-Osborne city-region approach and focusing again on getting councils closer to the people they serve. We perhaps need something of a reset on qualifications and access to good jobs. Right now the good jobs are not only too concentrated in big cities but are largely reserved to the graduates of Russell Group universities.

Perhaps a good start would be to launch civil service apprenticeships - and to spread them to the BBC, the NHS and other grand national institutions. Recruiting people at sixteen and providing education alongside work - giving a genuine alternative to the dominant academic route of 'A' levels and university. And maybe we should give the same level of funding to schools in the North as we give to schools in London.

This sort of practical change needs, however, to be matched by a rhetorical change that says to suburban and provincial places that they are at least as important as the big city and, in particular, as important as London. This requires those charged with developing policy to escape from the London-centric world they inhabit because that skews their understanding of how people live. If you live in a London flat and commute by train, tube or bike as do all your friends and colleagues, it becomes very easy to slip into the conceit that this is how everybody lives. Perhaps, instead of moving the back office and process functions of the civil service out of London, we should move the policy wonks and planners - to somewhere right in that 'red wall' like Scunthorpe, Mansfield or Consett?

You get a sense that some policy work is beginning to recognise the shift in conservative support - away from the elite and towards regular people doing regular jobs and living regular lives. Conservatives should begin to celebrate the idea of the suburb with its compromise between urban and rural. In doing so, policy should also begin to stress the local community more - the village hall, the little co-op, the post office and the chemist. And conservatives should see that, while money matters, attention matters just as much. With a shift in investment, rhetoric and attention away from cities and towards suburbs and small towns we can set again the idea that conservatism is about place, community and society not a vehicle for utilitarian technocracy.

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