"Not the great nor well-bespoke, But the mere uncounted folk": searching for a conservative home

There has been a resurgent interest in the ideas that, loosely, make up the philosophical basis of conservatism. Some of this has been an attempt (often from left liberals shocked, blinking in the light as they realise ideas exist that aren't founded in individual licence or state-directed fiat) to explain or understand what led to Brexit, Trump and assorted other things such folk lazily define as 'populist'. Alongside this is a second group (in the UK often dubbed Blue Labour and Red Tory) who, looking at the crumbling reality of small town and rural life, present a slightly rose-coloured rediscovery of old-time solidarity and community tossed together with the less globalist bits of that 'third way' communitarianism beloved of Blair and Clinton. Even libertarians have begun, gently and reluctantly, to talk about these ideas - State Capacity Libertarianism as Tyler Cowan called it.

The problem is that, while everyone is talking about conservative things, they're mostly choosing to do so without sullying their thoughts with the word 'conservative'. Instead, we're encouraged to think that conservatism is somehow more characterised by reactionaries like Roger Scruton with his bucolic myth-making about a lost England or, worse, is a composite of ignorantly insulting memes designed by leftist campaigners (the 'blood on their hands' stuff pushed out by sociology lecturers from third division universities and parroted by labour councillors and left-wing bloggers). Maybe all this is simply a consequence of the degree to which being a conservative has a very different nuance in America's elite Californian and New England communities - as a British Conservative friend in San Francisco told me, it's very hard to explain that, y'know, being a British Conservative is pretty different from a bible-waving, gun fan from Texas.

All this, I guess, brings us to Steve Bannon, one of the ultimate bogeyfolk of modern left-wing iconography. Bannon is sometimes pictured as a Svengali figure pulling Trump's strings, sometimes as a sort of alt-right demi-god and almost always as a sort of existential threat to everything we hold dear (where "we" are, of course, righteous centre-left globalists living in the Great Cities of the West). So it was genuinely fascinating to come across an article that stepped back from the caricature of Bannon and tried to understand what he really does believe - a thing called Traditionalism:

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies.

You will, of course, have noticed immediately what has been done here. The box that ought to contain conservatism has been replaced by this idea of Traditionalism. Instead of a solid, established set of ideas grounded in history and government, we're expected by Gavin Haynes (the article's writer) to use an esotheric, quasi-religious reactionary creed. It's necessary for the article as it works in explaining that the typical reponse to Bannon from many on the left - calling him a fascist or a racist - fails to recognise the reality of his beliefs.

What's most interesting about Haynes' exploration of Traditionalism and the alt-right is how he shows it to be rooted in a search for meaning - "Yeah, you have all of this stuff. Sure, you like to chase girls, you get wasted at Spoons with your buddies every Friday night. But… what does any of that actually mean?" This search for meaning seems very similar to the pitch that, for example, the Internet's Islamist extemists make to young men in Britain and France's urban places. It may even be that the hatred of Muslims so common among the alt-right's adherents is more a reflection of Islamists as competitors rather than opponents. It's also reminiscent of the flower children of 1960s San Francisco (indeed, Bannon is also a fan of gnosticism, trancendental meditation and weird Asian mythology).

While we're reminded here that the alt-right's ideology is very different to conservatism, we remain a long way from finding a position for the idea in the political firmament. It's also clear that if we allow it to become the sort of 21st century hippidom of Bannon, conservatives are a long way up a crocodile infested creek without a paddle and with a leak in the canoe. But do we embrace the slightly reactionary communiarianism of Blue Labour and Red Tory or do we endeavour to rebuild the idea that strong communities are not the antithesis of an open society. And to realise that the mistakes of government over many decades - urbanisation, centralisation, technocracy - can be reformed without losing the idea of free trade and free exchange or the principle that a market society is a natural state built on mutuality and co-operation, the very things conservatives should value.

At the same time, conservatives should consider two other ideological failures of liberalism - that poverty is a consequence of individual choices and that identity is determined by characteristics not the whole character. For the first of these we should start by stressing it's poverty not inequality that is the problem - the focus on the latter has led to shockingly poor welfare policy. By focusing on those who are literally poor, we can see our way to the system failures that contribute to this whereas attending to inequality does nothing for the poorest as policy attention focuses on infuencing marginal changes to measures of relative poverty. This latter policy therefore targets those most easy to shift and ignores the very poor.

Identity is a thornier issue - conservatives recognise its importance especially that part of it linked to nation, place, neighbourhood and community. This makes us sensitive to the identity politics of modern social liberalism. Yet the liberal idea of identity is flawed because it stresses characteristics rather than character - your D&D character isn't defined by the six charactersitics but through a broader understanding of identity yet liberal identity politics does just that by focusing on a set of characterisitcs to defines us (gender, race, sexual preference, age).

We talk of the gay community or the Muslim community as if these are homogenous entities with policy 'delivered' to meet the needs of these commuities. Not only does this misuse the idea of community but it fails to recognise that the Muslim might also be gay, might see himself as a Bradfordian or a British Asian and relate most closely to a particular neighbourhood or a network of family and friends. This man may have a shared identity with his white neighbours (living in the same street), his fellow City fans or the mix of races and ages he plays cricket with. Conservatives should not need to grapple with the complex intersectionality of this because it is irrelevant to how we want to support community. It's not that this man doesn't experience prejudice as a muslim, as gay but rather that we can see the need to 'denormalise' that prejudice without needing a policy platform that risks becoming a game of equalities top trumps.

The problem for conservatism is that it struggles to fit into intellectual debates between competing globalisms (socialism versus neoliberalism) or competing anti-growth ideologies (communitarianism and modern environmentalism). If conservatives simply adopt Scruton and similar somewhat reactionary thinkers, we run the risk of becoming little different from Bannon and the alt-right, forever searching for life's meaning by peering at obscure aspects of the world's history. The sense that what we have is built on the work of those Kipling called "...the mere uncounted folk of whose life and death is none report or lamentation" is not lost if we also recognise that the thing those men and women built is something, not just to cherish, but to improve.

What we must remember, however, is that for every great man or woman skimming across the world doing what they consider great things, there are a hundred or even a thousand other men and women doing ordinary things, in ordinary lives. These are not, as global liberalism implies, lesser people nor are their small hearts something to be critisised or worse, sneered at. And it is here that conservatism should make its pitch - as an idea that starts with the place with live, with what we see from our front door, not with some grand scheme for the perfection of man or the improvement of society. Those things will come if we allow the 'mere uncounted folk' to do what they do, if we step out of the way of innovators and if we support the things - family, community, heritage, tradition - that provide strength and stability in the places those people love with all their hearts.

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Conservatism - the home for grown up libertarians

 Although you can't, of course, use the actual word 'conservatism':

Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either. Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with. Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree.

This (and the rest of Tyler Cowan's article) describes what I'd call 'institutional conservatism' - if you want to maintain an effective system not only should it be allowed to evolve but it needs to be well managed. What's happened is that essentially liberal-minded people have realised, as Cowan comments, how "...it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems...". Cowan cites climate change (where a common libertarian response is simply to deny it) but, more importantly in my view, we should look at how the sociological evidence around social infrastructure, communities and families all leads away from a hyper-liberal approach and towards conservatism.

What's important here is that, unlike (almost all) the left, we need to begin with recognising that markets and capitalism remain an essential part of the solution to problems such as climate change but also need what Cowan calls 'state capacity' to ensure social outcomes - from good public transport and nuclear power through to welfare and health safety nets - are secured.

My instincts are impeccably liberal and I don't consider that government should be the first choice for delivering any service but it seems clear that the social damage done by ultra-liberalism requires intervention - from the growth of loneliness and the collapse of the working class family through to violent crime and class bias in educational outcomes there's a case for government to act in the interests of the working person rather than simply to follow the liberal, utility maximising imperative.

I've long thought that, to oversimplify, economics is liberal while sociology is conservative (and the academy for both of them is filled with socialists). And that the division in national priorities flickers between an emphasis on community, family, security - the conservative instinct - and one on growth, progress, wealth - the liberal preference. Moreover, conservatism is the only practical politics able, at its best, to marry these imperatives in a lasting manner. Sadly conservatives, especially in the USA, have become bogeymen to intellectuals - self-interested plutocrats or rednecks with bad teeth and guns. The former is conservatism as the merely the rich preserving their interests while the latter is a modern urban snobbery about those less well-educated folk outside the city.

Rampant liberalism, the 'Thatcherism' that great lady never believed in that young men with cash and good suits brashly proclaim, has damaged the idea of conservatism as much as has the endemic infections of reaction, racism and small-mindedness. Even if burning fifty quid notes in front of the homeless is a bit of a myth, the sentiment - that the poor are solely responsible for their poverty and for getting out of that poverty - remains too common. Just like absolutist approaches to individual choice (witness the trans ID debate), this hyper-liberal idea is a corruption of decency, moderation and good sense. Plus it denies duty, responsibility and community as central parts of our worlds.

So if you've read Tyler Cowan's "state capacity libertarianism" and find its argument persuasive, I'd like to welcome you to conservatism, to a world of compromise, consensus and good government. Then you can join in making better policy for the families and communities that make up the societies in which we live - get them better lives, safer communities and (as Tom T Hall would say) more money.

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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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Some questions to get conservatives thinking

 I've repeatedly warned conservatives that, if defining who is or isn't a conservative and what is or isn't conservatism is left to socialists, liberals and reactionaries, we will become irrelevant to politics and policy-making. Historian Robert Saunders, in criticising Roger Scruton's call for defunding of university departments lacking in intellectual diversity, set this out in a Twitter thread:

In its early years, Thatcherism teemed with ideas. The party became a magnet for historians, philosophers and economists - some converts from the radical Left - who hammered out their ideas in think tanks, discussion groups and Scruton's own journal, The Salisbury Review

Saunders asks whether the current reaction from conservatives to left-wing dominance of academia - ban it, stop it, take its money away - simply covers over the paucity of conservative thinking, especially in or near to the Conservative Party itself. Saunders isn't a conservative so my warning is relevant but his (admitted a tad jaundiced) analysis of David Cameron is very telling:

From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it.

This is, without question, the defining characteristic of many modern politicians - Cameron is not unique in being spectacularly bright but incredibly shallow, just look at Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar and, of course, the godfather of 'image is everything' political positioning, Tony Blair.

A while ago - when slightly angry voices on the right of politics were saying that Cameron was a 'conservative in name only' or similar, I wrote that this was far from the truth, he is absolutely a conservative:

But for Cameron – and we see this in his enthusiasm for “social action” – such an obligation to act nobly is essential to conservatism. We are defined by what we do rather than what we support. Passing laws to help the poor in Africa or to care for communities in England is not sufficient; we must act ourselves to help society. A central tenet of Cameron’s conservatism is the idea of “giving back” – we are fortunate so it behoves us to put some of that fortune back into society.

The second concept is the idea of administration. Some people see the purpose of securing political power as the way to effect change, to direct the forces of government so as to improve mankind. In Cameron’s conservatism this is not the case; the purpose of power is administration – the running of good government.

The problem is that this outlook - action and managerialism - doesn't leave a great deal of space for thought and rather focuses our preference on doers rather than thinkers - Rory Stewart rather than Jesse Norman. As Blair once put it "what matters is what works" and, in most cases, "what works" is defined as what wins us elections rather than a genuinely technocratic evidence-based polity. Our modern government looks technocratic but is far more concerned with what might be called "feels" than with substantive thinking about policy.

An illustration of this came from Will Tanner (who runs the brand new Tory think tank, Onward) in response to Liz Truss MP's suggestion that we need to reform planning and build a million new homes on what is now 'green belt' around London:

You've got to admire @trussliz' chutzpah, but our 10,000 sample megapoll last month suggested allowing development on the Green Belt would be the most unpopular housing pledge the Conservatives could take into an election, even with young people

Truss responds with a very telling comment:

We've got to move away from focus-group paralysis and deliver what will improve people's opportunities and life chances. We have to start making arguments again and not just follow.

Tanner's comment is in line with the Conservative Party of Cameron - no thinking ("how do we craft a planning system that protects, enhances even, the beauty, heritage and environment of England while allowing the housing development we need") just 'we can't do that, it isn't popular'. You don't have to agree with Truss's argument about housing development to see that setting policy by opinion poll denies the requirement to think seriously about the sort of places we want in our society. It is also a little ironic to see a politician slapping down a think-tank chief for not doing any actual thinking.

As to that conservative thinking, it is out there but not quite where you'd expect to find it. Firstly, the sort of issues that really bother people are now far less about economics than they are about sociology:

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

So if you want to get some substance about family, community, identity and the loss of institutions, you're better off reading US sociologist Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" or Dutch geographer Harm de Blij's "The Power of Place" than dabbing your eyes at reactionary paeans to a lost bucolic England or thudding your way through "The Road to Serfdom". And taking a look at non-conservative voices at the fringes of what's usually called 'populism' like Ben Cobley, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin.

The questions - challenges we could call them - that emerge include:

1. How do we restore trust to society - in things like marriage, education, justice, business and finance as well as government?

2. How, in an age of individualism, LGBT rights, gay marriage and identity wars, do we rebuild families as the central building block of society?

3. How do we balance the undoubted power of free markets and new technology in promoting betterment with the human desire to sustain community?

4. How do we promote local autonomy in a world filled with outcries about 'postcode lotteries'?

5. How does personal responsibility square with the popular idea that our agency is compromised by modern marketing methods?

6. Is there still a concept of duty - to family, friends, neighbourhood and nation?

7. Can we meet the aspiration for security without compromising civil liberties, and where is the boundary beyond which acceptable social control become autocracy?

8. What are the institutions we need to meet the aspirations for secure families and strong communities?

Too much of our thinking is, as Lizz Truss noted, dominated by opinion polling and focus groups resulting in policy-making that, to use an ad man's term, "just films the brief" - we get lists of initiatives each crafted so as to ping a positive in polling or research but these lists are, taken as a whole, unsatisfying. From tweaks, up or down, to taxes through grants or incentives to tinkering bits of regulatory change, what we have doesn't present any sort of picture of what we want tomorrow's families, communities and neighbourhoods to look like - they are bereft of a vision and wholly without the sort of mission Disraeli set us, 'improve the condition of the working man'.

You don't need university departments, think tanks or learned societies to consider what a 21st century conservatism might look like and there's no point in (given the left wing bias of academia) trying to push water uphill - so feel free to take those eight questions above, add to them if you like, and start thinking about what kind of place you want to live in and how we get there.


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If you say you believe in One Nation, aren't you a nationalist?

‘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?
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Roger Scruton, for all he calls himself conservative, is just another reactionary

What too many folk think conservatism is about

 Yet again, we are allowing people who are not conservatives to frame a definition of conservatism that is essentially reactionary. This problem is not helped, I think by reactionaries who define themselves as conservatives.

I suddenly realized I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down.

Roger Scruton, beginning with this entirely reactionary statement, has become for some the acme of modern conservative thought, a definitional bulwark of resistance to those who want (by inference) to destroy 'western civilization'. I consider this definition of conservatism - as somehow peculiar to western culture - deeply troubling and, as sure as night follows day, such a definition leads to racism. Not that I think Scruton is a racist but rather that his words, the focus on a perceived superiority of that 'western civilization', valorise the idea that other races and places are somehow less good - inferior.

The reason I began with a concern I've expressed before - that non-conservatives are allowed to define conservatism - is because it gives tendentious left-wing writers like Jonathan Portes the space to create a definition of conservatism founded on reaction rather than preservation. People such as Scruton - and Enoch Powell, another reactionary who did immense damage to the conservative idea - are caught in the myth that there's a unique superiority to the thread of thinking running from what they call classical civilisation - Greece and Rome - through to a comfortable leather chair in a book-lined Oxford study.

It's not that Scruton has nothing to say or even that he should not be appointed to an unpaid public position - it's entirely clear that the New Statesman set out to get him and achieved that aim - but rather that, if the only conservative thinking we can find is from antediluvian and reactionary writers then our movement has a problem. If our ideas are defined solely by a fear of the barbarians - Muslims, Marxists, enemies of civilisation - at our gates, if we have nothing positive to say then we stop being conservatives and become mere reactionaries trapped in a sort of cultural Rorke's Drift.

The central ideas of conservatism - stability, family, community, personal responsibility, duty, a sense of place - are not peculiar to western civilisation but have been features of human society since its beginnings. Those ideas are just as familiar to people in China, Angola, Arabia or Java as they are in England or France, they are not off-shoots of 'judeo-christian' traditions (it's striking that we say this rather than 'People of the Book' because that would mean us recognising Muslims as part of the same tradition).

When we - conservatives - are asked the question 'what are you conserving', we need an answer that isn't about race, religion or culture but rather is about the things that led to the betterment of our lives. Crucially, this means that we must distance ourselves from reactionary politics so as to allow us to make common cause with others who see the truth - that it's an open society, free markets and a strong bourgeoisie that need preserving. And that, when the left define us as reactionaries, they push us into their cultural camp - opposed to choice and liberty, in favour of limits, restrictions, controls and the domination of a government elite. Where we differ from classical liberals is in believing that community, family and allegiance to place are things that need preserving too.

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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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"The things we share" - a message for Conservatives

Last night I spoke to about 30 Conservatives in the upstairs room at Bingley's Brown Cow where we'd enjoyed a curry (a proper home-cooked one courtesy of my colleague Naveed). This is the gist of what I said.

I promised myself I wouldn't use the 'B' word and although some people thought I meant Bradford, I intend to stick with not using the 'B' word. Instead I want to talk about the values, ideas and principles we have as Conservatives regardless of which side we took in the 2016 referendum. There will come a time when we look back to the debate out there now and recall with shock the manner in which it was conducted.

So what do we share? This isn't in any order or structure, just the things that came into my head when thinking about what to say tonight.

Modern isn't always good or better. As Conservatives we want to preserve the things we have now, maintain institutions that have served us well. Just because something is shiny and new it doesn't mean it is automatically better. Conservation, preservation and tradition matter to us as Conservatives

Conservatives have a strong sense of duty, of personal responsibility. We do not believe you can sub-contract caring to the state, we don't believe that the first answer to every question is more government. And we feel that we are responsible for our own lives and for doing what we can to live those lives well.

Conservatives have a real sense of belonging, of place and of identity. This is what we mean by patriotism - not a sort of jingoist, unquestioning worship of flags or monarchs but rather that this is our place and we will stand together to protect it and work together to make it better.

As Conservatives we believe in the idea of business, of hard work and enterprise. Too often business men and women are portrayed as the bad guys - wouldn't it be brilliant to see a peak time drama where the hero is a businessman or businesswoman rather than a lawyer or doctor or policeman. It's not that we've anything against doctors and policemen - not sure about the lawyers - but rather that the contribution of business people is every bit as important as the contribution of doctors, nurses, policemen and social workers.

And Conservatives believe in community, in the idea that we should look out for eachother. In the principle I've spoken of before - that we start with fixing the things we can see from our front doorstep. If everyone did this - even seemingly small things like Tony here fixing stone walls - if everyone made where we live just a little bit better, the whole world benefits.

Finally - although there may be many other things - as Conservatives we don't think the man in Whitehall knows best. One of the things about government - especially the EU (but I promised not to speak about that) - is that for many people it is, physically and psychologically, a very long way off. What does the man in Whitehall know about the mum in a terraced house in Denholme? All he can see is what somebody puts in a briefing or some numbers in a spreadsheet. And that young Mum - or the old gent in the supported housing over the road from her - has no means of influencing or effecting the decisions being made that affect her, or his, life.

Regardless of what we get as an outcome from the 'B' word, we will still be Conservatives and we will still share these values and principles - community, duty, responsibility, care - as well as the objective of making where we all live a little better than it was before us. Let's not spoil this with fallings out, arguments and rudeness, and let's not lose sight of the truth that our values - Conservative values - are not shared by our opponents.

Those opponents do think the man in Whitehall knows best. They do think it's OK to sub-contract personal responsibility to the state. They hate business and business people. And they believe personal, voluntary initiative - acts of caring - are a failure not part of what makes society work.

So let's keep these things we share as Conservatives in mind and do what we've always done, make where we live a little bit better, looked after the good things already here, maintain traditions and look after friends, family and neighbours.

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A combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty - welcome to Conservative policy-making

Conservative policy-making is in a bit of a pickle. It's not that there isn't any thinking about policy just that the thinking seems rooted in focus groups, the received wisdom of government policy wonks and a seemingly obsessive desire to be liked. The best place to start in explaining this is a set of "principles" set out by centrist Tory think-tank, "Bright Blue". These principles purport to be an encapsulation of something called 'liberal conservatism'. Now, leaving aside the slightly oxymoronic nature of the tag (Americans would probably pop if they were faced with such an apparent contradiction), it seems that the nice folk of Bright Blue have confused having an activist state with 'liberalism' - here's a couple of examples:

We should be open-minded to new thinking, applying solutions to public policy problems on the basis of good ideas rather than tired ideology.

Markets are the best way of allocating resources, but they can be inefficient and inequitable, so government and social institutions can help correct market problems.

Both of these statements doubtless tick the box for bureaucrats and assorted inheritors of Blair's actualist ideal of "what matters is what works" but they are essentially illiberal and, to make matters worse, contradictory. Describing your positioning as 'liberal conservative' is a statement of ideology even if, like Blair did, you adopt a sort of rhetoric that denies ideology while promoting an approach that sees government intervention as central to policy. Bright Blue are ideological in the same way and it is likely that their policy proscriptions will involve the state intervening in the interactions of private individuals - the very antithesis of liberalism.

This illiberal position is underscored by the essentially anti-market stance of Bright Blue's "pro-market, not free-market". If you are a liberal then the free part of free market is the bit that matters - liberals should be making markets more free not believing that government can "correct" market problems. These contradictions and confusions can only result in similarly contradictory and confusing policy proposals. Indeed scrolling though the titles in Bright Blue's library, there is a sense that the environment and climate change, human rights and how capitalism is in some sort of crisis seem to dominate. I may be doing an injustice but I've a feeling that, while these things matter, they are not the basis for a cogent conservative position appealing to the wider electorate.

From this same camp - a sort of slightly squishy centrist world where policy gimmicks dominate - comes Onward, another conservative think tank. It's the brainchild of Neil O'Brien MP (who used to policy wonk for George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer) and they are a step ahead of Bright Blue by looking at something that does seem to matter - housing. The problem is that, having identified the problem (there aren't enough houses), Onward sets out proposals that seem designed to make development less likely. After all the cost of land is a big chunk of the reason why we don't building enough houses where people want to live but nowhere in its proposals does Onward set out any way to reduce the cost of land. Instead O'Brien tells us that the high land values are a boon because we can tax them and use the money to build "vital" infrastructure (although it's not so vital that private-funded initiative delivers it).

In truth Onward and O'Brien are trying to square the circle of needing development while pretending this can be done without building on green belt sites. O'Brien also gets confused between landowner and developer (a common problem with the public but one a bright young MP who worked at the treasury shouldn't be making): "(a) thing that drives my constituents mad is the way that developers make a killing when they get planning permission..." says O'Brien when it isn't the developer who cleans up on the land value but the landowner who the housebuilder bought the land from. The only impact of infrastructure contributions, a sort of CIL on steroids, would be to make development more costly, more slow and, in a lot of locations, uneconomic.

Onward has the jump on Bright Blue making proposals that, while they are entirely counter-productive, at least reflect the fears and concerns of likely Conservative voters. The problem, however, is that Bright Blue and Onward assume that the resolution to policy challenges must lie in action by government - tax this, regulate that, control the other - and most commonly by central government. For all Bright Blue's talk of institutions, the only ones they seem to feel matter are the institutions of state - local, private and civil society institutions can be commissioned by the state to deliver policy, there is no sense that those institutions can do the business without requiring the direction of national government.

Policy development in this centrist Tory world seems to consist of manufacturing crisis and then setting out proposals to resolve the crisis, proposals that almost always require significant government intervention, new laws, new taxes and bans. Mark Wallace at Conservative Home, in what amounted to a cry of pain, described the current Conservative obsession with banning things and concluded:

"...meddling in people’s lives might temporarily satisfy some politicians’ itchy need to “do something”, or to paint themselves as go-getters, but the cumulative price is to paint the Government as increasingly dour, gloomy and authoritarian in both tone and policy. Some positivity, some joy, some creation of new opportunity and liberty would not go amiss."

I fear that this pain will be ignored - even attacked - by those developing policy for Conservatives. We are stuck in the world of "something must be done" with the finest example being the new "Obesity Strategy" filled with pettifogging fussbucketry like trying to get Sid's Caff on the A49 to count the calories in his full English breakfast. Even worse there's its pretence that somehow these proposals are based on evidence when they're just another list of nannying gimmicks from astroturf campaign groups like Action on Sugar - ban ads, force manufacturers to reformulate, stop offers like two-for-one, and ban sweets at the checkout. Plus taxes, more taxes and yet more taxes.

Yet, as I noted in criticising the New Puritan Left, the response from ministers when challenged on this is to say that we're doing it to protect the NHS - asked about the obesity strategy's fussbucketry by Phillip Davies, the current public health minister replied:

“This is a publicly funded health service that we all believe in and all love. If we want it to celebrate its 140th birthday, we need to protect it, and that means getting serious about prevention and stopping people coming into the service and getting sick."

The same lie as the left's new puritan nannies - the NHS is under strain and it's your fault because you're too fat, you drink to much and have too many bad habits. All followed up by proposals for bans, controls, taxes and regulations to make you change your bad behaviour. It's a lie - obesity isn't rising and NHS costs are going up because we've got better and better at staying alive. Everyone - even the NHS - knows this, ignores it and proposes a new bunch of nannying, fussbucketing interventions that amount to a nudging us with a baseball bat.

To close the loop here, the same goes for housing. Everyone knows that the problem is that we've spent 30 years or more not building the homes we need resulting in hugely over-valued housing, sky-high rents, homelessness and a resentful young generation. And we also know that the reason we've not built those houses is our planning system, a system that's now wholly-owned by NIMBYs and BANANAs. Yet nobody does anything beyond tinkering for fear of upsetting those (few) constituents who moan to Neil O'Brien about heavy vehicles delivering to development sites or (a loud handful of) campaigners fighting hard to protect a bunch of ugly buildings in a derelict airfield because 70 years ago some brave Americans flew bombers from that field.

There is almost nothing about current Conservative policy-making - whether in think tanks or inside the government - that gives me, as a conservative, any confidence. Our core values of localism, self-reliance, community, enterprise and liberty have been swamped by technocratic solutions based on questionable evidence devised by bright young things with barely the first idea about the communities those policies will affect. It's not just fussbucketry, although that drives me mad, but also the ignorance of basic business economics and the belief that freedom is somehow a 'nice-to-have' rather than something absolutely central to what we believe as conservatives. The next generation of policy will be set by these people and it will be a putrid combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty. It won't be conservatism.

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How demanding ID undermines trust and community

The debate about ID cards is back and this time the advocates of us having such things have added new weapons to their armoury - alongside stopping illegal immigration and being really convenient (until you lose the damned thing) we can add preventing the rare and unusual act of voter fraud and providing a simple way to administer state systems. There won't even be a physical card, say some ID fans, you'll just be issued a number. At the back of my mind the opening credits of The Prisoner spring to mind - "I'm not a number, I am a free man".

At the heart of the need to produce identification is the idea that we cannot trust the person in front of us to behave honestly. Every transaction requires some sort of identification process because of the remote possibility that somebody is going to cheat us. Take, for example, a simple thing like collecting a parcel. For most of my adult life, all this has required is that you take the card popped through your door by the postman or delivery company to the place where the parcel has been taken and they hand you the parcel. Now - and this is used as the most common argument for demanding ID at the polling station - we have to produce some sort of photo ID and proof of address as well as the card the postie delivered. This is daft - the card was delivered to you and should be sufficient. Unless, that is, there are cunning thieves following delivery vans, breaking into houses, stealing those cards and going to collect them.

The government rather likes it that you don't - or aren't allowed to - trust your neighbour. The idea that, in a community, people know each other and trust each other doesn't fit with a state directed system. Take voting - the presiding officer for the past few years in Cullingworth lives in the village and has done for a long while. She knows a lot of people here and, along with local polling clerks, can be trusted to only question those folk who raise some sort of doubt. Most of the people lining up to vote arrive with a poll card (delivered to their house by the council) and ID fans seems to believe that there's another cunning set of miscreants going round nicking poll cards so they can impersonate voters. This might occasionally happen but I prepared to bet that it won't be happening in Cullingworth. We should be trusting our Presiding Officer, trusting the poll clerks and trusting the vast majority who are not about to cheat anyone.

In an environment of trust, especially trust established over a long period, there is less need for government protection. My exchanges and interactions with friends and neighbours don't require government oversight to make sure nobody is cheating. The sad thing is that this sphere of genuine community has shrunk and shrunk - we stopped trusting the local shopkeeper to know whether or not young James is over 18. Or, more to the point, trading standards officers shifted their focus away from product safety and towards the enforcement of arbitrary age limits on an ever growing range of products. And because of this enforcement, the shopkeeper stopped selling these products without a proof of identity (and age) - the days of sending the kid to the pub to get jug of ale for grandpa are well and truly over.

Government - and by this is mean the Kafka-esque structures of bureaucracy and control not the politicians we elect who pretend to direct these structures - likes the fact that mistrust makes its controls and enforcement necessary. It suits bureaucracy for us to be issued with numbers and for those numbers to be demanded in order to access simple services like collecting a prescription from the chemist or signing up to a GP. And the bureaucrats will point to examples of abuse (carefully gathered for this purpose) to show how absolutely essential it is that the sub-postmaster, pharmacist and GP don't trust us. There'll be mistakes, example of abuse and the old canard of illegal immigration all paraded before us to explain why you will need to produce a photo ID to enter a pub in Bingley.

As a conservative, I believe that trust sits at the heart of our idea of community. We cannot have a true community - it's merely a space shared by unconnected individuals - unless the people in it have trust in their neighbour. There's a lot of evidence - mostly from the USA - that people are beginning to look again for that idea of community. Partly it's a sort of wistful remembrance of times when "ID please" wasn't such a common sound but it's also a recognition that successful places are founded in large part on a shared idea of what the place should be and much of the sharing here relies on trust. Without trust of neighbour - on a scale wide enough to make a difference - loving where you live becomes a solitary pastime rather than a shared mission.

It may be that we can't get those days back, a time when filling in a form and handing over some money was sufficient to open a bank account, when a boy could buy fags for his mum because the shopkeeper knew who he was and knew his mum, and where the publican could keep an eye on three 15-year-olds knowing they're better and safer in his pub than they'd be at the back of the park with some cans. It may be that automation leads to a need for a single universal number but we should, at least think seriously about how we restore the idea of trust and community in a world where systems assume that everybody, all of the time, is up to no good. And maybe we should ask the government - and those subject to government enforcement - to start trusting us again?

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Unpopularism (some policy thoughts for conservatives)

There's a media caricature of conservatism as being a sort of red-faced, reactionary creed. And, at times, we do sound like the angry bloke at the bar as he moves from beer onto double whiskies - "send 'em home, stop 'em coming, hang 'em, flog 'em, blame the parents, close the borders, scroungers, layabouts, druggies". For all of his modest manner, politeness and media-savvy approach, this is pretty much how a lot of folk see the Rees-Mogg tendency.

Now I really am a conservative, probably more of one now than I've ever been, and this means that we need to take one of David Cameron's cute observations - "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as the state" - and ask what is means in terms of policy. We should also recognise that our social problems seem to be pretty resistant to both the left liberal's "give everyone a nice hug" approach and the reactionary's "kick them up the pants, the lazy oiks" policy platform.

Anyway it seems to me that we should start thinking about those social problems - social mobility, inequality in health and education, housing, community, crime - as conservatives. We should also draw on the actual evidence as to what underlies the problems and how a conservative outlook can make a big difference. None of what follows is economic policy, all of it is intended to strengthen social bonds, reduce barriers between people and places, and provide some pointers to a society based more on the idea of community than the one we have right now.

Crime and Punishment 1 -Shut down prisons. We lock up too many young men and, in particular, young men from less privileged backgrounds. This isn't just bad for those young men, it's bad for their partners, their children and for society. We should stop doing this, close down a load of prisons and make prison more effective. Prison doesn't work as a deterrent and acts to destroy families while damaging society still further.

Crime and Punishment 2 - Legalise pot. If your place is like mine, then hardly a day passes without a proud announcement from the local police about another cannabis farm they've found. Have you noticed how this is reducing the number of folk smoking weed? No? We're losing the war on drugs. With appropriate safeguards, licences and taxes legalised cannabis (and maybe some other drugs too) would immediately end a huge criminal enterprise with all its attendant violence and unpleasantness.

Families 1 - Pay childcare to mums (or dads). We're spending billions (getting on for £10 billion) on providing parents with childcare subsidy. Since the evidence tells us that full-time, attentive parenting is the best development environment for a toddler, we should make that money we currently pay to nurseries and pre-schools also available to mums or dads who opt to stay at home to raise their toddlers.

Families 2 - Divorce reform. OK, we're better off than the Americans as we don't have 'no fault' divorce but it's still probably too easy to get a divorce especially where there are children. We should reform the system so that the interests of children is central to any decision. And those interests must be guided by the evidence telling us that being raised by a single parent is one of the best ways to screw the life chances of those children.

Families 3 - Incentivise marriage. You know why we have marriage? Love and all that jazz innit. Nope - marriage exists to stop men leaving once they've fathered a child. And forget all the religion stuff - every single society on earth has marriage in one form or another. Marriage works because is places a social stigma (sometimes enforced by a familial big stick) on men who abandon women with children. As the evidence on life chances for children born outside marriage tells us, not having married parents is bad for children. We should incentivise marriage through the tax system and, for the least well off, introduce a specific benefit payable to married couples.

Education 1 - school place lotteries. Grammar schools are one of our things as Conservatives. We love them despite the evidence telling us that they make barely a jot of difference to overall educational attainment or social mobility. If we want working class kids to do better then we have to mix them with middle class (and posh) kids rather than, de facto, herding them into separate schools because of social sorting by house price. So rather than grammar schools, let's have school place lotteries thereby creating better social mix in schools to the benefit of those working class kids.

Education 2 - fund more extra-curricula activity. Non-classroom stuff is really important - sport, music, art, debating, clubs - and we've been gradually squeezing it out (mostly by pulling funding and expecting parents to pay). We should fund activity like music, dance and school sport directly and pay the teachers who support extra-curricula activity more money.

Health - merge 'clinical commissioning groups' into local councils. Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are the bodies that hold local budgets for the NHS. We've already created 'Health and Wellbeing Boards' to make them at least talk with the local council. We should go further and put all the health and care commissioning under the local council - it would be more accountable, more transparent and might result in some creative, community-based health initiatives.

Housing 1 - scrap the 'green belt'. All the evidence, wherever you look in the world, tells us that policies constraining the supply of land in large, growing cities result in unaffordable housing. Let's abolish anti-suburb, anti-sprawl policies and focus instead on a planning system that actually protects special, beautiful, and environmentally-important land rather than a huge blanket consisting mostly of agricultural monoculture with all its attendant ecological negatives. This won't make housing cheap overnight but it will set a direction for more supply of land, more homes being built, more variety and a chance for young people to aspire to own a home.

Housing 2 - extend the right-to-buy. Right-to-Buy was the single biggest transfer of wealth from government to people in our history. We need to extend right-to-buy to all social housing with similar incentives to those offered to council tenants in the 1980s. And we should give tenants of privately rented homes the right to buy when a landlord seeks to sell the property - again with a discount similar to that offered to social tenants.

And finally - scrap beer duty for drinks sold in pubs. The pub is the heart of the community - how often does some politician tell us this (usually while having their picture taken with campaigners opposing yet another pub closure). Well pubs are places where people drink beer, that's their primary purpose. So why, if pubs are so bloody important, do we slap a massive additional tax on those drinkers? Scrap the beer duty (and probably duty on cider and wine but not spirits) for the on-trade.

As I said - unpopularism?

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The left is everywhere but prefers preaching to listening

I could start by adding "..and nowhere" to the headline because that pretty much summarises the issue here. The left's ideas are meant to be universal and absolute - no political postcode lottery is permitted - such that cultural variation is suspect. And conservatism is all about the nuance of that cultural variation. The comment, 'the left is everywhere' comes from this Russ Roberts commentary about Jordan Peterson:

I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of a smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.

Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic. In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone’s cup of tea. By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Or that gender is a social construct.

This is the gist of the left's incomprehension. Our trendy lefties cannot understand a conservatism that, while it's pro-market, is deeply suspicious of capitalism - or at least the grand capitalism of banks and big business. There's an incredulity at people who think the first duty of government isn't to promote equality but is rather to protect the community and culture of the people that government serves. As Roberts says, who find that "radical egalitarian agenda" not their cup of tea.

The cultural ubiquity of this position can be set out even more starkly:

And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism.

Of course, our neoliberal left will be adamant that they care deeply about economic inequality, they'll point to tweets, to conferences attended, to the presence of M. Piketty's book on their coffee table. But then we look at their priorities and see a different thing entirely - the excitement is over the gender pay gap for TV presenters, the 'trans agenda', and abusive language on social media.

It is a bizarre irony that someone as selfish, grandiloquent and preening as Donald Trump seems to grasp the real worries of the working class and, for want of a better word, lower middle class better than today's left. Concerns about the loss of social infrastructure like pubs, clubs, societies and local shops. Worries about jobs, businesses and the future opportunities for young people. And a sense that nobody is really interested in their local community, culture or lived experience - except, that is, for lecturing them about making the wrong lifestyle choices or sneering about what they like to eat, listen to, read or watch. This isn't to say that Trump's policies are the right ones but that he, at least, makes the effort to try and understand.

Neoliberalism is, in economic terms, brilliant - the billion people lifted out of absolute poverty over the past 30 years are a testament to this - but, while this has been happening, there's a set of people who don't see their lives getting better, watch their community hollowing out and wonder whether anyone is really interested in their lives and their neighbourhood. As Roberts observes, to see these people, hear them, understand them, our essentially metropolitan left has to go somewhere they wouldn't normally go - a tired English seaside town, a church in America's 'bible belt', a Yorkshire pit village, a French small town or an Italian village bar.

And when this metropolitan left arrive they have to do something else, they have to set aside the urge to lecture, to explain, to know better and start to listen. If they don't do this the result we get from the visit sounds like this:

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

OK, this is written by a Conservative (I really object to those CINO, RINO sneers from the, mostly reactionary rather than conservative, alt-right - Matthew Parris is a conservative) but it rather sums up the dismissal that these distant, slightly tatty places get from the great and good when they call in. The same goes for France where arrivistes get a prickly response from locals for wanting some sort of (largely imagined) lost past to return:

Hours had passed on a sunny Friday in the center of town, yet on some streets we saw almost no one. “You see clearly that we are on a street that is dying,” Mr. Jourdain said on Rue Emile Grand as we concluded our tour. “There are whole buildings where there isn’t a soul.”

I called City Hall for a meeting with the mayor, a member of France’s center-right party, but was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from her spokeswoman. I was put off with the promise of a phone call the following week, and when I finally reached the mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, she argued that urban “devitalization” has had a “relatively moderate impact.” She also angrily condemned Mr. Jourdain.

“He is an extraterrestrial,” she said, “who came here to get talked about.”

There is no comprehension here, simply a refusal to sit and listen. It is the pattern again and again, in place after place. Journalist or researcher arrives in town, talks to a couple of people, takes some pictures and then rushes back to somewhere with better coffee bars and trendier restaurants to write a piece explaining how the community they visited is tired, left-behind, struggling, dowdy, depressed (select the descriptors of your choice). Sometimes these writers or researchers are good enough to speak to a few actual locals but mostly this gets boiled down to a few grumpy quotes - even better if the locals say something a bit racist, sexist or homophobic.

The places we're talking about here aren't rich places but they're also not really poor places. The people who live in these places are conservative and it hurts them to be told they're "going nowhere" and we should look instead at the shiny city with its overpriced apartments, fancy restaurants, crowded roads and unfriendly neighbours. Nothing is offered to people in Clacton or Albi except the strong suggestion that somehow the people in the big city are better than them - be more like East London, more like Paris. Presumably without the racism and knife crime.

The biggest challenge facing western democracies isn't populism, it isn't robots, it's not flying cars or food security or climate change or the rise of China. No, the challenge is stopping the city from strangling our societies and cultures. Part of this is to start trying to work out how we make Clacton and places like Clacton something other than "all our yesterdays". And sitting at the centre are the people, the ones who think that "radical egalitarian agenda" has gone too far, the ones who want politicians to worry as much about neighbourhood, community and place as they do about transphobia, the gender pay gap and high speed railways.

We started with the trendy left being everywhere and nowhere, like butterflies flitting across a cultural herbaceous border. Set against this isn't just "somewhere" but the idea that society starts with family, friends, neighbour and community. And that this society needs looking after. This isn't about everything being the same, nor is it about community developers - assorted left-inclined missionaries of social action - arriving in a place getting everything sorted. No, it's about rebuilding the structures of place - community, neighbourhood, families - and the institutions they need to succeed.

Many conservatives (and Conservatives) have forgotten this essential part of what we believe, preferring instead a sort of technocratic fix based on regulation and grand institutions. Not that such things are unimportant but without strong local institutions - family, neighbourhood, community - strong national institutions will not succeed. Hospitals in "Our NHS" work (most of the time) despite the stupifying bureaucracy of the NHS because they are local institutions - our hospitals, our clinics, our health centres. And the same goes for schools, policing and much else that makes society work - when the ties to local community are strongest, the institution is most effective. The national, even supranational, urge for homogeneity that neoliberalism and social democracy force on communities excludes people from any sense of owning those institutions, prevents initiative and slowly stifles the local ties, the idea that we should love where we live, that make community work.

Although there's a grumpiness (and bemusement) at that 'radical egalitarian agenda' it perhaps covers over a deeper malaise in society, the seeming alliance between the uncaring utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the controlling 'gentleman in Whitehall knows best' approach of social democracy. Everything is so far away, out of our control, and more bothered with things that aren't important to us and ours. It's not that people far from the places of power - Westminster, Brussels, Washington, Paris - are ignorant but rather that they've stopped listening as so little is about them or their lived experiences. The left is everywhere, except in the lives and communities of people just over the hill from the shiny city, quiet places with good people who would like a little care and attention for a change.

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Let's stop watering down Corbyn's policies and offer a property-owning democracy again

There is a modicum of welcome introspection within my party. Questions about our values, purpose and mission are mixed in with less considered and more tactical debates about getting more support from young people or responding to what Brexit (and Corbyn) "means". Alongside this is a discussion about organisation - whether the party has the structure, membership and organisation to take a positive message to the electorate.

For me, and the apparent success of Corbyn's populism doesn't change this fact, the answer doesn't lie in contention or extremes but rather in consensus and moderation. Don't misunderstand me here, this isn't a rejection of ideology, but rather a recognition that policies drawn from our belief in freedom, community, neighbourliness and self-reliance have to chime with the values of people who we want to vote for us.

So let's start with those values rather than - as we see here from David Skelton - an approach based on opinion polling - little better than a list of bribes (higher minimum wages, housing subsidies, free tuition) aimed at attracting support. This is what we mean when we talk of populism and is precisely the programme that Corbyn espouses - rail nationalisation has big opinion poll support so we propose rail nationalisation. Students say they want free tuition so we give them free tuition. All paid for through another solidly opinion poll tested plan - increasing taxes on big business and "the rich".

What Skelton proposes is a return to what was once called Butskellism, a policy platform based on trying to have as close a policy platform to the other side as possible without quite abolishing any difference. Here's an example:

A reformed Toryism could address the growing disparity between capital and labour and encourage firms to empower their workers with shares and board representation. But that shouldn’t obscure the need for higher wages. The minimum wage should be increased when possible, and companies above a certain size should be expected to report on how they are moving towards paying the voluntary living wage (£8.45 in the UK and £9.75 in London).

If I'd replaced the first three words here with "a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn" no-one would have batted an eyelid. What we have is a policy platform founded on wording current Labour policies slightly differently and calling it "reformed Toryism":

a new generation of genuinely affordable, low-rent homes,

reducing tuition fees and concentrating the greatest attention on those from poorer backgrounds

hindered by cuts to in-work benefits and anti-trade union rhetoric.

All of this is good stuff but it does not give a single young person (or indeed older person) a solitary reason to switch from voting Labour to voting Conservative. All Skelton - and too many others on the left of my Party - is saying is "be more like Labour by proposing toned down versions of their policies".

So let's start instead with these values:

Wherever you go in the world you'll find people who hold as important such things as family, neighbourliness, independence, duty and effort. That you should work hard, contribute, look out for the neighbours, bring up your family as honest, self-reliant and care for those less fortunate.

And these are conservative values, the building blocks of community. None of them are about government, large or small. None of them see society as greater than the sum of its individual parts. And none of them are predicated on knowing better what is good for your neighbour.

Let's frame a policy platform beginning with the communities we want to represent rather than with centrally-directed proposals determined by opinion-polling. Let's talk about community, about how health, social care, good jobs and much else start with the places we live in rather than with the Bank of England, International Monetary Fund and National Health Service. I like it when Skelton talks about people having a stake, although he makes the mistake of talking about "the economy" rather than "society". As conservatives we need to renew the offer we made repeatedly - in 1959, 1970, 1979 and 1992 - do the right thing, play your part, get an education, work hard and you will have a stake in society. Right now overpriced housing, the pillage of pension funds and disincentives to invest mean that people, especially younger people, struggle to see how they're to get that stake in society - the real cash stake we all believe we were offered.

I'm pretty sure this means some tough choices about policy but we start by renewing the offer - to everyone - of a property-owning democracy. To get there we've to have some tricky converstaions about green belts, care for the elderly and the balance between taxing what we earn and taxing what we spend. We've to embrace the idea of family again - not as some sort of mythical Oxo advert image but the messy, complicated and varied things that are the reality of our lived experience as families. And, above all, we need to start talking about community and getting the decisions about care, health and social support down to that basic building block. You only need look at the benefits system - which can't process a claim in less than seven weeks leading directly to destitution - to see how centralised, national systems really don't work.

I've said before that we should start, as conservatives, with caring about what's right outside our door. It's dull, I know - soft loo paper conservatism as a university colleague called it - but most people are not either interesting in or impressed by fancy dan utopian solutions. Don't get me wrong, we'll respond to a straightforward bribe - free stuff paid for by taxing anonymous others - but conservatives have usually been better than this and, when we are, we change the world for the better.

We won't win by offering watered down versions of Corbyn's policies but by renewing the offer we made to my generation - an offer that was met - of creating a property-owning democracy. Let's do it.

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Restoring community - an imperative for conservatives

Each day I see more and more that us conservatives, by allowing assorted Marxists to capture sociology, have done the world a disservice. This is because Marx was an economist meaning that he had little or nothing to say about sociology - as a result left-wing sociologists became activists not academics. Much - not all, a long way from not all - of the subject is arrant nonsense.

But it matters. The questions it asks are not answered by economics - for sure there's a bunch of economists splashing about pretending they can inject morality into their subject's dry modelling but this isn't asking the questions a sociologist would ask. Here's Aaron Renn:

There are a number of people in the national media who make the argument that things aren’t so bad, that if you look at the numbers this idea that things are horrible in much of America just isn’t true. It’s easy for me to believe this is actually the case in a quantitative sense. But man does not live by bread alone. When you have an iPhone but your community is disintegrating socially, it’s not hard to see why people think things have taken a turn for the worse.

There are social goods (if you want to use that dreary economics language) that are as necessary as the material benefits brought us by liberal capitalism. And most of these goods are about community rather than anything definable in the typical national politics. As I wrote a little while ago:

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

It may seem trite, as Renn does, to hark back to a past age when we didn't have to lock our doors and left the keys in the car on the drive. The local concerns about burglary here in Cullingworth are real yet we have so much more than a past generation who lived lives less plagued by the fear of crime. But we can't blame the good life, the betterment of our lives as consumers - running water for folks in Aaron Renn's home county and the central heating for families here in cold, damp Cullingworth.

The willingness to be a community is still there but it is suppressed by the manner of public service management, by the transformation of voluntary organisations into agents of the state, and by the permissions and regulations laid down by the state between ordinary folk and helping their neighbour:

That's right - permission to care. That professionals in the employ of the Council, the NHS or their satellite agencies needed to allow people to look out for their neighbour. In this I saw a dead culture - one murdered by the good intentions of public agencies. 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.

We need to look again at the risks of individual social action and start to err in favour of community and its capacity to self-police rather than respond to every bad case with more rules, controls and regulations. It is the suppression of social innovation, suggesting it is only possible through endorsement by the sate or its agents, that damages community. Anyone who has been involved in local communities (and I've been a local councillor for two decades) will know they are buzzing with ideas, filled with people who want to be involved. We have a generation of wealthy and healthy older people who aren't just looking to have extended holidays, yet so much of public rhetoric seems to be about how those folk are uncaring and selfish.

For me the biggest lesson from things like the Brexit vote isn't about divisions but rather about distance. Government - nearly all of it - is distant, complicated, unapproachable, opaque and thoughtless (and this is a large part of why we dislike the EU so much). We look at what happens and wonder why decisions are made the way they are, why no thought is given to neighbourhood, why the word community is used without, it seems, even the vaguest understanding of what it means, and why the narrow interests of a small economically-successful class seems to dominate the thinking of every political party, every academic and every pundit whose number the BBC producer has in her mobile phone.

When we talk about social capital, we tend to do so in a sort of abstract way - as if it it something that can be bottled by middle-class academics and civil servants and poured onto struggling communities. But social capital is all about people standing on their doorstep, seeing something that could be better and saying "we can fix that, we can do that". It's not about local councils having 'community strategies' or lottery agencies funding middle-class experts to administer to places needing help. Nor is it about trying to turn that willingness to help into the new vanguard of the proletarian revolution let alone the need to resist neoliberal hegemony.

The starting point is simply giving places - local communities, neighbourhoods - the capacity to do what they think will make where they live a little better. From fixing some fences, clearing paths and picking up litter to helping mind neighbour children or doing what Mr Sparks did for me, my brothers and dozens of local children in the South London suburb of my youth - took us to play cricket in the summer and swimming in the winter. So long as people think they have to wait for permission to do these things, they won't do them. The imperative in building that social capital we say we've lost is to get government out of the way of people who want to help.

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