"It starts with what you can see from your doorstep" - thoughts on conservatism

Conservatives don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a conservative. After all politics is boring, political philosophy doubly boring. So we don't spend hours discussing the nuance of our ideology, preferring instead to talk about the garden, the football or the state of the gulleys on Bingley Road.

The problem with us conservatives not thinking much about conservatism is that others decide to do it for us. And they really don't get it at all. A thoughtful consideration of conservatism get replaced by a set of negative stereotypes depending on who is doing the defining.

To our right we get faux-conservatives who pretend that they're the only real conservatives. Everyone but them are 'cucks', 'conservatives in name only' or, worst of all 'liberals'. The true conservatism for these people is a sort of warmed over nationalism peppered (or even pepe-ed) with sub-literate on-line memes and old-fashioned racist tropes.

To our left are a bunch of folk who range from considering us sad thickos to really, genuinely hating us. No chance of a positive press here, we're greedy, uncaring, elitist and even murderous. Conservatism is a bloated, red-faced man in a pin-stripe suit.

As conservatives we've allowed these oppositional stereotypes to dominate people's understanding of the ideology (insofar as it is an ideology - but more of that later) because we spend almost no time considering what we do believe and, more importantly, what conservatism means to the millions of people who simply toddle along to the church hall and vote for us.

Conservatism is ill-defined - it's felt rather than analysed, emotional rather than intellectual. Unlike the left there is no ur-text, no 'Capital' that provides a bedrock of religious certainty to ideological discussion. We have a set of populist aphorisms - 'hand up not a hand out', 'people who do the right things', 'choice and opportunity' - but these don't help except as a set of clues to what we believe.

The advantage, of course, with all this is we can, like the Red Queen, believe almost anything if we try hard enough. This is the problem that some absolutist free marketers (and those Pepe-loving nationalists) have with conservatism - it doesn't preclude a role for the state or assume that there is some perfect model of government that, if introduced, will lead us to the Fields of Elysium.

The disadvantage with the lack of that ur-text or even a recognised corpus of accessible conservative thinking is that there's no obvious ideological filter through which to assess policy. Conservatives literally wing-it much of the time at least in ideological terms. When people speak of some sort of conservative ideological mission they largely miss the point - it's mostly this is what we do not a case of this is what we believe.

As a starting point in understanding conservatism let me say that emotional meaning is more significant than philosophy, at least in its role as an ideological source. Place, people and values matter more to conservatives than the words in some book written in the 19th century. Where there are central texts to liberalism and socialism, there is no source book for conservatism - we can't get ideological reassurance from Marx or Smith or Mill.

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, Tolkein 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.

If you spend time with conservative people - and as a Conservative Party member and activist of forty years, I can say that I have done just that - you soon realise that the stuff of national debate and headlines is not the stuff of conservatism (not, as I've noted, that conservative folk spend that much time talking political philosophy). Boil it down and the core of our belief is about community, family, neighbourhood, friends - social capital, sociology. Yet we bang on as if economics is everything, dry and dusty emotionless numbers.

Because of this and because we don't think enough about what we're about, conservatives become pragmatic, technocratic and seem uncaring. If we don't ground our policy in community, family, neighbourhood and home, we end up sounding like the young man with the spreadsheet trying to tell the old publican why his business is dying. Or worse that it would be an improvement to close that business and turn the property into a convenience store or some flats. Apply this thinking to how we see the poor. Not benefits scroungers. Not immigrants. Not undeserving. But somebody's family. Someone's neighbour. Someone's friend.

The reverse used to be true about conservatives. The folk bothering about their neighbourhood, the town, the country were mostly conservatives. The sense of social duty and that 'we can't let things like that happen here' was what drove my grandmother and two friends to start delivering meals on wheels in the years after WWII - ferried round by the local curate who had a motor-cycle and sidecar.

In Britain, conservatism doesn't need a relaunch, we just need to literally go back to our roots as conservatives. To understand why we are what we are and to start talking about those conservative things - few of which, once we've got past thrift, have much to do with economics, at least in that Hayekian or Marxist "we've a prescription for the perfect society here in this book" sense of economics.

Firstly, everything is local. This is what matters most to people. Their family. Their friends. Their neighbours. Their community. Their place. As Kipling said:

GOD gave all men all earth to love
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all

Admitting our hearts are small is just the start - we must then be able to answer the questions people have about their school, their hospital, their road, their house, their family. It's not that people in Sevenoaks don't care about school and hospitals in Wilsden, of course they do. It's rather that those small hearts make them care much, much more about the things of their neighbourhood than they ever will about things in distant (even five milesaway) places.

Today this means giving people control of the answers to these questions, at the very least a say, a chance to hold the people running the services to account. So when we say we don't like the EU, it's not because it's evil or stupid but because it's simply too far away to understand what our neighbourhood, our community and our family needs except as numbers on a spreadsheet or a footnote in a think-tank report.

Even the local council is too far away to really understand what matters in our communities, to our families and for our neighbourhood. Yet the flattening of everything - creating Harm de Blij's 'flat earth' in the pursuit of Max U - makes that council just an outpost of the distant regime. And people know this and feel excluded. For some there's enough money to escape (or even to be an 'Anywhere' person, a 'Flat Earther') but for most people that's not an option.

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.

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

For me this is the starting point for a conservative mission. We're not about grand schemes for the perfect society but rather for places that people love. I quoted Kipling's 'Sussex' above but I could equally have used Casey Bailey's 'Dear Birmingham' because it's exactly the same sentiment - I love this place for all it's flaws, mistakes and problems. It's my place.

This is where we start - with home, friends, family and the places we love. You want a conservative manifesto then it starts with how we give folk the power and the tools to turn the places they love into great places. For sure there are lots of other things about keeping people safe, about nation and stuff like that - even macroeconomics if you insist, but if we don't start with what we can see out of our front door we've missed the point.

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Indulgent ramblings on political position and a further chapter in my vain search

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The game of positioning ourselves within some accepted political taxonomy is a fascinating one but, for many of us, we end up wondering just how such positioning assists us. Especially when we encounter other people who adopt the same positioning. Moreover, why should we define ourselves through some game of political positioning and not through other traits, characteristics or preferences?

However, I will indulge you will a little speculation – a moment of wordplay. Here are some words that, on occasion, I have used to describe my self politically.

Conservative; Liberal; Libertarian; Right-wing; Tolerant; Intolerant; Sceptical; Doubting; Cynical; Optimistic; Anarchist; Tory

To this might be added a similar list of descriptions given to my manifest politics by others – some of which might be appropriate in polite company!

Now the wise among you will have spotted just how contradictory some of these words are – how combining them creates a concept as incongruous as to be impossible to parse. However, I do think that such an exercise is useful. If you read about me on this blog, you will see I describe myself as an “occasionally intolerant libertarian”. Clearly a contrary statement? How can you be libertarian and intolerant as the moment you move away from tolerating something you move away from liberty?

So it is with being a Conservative anarchist. After all anarchists wish to destroy, to pull down the state – anarchy is the very antithesis of conservatism. And does not a conservative wish to maintain the proper order of things (I always think of this as librarianship rather than conservation)? The problem comes when the “proper order of things” is wrong – we keep Sauron in power because that’s always been so, it is the proper order.

We live in such a time. For approaching 100 years, the proper order has been for important things in our lives to be ordered by the state – health, welfare, education, protection. This is the proper order – it is what we must conserve come what may and despite the growing evidence that its outcomes no longer serve our interests (where we are the “people”) but instead serve the interests of those who administer the system. The conservatives in this system are not those usually labelled in such a manner but a different group – a group who consider themselves liberal, social, caring and progressive.

So we must change. And the change must allow those people currently conserving a system that does not serve the people to be what they proclaim themselves to be – liberal, social, caring and progressive. And to achieve that we must remove the methodology of the modern state and replace it with a democratic version of that which went before – voluntary action (both individual and collective) overseen by a government tasked solely with upholding the protection of the law and of our freedoms. And within that new order, as conservatives we act to protect and maintain its hierarchy, structures and methods from those who would seek some form of permanent revolution.

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Second thoughts on a limited understanding of "the progressive"

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It is clear that, when the left use the term “progressive” it has a different meaning from the meaning most people attach to the idea of “progress” – for the left “progressive” is another way of describing the idea that man can be improved. Clearly this idea of “progress” differs from the orthodox socialist concept of “progress”. In a paraphrase of Trotsky here:

“The greater the expansion of the productive forces, the nearer do men approach the kingdom of freedom, and the looser become the chains of necessity. The Marxist, therefore, always supports that society whose productive forces are expanding.”

But “progressives” must have rejected this approach or else how could modern Trotskyite groups and the Greens co-habit a realm of “progressive values”? If “green economics” is about anything it is about the rejection of the orthodox Marxist economics described above – and to the society implied by socialism: a society led and controlled by those engaged in production (however defined).

It seems to me that progressive values are, in fact, unconnected with economic progress but are reflections of attainable social conditions: non-discrimination, freedom of lifestyle choice and the defining of entitlements as rights.

Non-discrimination: the idea that we should not “discriminate” (in the modern sense of the word) is a core mantra for the left. Indeed accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia or other discriminatory action are central elements of the debate between left and right in both the UK and the USA. The problem is that the “progressive” conceptualisation of non-discrimination differs from what I’ll call (for the purpose of absolute distinction) the “liberal” understanding of the concept. For the left – using the collectivist group definitions they favour – non-discrimination is dealt with by the enforcement of non-prejudicial rules of behaviour: we pass laws to punish sexism, ageism, racism, homophobia and prejudice against the disabled.

A liberal says the laws should not be used to control behaviour – for sure the various group prejudices are wrong but I have a right to be racist or sexist if I wish. Saying this doesn’t make me racist or sexist and there is an argument for saying that racism or sexism represents aggression – worthy therefore of society’s intervention. But what about all the other possible prejudices and discriminations? Do they not also merit protection – must left-handers, the short-sighted, the overweight and the ginger-haired “mobilise and organise” to campaign for legislation outlawing discrimination based on these conditions?

Freedom of lifestyle choice: as with non-discrimination this “progressive” idea draws on the importance of group-think and the rejection of individualism. Social policy is formed so as to support people in their chosen alternative lifestyles rather than as a means to improve the general welfare of the population: we craft policies directed at “communities” rather than at individuals. As with non-discrimination this forms a debate between left and right – with the left accusing the right of either not “respecting” those who have made “alternative” lifestyle choices or worse of actively promoting an orthodox lifestyle through policy.

As before the liberal critique of this approach rests not in responding to the left’s stereotyping of the right as racist, sexist homophobic bigots but in understanding that it isn’t the role of the state to govern the choices of individuals. People making lifestyle choices (or having those lifestyle choices made for them by circumstance) need to be aware of the challenges and costs that choice entails. By dividing society up into groups – often into “good” groups and “bad” groups – we present again the problem of the outsider, the person who does not slot neatly into the left’s stereotypes. Because the “progressive” idea is anti-individualist there is an assumption that each person will submit to a group – and that policy will be directed at those groups communicated to them through the moderation of the selected group leadership.

Entitlements as rights: to the liberal, entitlements are not inalienable so are ipso facto not rights – not so for the “progressive”. Entitlements – to work, to education, to welfare benefits and so on – are described as “rights” even when they are self-evidently things that cannot be assured or left unchanged. Thus the minimum wage is portrayed as a “right” given to workers by a benign progressive government. Partly this remains a matter of semantics – even spin – “rights” is a far more accessible idea for the ordinary man than the more nuanced concept of being entitled to something.

Interestingly though the “progressive” view doesn’t accord the same strength to rights to property – be that land (or rights to use land) or other property. Again the liberal position relies on property rights and their absolute protection in law – the “progressive” view that property rights can be alienated to suit some specified group need runs counter to the liberal ideal of a free society. Again a debate between left and right arises – once more centred on the key difference: “progressives” focus on group needs rather than individual rights.

It seems to me that the core principle of “progressive” thinking lies in supporting group rights rather than individual rights. Good things have come from this focus – our changed and changing attitude to women, gays and those with a different skin colour, for example – but also great damage is done to property rights, economic freedoms and to freedom of speech. In the end one of the divides in politics will always be between those who promote the idea of the free individual and those who see the individual in terms of the groups into which that person falls.

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