James Vitali: Being the party of opportunity

Spreading property ownership will unleash national renewal

Unless the Conservatives can recover their mantle as the party of opportunity and property ownership, there is a very real risk that, for want of a voting base, they will go into decline. To avoid this, we need to find an agenda that can do two things.

Firstly, it needs to unite our fracturing party. As the disciplining effect of power diminishes, so the ideological fault lines of our broad church will become increasingly overt. We need to establish a set of ideas and arguments that can unite both Clarke and Kruger, Braverman and Badenoch.  

Secondly, this new agenda needs to convince the British public again that the Conservative Party’s mission is a moral one, aimed squarely at giving as many people as possible the opportunity to share in the successes of our country.

It is a point of consensus that increasing our rate of economic growth is a precondition for improving living standards. But we should be mindful of the trade-offs and sacrifices that will be required to achieve this end. We will need people to cede veto power in the planning process. We will have to increase our tolerance for risk in many aspects of our lives. And why would people do that if they cannot see how they will benefit meaningfully and directly?

In The Property Owning Democracy, I set out a case for what I believe is a political agenda that can meet these two requirements. And it is based upon a recommitment to the values of ownership.

The argument is an historical one: that “private property”, as Noel Skelton put it one hundred years ago this year, “is the foundation of civilization and the extent of its distribution the measure of a civilisation’s stability and success”. That basic insight has been passed down to each generation of conservatives, who have interpreted it differently for their own political contexts. For Churchill, it meant fighting the socialist idea that public ownership could genuinely satisfy the hopes and aspirations of the working classes. For Macmillan, it meant building hundreds of thousands of new homes. For Thatcher, it meant transferring state assets – from council houses to shares in formerly state-owned companies – into the hands of individuals.

And it is fundamentally a moral argument too. Ownership is inextricably tied up with responsibility. To “own” one’s actions is to be responsible and accountable for them. To be an owner is to be invested in something, to have a “stake”.

The ownership of private property is a source of personal independence and self-sufficiency, and a medium for the practical expression of the individual personality. The things we own are in some way, as William James put it, an extension of the self. And in passing our property on to our children, they give us a form of identity across time.

But personal ownership is also the life force of healthy communities too. The “tragedy of the commons” is that what everyone owns, nobody owns; when “everyone” is responsible for something, no one considers themselves personally responsible. A community - however small or large - functions when individual men and women believe that they are personally responsible for it; that they own that community in some way.

And finally, personal ownership is the essential condition of a vibrant free market economy. It is the strongest spur for enterprise and innovation we have because it enables those who work hard and produce things of value to capture the proceeds of their endeavour.

Ownership matters, and it matters distributionally. It can be a unifying aspirational ideal when all have access to it. But for some time now, ownership has been narrowing in this country – in the housing market, in our businesses, and on our high streets. And so, the idea of ownership is coming to divide us into those who have been given the opportunity to be owners, and those – particularly younger generations – who are locked out of those same opportunities. This is compromising the very legitimacy of our political and economic model. Quite simply, we are producing too few capitalists to sustain capitalism in Britain.

A moral undertaking to save popular capitalism through an expansion and diffusion of ownership in this country can galvanise our party and get our country back on track. It creates the starkest dividing line of all between what Conservatives believe in, and political creeds that treat private ownership as selfish and something to be transcended. It provides the conditions in which good lives, rich with responsibility and obligation to others, can be led. It is the framework that enables people to build something which they can share with their family and pass on to future generations. And it is the practical means by which we can make households and communities more self-sufficient, and less reliant on an ever-expanding state.

The Property Owning Democracy looks backwards, to what has made the Conservative Party great in the past. But it looks forwards as well – to a country in which the tensions between the old and the young are assuaged, in which individuals have both the security and the incentives to take risks and drive our economy, and in which conservative values – like mutual obligation, a sense of place and rootedness, independence, aspiration – thrive.

These values haven’t gone out of fashion. Their relevance is timeless. But if we want younger generations to share them and to believe in them, we need to provide material conditions that are conducive to holding such values. That is the defining challenge of our time.

James Vitali is a research fellow at Policy Exchange.