James Vitali: We need personal freedom and the constraints of community

Michael Gove and Lord Frost have more in common than they might think

Last month, the Conservative Reader ran two thoughtful pieces on the nature of conservatism, and the direction it ought to go in. In the first, Michael Gove asserted that membership of communities, from the family through to the nation, is what give our lives meaning and value, and enables us to flourish. In response, Lord Frost contended that the great ailment in our society today is not a loss of community, but centralisation and a creeping collectivism which is sapping individual energy and freedom.

But are these two visions so opposed? I don’t think they are. There has always existed a strain in conservative thought that sees these perspectives as two sides of the same coin. And equally importantly, conservative politics has succeeded only when this critical insight has been heeded: that self-reliant, self-sufficient individuals and healthy communities are symbiotic.

The very title of Michael Gove’s essay – “The Quest for Community” - is instructive. It is borrowed from the title of Robert Nisbet’s remarkable 1953 book. Nisbet’s basic, conservative insight is twofold. Individuals need genuine, human-scale communities to be self-reliant and fulfilled; “the perspectives and incentives of the free creative mind”, as he put it, “arise out of communities of purpose”.  But the state is both parasitical towards such communities and fundamentally incapable of providing people with the same sense of place, purpose and meaning itself.

Look around Britain in the present context, and Nisbet’s hypothesis seems intuitively correct. Britons seem both more burdened by the state and less possessed of a sense of mutual obligation and solidarity than ever before. This is not contradictory. Individuals deprived of robust forms of proximate community and ejected into a more direct relationship with the state are predictably more dependent and less self-sufficient.

The elision of the community and the state is something which conservatives must contest strongly. And indeed, they have done so in the past. A curious development in British politics is that the label of “one nation” has become a signifier of a sort of middle-way conservatism, sanguine about a sizeable role for the state in the lives of citizens and seeking some form of compromise between liberalism and socialism. Yet that is not the viewpoint which one nation conservatism took historically.

Indeed, the One Nation Group of parliamentarians was established in the 1950s by Angus Maude, one of the early supporters of Thatcher’s programme to curb state interventionism. In a pamphlet for the group, Maude wrote that the effects of increasing levels of state intervention, taxation, and redistribution on “the relationships between men, and between classes of men” would be to undermine that sense of mutual obligation which makes people genuinely responsible for themselves and inclined to aid fellow members of their community.

Writing four decades later, his son and leading moderniser Francis Maude argued similarly in his One Nation Revisited that statism “erodes the bonds of duty and compassion that bind society together”, and that “the more powerful the state becomes, the less room it leaves for individual virtue”. One-nationers historically then have advanced broadly the same case as Nisbet: that the state and community are not one and the same, and that as the former erodes the latter, what is left are not self-reliant citizens, but disheartened and demoralised individuals.

Based on these philosophical insights, there is a policy agenda that conservatives everywhere ought to be able to unite around - one which will empower and encourage both individuals and communities. And it is one which demands that we diffuse and decentralise power away from the state. Conservatives should seek to get more people literally invested in the housing stock, the businesses, and the infrastructure of this country - for personal ownership not only begets self-sufficient individuals, but ones who are more willing to be responsible members of the local and wider national community too.

In some ways this means, as Conservative Home has been calling for, reducing the aggregate “demand” for the state before we begin to cut back on its “supply”. We must support households in becoming more self-reliant through good, well paid, dignified employment, and we must do this not through further subsidies, but by reducing the already heavy tax and regulatory burdens on small and medium-sized businesses so they can grow and create more job opportunities.

But we must also reimagine the levelling up programme. To deliver sustained growth we must address the fact that low productivity across other regions is dragging down the UK’s overall economic performance. But the solution will not lie in the pork-barrel politics of government subsidies. It lies instead in empowering regions, giving them more responsibility through devolution settlements like that struck with the West Midlands Combined Authority, and at the more local level helping communities take control of their high streets through initiatives like the Community Ownership Fund.

Undoubtedly, we must also ensure that those things that only the state can do are done better. Maintaining law and order is perhaps the most important of those responsibilities. We need to reform policing so that forces are more focused on, and more effective at, tackling common crime. Low trust societies inevitably come to rely more on the state. It is only in a context where people feel safe and secure can individuals and their communities flourish. We need government to do fewer things more proficiently.

Nor does any of this preclude a vital role for the state in delivering these ends and objectives. Empowering communities, easing the burden of the state on businesses, promoting personal ownership in both the housing and the stock market - reducing the size of the state itself - will require a plan from government, even if we reject the idea of “central planning”. But if we want to ask more of individuals and our communities, we must realise that this implicitly requires us to ask less of Government too.

James Vitali is a research fellow at Policy Exchange.