The choices ahead for conservatives
A conference hits town next week. But is 'National Conservatism' the answer to our problems or a foreign creed we should reject?
We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So here we share the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.
The Conservative Reader is published every Friday lunchtime, so please do look out for it. And expect plenty of content about the things we think make conservatism such a compelling body of thought: identity and belonging, community and commitment, market economics, national resilience and good government.
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Best wishes, Nick and Gavin
Towering columns
On ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks whether ‘National Conservatism’ - the subject of a conference in London next week - can adapt from America to Britain:
I’ve three questions for the movement in Britain – the precursor to many more, which would seek to find out its take on, say, localism and Net Zero. First, what’s its view on the size of the state? I’ve found in some National Conservative fellow-travellers an appetite for higher state spending and taxes than the post-war Conservative consensus is comfortable with.
Next, does it believe that a Christian majority exists in Britain and, if so, what kind of majority and what follows from it? Church-goers? Cultural Christians? Where do Islam and Muslims fit in – or for that matter agnostics and atheists? Finally, British patriotism is a good thing, but is nationalism everywhere else? If so, what about Scottish nationalism? Or Welsh? If nationalism per se is good, are these manifestations bad, and if so, why? Does supporting nationalism just mean the forms of it we approve of? And if national self-determination is the cry, what about the rights of minorities?
… I’m puzzled by Burke’s status as the poster boy of the movement. Burke was suspicious of a doctrine of natural rights, but not because held one of national identity instead. Rather, he is best remembered not for championing such a generality but rather a particular: Britain’s institutions: the “well compacted structure of our church and state…defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple”. It’s unclear whether or not the National Conservatives are interested in British institutions. The religion in which they are grounded, yes. The culture that raises or lowers them, certainly. But not maybe in replenishing those institutions themselves – at least yet. Or in how to go about the great work of our time: reducing the demand for government.
On his Substack, Ed West says the national will always be an important element of conservative thinking:
Conservatism tends to evolve, and concepts like National Conservatism are obviously a response to underlying problems with a mainstream Right that is, in many ways, adrift. It is also a reflection of the fact that we live in a world in which the major divide is not over redistribution anymore but the balance between the national and global.
Although it is a philosophy based on local peculiarities, there are some obviously ‘universal’ conservative beliefs, which might be summed up by the idea that ‘humans are flawed, fallible creatures; reason is powerful, but prone to error; and tradition and prejudice are often good guides to social policy.’ With conservatives preferring the near to the distant, in Michael Oakeshott’s famous quote, some sort of small-n nationalism is an obvious component.
This support for the nation-state was articulated by Edmund Burke in his rhetorical battles with the internationalist Thomas Paine. ‘Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality,’ Burke wrote: ‘It consists, in a great measure, in the ancient order into which we are born.’ Paine instead wrote that ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good,’ admittedly a slogan that looks much better on a T-shirt.
At Unherd, David Jeffery asks what has happened to One Nation Conservatism:
This two nation country is the result of 12 wasted years of Conservative government. Instead of fixing the roof while the sun was shining, as George Osborne told us he would, the Conservative Party has built “a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners”: a voter base that relies on increasingly tetchy boomers who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. Fundamentally, the Conservatives have presided over the intensification of a two-nation country.
CCHQ should be petrified of that fact that a Tory voter under 50 is almost as rare as an affordable property in London. A recent YouGov survey found that just 14% of 18-24s and 13% of 25-49s would vote Conservative, compared to 59% for Labour among both groups. Recent polling by Ben Ansell finds that just 15% of all private renters would vote Tory, and among under 50s just 14% of undergraduates and 10% of postgrads would go blue. Demography is not destiny for any political party, but these are worrying numbers.
A two-nation system is bad for society. It is not for nothing that Disraeli warned against it: a perpetuation of the unfair status quo would, he feared, lead to social instability. Improving the lot of the people was not only morally right, it was also a clever act of self-preservation on behalf of the Tory elite. The real kicker is that it does not have to be like this. We do not have to worship at the altar of the NIMBYs. As far back as 2010, the Conservatives were level-pegging with Labour in terms of winning the support of 18-24-year-olds. Across Europe, young voters often back parties of the Right. There is no iron law that says the Conservatives cannot win the youth vote. It’s a demographic they need desperately to win over.
At The American Mind, Joel Kotkin says we need to junk Tory Autocracy for Tory Democracy:
In essence, as former Cato fellow Randal O’Toole notes, the libertarian right has “betrayed” the very middle class that most supports conservative causes. Tory autocrats on both sides of the Atlantic welcome the arrival of a rentership society, where homes, furniture, and other necessities are turned into rental products, offering an endless cashflow to the oligarchs. Large financial institutions like Britain’s Lloyds Bank and U.S. investment managers BlackRock are deeply involved in this process.
This undermines the chances for wealth creation and aspiration for coming generations; homes, for example, account for roughly two-thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans. The importance of dispersing property was essential to the notions embraced by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams. All considered the over-concentration of property in a few hands as a basic threat to republican institutions, an insight shared by intellectuals like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Adam Smith. As Burke put it, what really matters in the end is not ideology but reality: “The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”
Whether here or in Britain, conservatives need to focus more on the interests of both the working class and grassroots capitalists, their natural base. Tory Democracy would confront, rather than kowtow to, the consolidation of corporate power, whether in the tech world or real estate. They need not possess the charm of Reagan or the dynamism of Thatcher, just a political strategy that, as Cambridge historian Richard Bourke puts it, can “reanimate the ghost of Benjamin Disraeli.”
In The Times, Melanie Phillips says limiting the right to protest is consistent with the principles of a liberal society:
Freedom of speech and the ability to protest are indeed precious features of democracy. But there is no right to interfere with other people’s ability to go about their own business. Indeed, it’s a cardinal tenet of a liberal society that freedom must stop at the point where an individual’s action causes harm to others.
This principle was expressed in the 19th century by the high priest of liberalism, John Stuart Mill. He wrote in On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” He added: “For such actions as are prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable, and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishments if society is of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection.”
One might reasonably say that if protests prevent people from hearing or seeing what’s going on at a public spectacle, this harms their freedom to participate as equals in a communal activity. It treats them wilfully as mere collateral damage to a political agenda. In recent years, however, an acknowledgment of the balance to be struck between freedom to protest and the duty to prevent harm has increasingly been forgotten.
Also in The Times, Juliet Samuel says the world economy is changing fast, yet Britain is failing to respond:
Subsidies are only one part of the picture. For seven months, [advanced semiconductor company founder, Simon] Thomas has been renting a warehouse near Huntingdon, two-thirds the size of a football pitch, in which he plans to expand production. But the building is empty while Paragraf tries to get the local council to help connect it to a sufficiently powerful electricity substation. Neither the council nor the grid will help, so the company is having to put up £1 million of its own money. On top of that, much of the machinery required in the warehouse is stuck in production queues due, ironically, to the global semiconductor shortage. Unlike Germany, for instance, the UK has no scheme to help high-tech or strategic companies skip such queues.
And then there’s recruitment. Even after finding and hiring specialist engineers and physicists, it is taking Paragraf up to nine months to secure “fast-track” visas. The latest to be delayed was a German engineer working in Sweden. Apparently, post-Brexit, this combination was too complicated for the system to compute. Thomas wants to expand his 112-strong workforce by 50 per cent, but these workers are among the world’s hottest commodities right now and Britain keeps them dangling for months…
Across the board, problems mount and our government seems paralysed. Yes, small boats and the NHS are urgent problems, but so is this drift into an economic no-man’s land. Britain needs to devise a response to enormous shifts in the global economy, where all our rivals have decided to support national industries.
Wonky thinking
Rather than present a single report this week, we have chosen a selection of recent writing on the great unknown of our time: the consequences of artificial intelligence. In The Sunday Times, John Tasioulas, director of Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics in AI, and Nigel Shadbolt, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, write:
1. Don’t fall prey to the doom-mongers. Of course, we should take the fears of AI experts seriously. But we must keep a number of things in mind. The first is that these experts are human beings, and therefore prey to standard human pathologies, such as doom-mongering and to be in awe of such powerful technology. There is also a tendency to magnify the significance — for good or ill — of one’s own area of expertise. Additionally, like any academic field, there are disagreements among AI scientists about where the threats lie.
2. Just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should. At present AI is often framed as an unstoppable process, but its regulation is ultimately an ethical question. But there are choices everywhere when it comes to AI, from the decision of whether or not to buy a social robot to keep one’s aged parents company, all the way through to the national laws and international treaties we choose to draw up. Ultimately, it is up to us, individually and collectively, to decide what role we want AI to have in human life.
3. Don’t over-regulate. Today, legal scholars such as Simon Chesterman at the National University of Singapore, have shown that many of the challenges posed by AI can be dealt with through the application of general pre-existing legal principles. For example, responsibility for decisions made by AI systems should be attributed to whoever is using them, making them or selling them, depending on the situation. Attempting to develop a bespoke comprehensive scheme specifically for the new technology threatens to produce overly complex and unprincipled regulation. This could well be the case with the EU’s proposed AI Act which tries to list in advance a series of “high risks” domains that may be impacted.
4. Stop following the ‘ethical experts’. In place of rule by experts, we urgently need to promote democratic deliberation about AI by an informed and empowered citizenry. Crucially important here is education, especially enhancing digital literacy throughout society as a whole. We should pay attention to Taiwan where Audrey Tang, the minister of digital affairs in the country, has been at the forefront of using digital technology to enhance citizen participation.
5. Search for a truce in the AI arms race. The prospects of a global consensus may seem bleak, but we have to try. We urgently need to develop minimally adequate standards for AI regulation that reflect what different countries and ideologies will be able to accept. This means giving up on the best to avoid the very worst. A first step might be to reach a consensus among leading democratic states on guidelines for developing and deploying AI and then to see how far we need to dilute that consensus to bring China and other key states on board. It’s not impossible that Britain, intermediate geographically and ideologically between a libertarian US and a Napoleonic EU, may have a constructive role to play in this urgent task.
6. Help it become a force for good. Finally, let us not lose sight of the extraordinary potential for AI to enrich our lives, our societies and economies. AI will continue to revolutionise medicine, from the discovery of new drugs to early diagnosis of disease, from understanding our biology to managing every sort of medical surveillance. AI will help us understand climate change and work with humans to find ways to ameliorate its impact. It is already working with artists and musicians to create new content.
In the Financial Times Martin Wolf writes:
Consider some of these wider effects. Yes, we might have unbribable and rational judges and better science. But we might also have a world of perfectly faked information, pictures and identities. We might have more powerful monopolies and plutocrats. We might have almost complete surveillance by governments and companies. We might have far more effective manipulation of the democratic political process. Yuval Harari argues that “democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When AI hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.” Daron Acemoglu of MIT argues that we need to understand such harms before we let AI loose. Geoffrey Hinton, a “godfather” of AI, even decided to resign from Google.
The problem with regulating AI, however, is that unlike, say, drugs, which have a known target (the human body) and known goals (a cure of some kind) AI is a general purpose technology. It is polyvalent. It can change economies, national competitiveness, relative power, social relations, politics, education and science. It can change how we think and create, perhaps even how we understand our place within the world. We cannot hope to work out all these effects. They are too complex…
Humanity is Doctor Faustus. It, too, seeks knowledge and power and is prepared to make almost any bargain to achieve it, regardless of consequences. Even worse, it is a species of competing Doctor Faustuses, who seek knowledge and power, as he did. We have been experiencing the impact of the social media revolution on our society and politics. Some warn of its consequences for our children. But we cannot halt the bargains we have made. We will not halt this revolution either. We are Faustus. We are Mephistopheles. The AI revolution will roll on.
On his Substack, Tim Lee writes:
There’s now a tightknit community convinced that AI poses an existential risk to the human race. I’m going to call their viewpoint singularism—a nod not only to Verner Vinge’s concept of the singularity, but also to Bostrom’s concept of a singleton, an AI (or other entity) that gains control over the world. The singularists have been honing their arguments for the last decade and today they largely set the terms of the AI safety debate. But I worry that singularists are focusing the world’s attention in the wrong direction. Singularists are convinced that a super-intelligent AI would become powerful enough to kill us all if it wants to. And so their main focus is on figuring out how to ensure that this all-powerful AI winds up with goals that are aligned with our own.
But it’s not so obvious that superior intelligence will automatically lead to world domination. Intelligence is certainly helpful if you’re trying to take over the world, but you can’t control the world without manpower, infrastructure, natural resources, and so forth. A rogue AI would start out without control of any of these physical resources. So a better way to prevent an AI takeover may be to ensure humans remain firmly in control of the physical world—an approach I’ll call physicalism. That would mean safeguarding our power plants, factories, and other physical infrastructure from hacking. And it would mean being cautious about rolling out self-driving cars, humanoid robots, military drones, and other autonomous systems that could eventually become a mechanism for AI to take over the world…
Singularists predict that the first superintelligent AI will be the last superintelligent AI because it will rapidly become smart enough to take over the world. If that’s true, then the question of AI alignment becomes supremely important because everything depends on whether the superintelligent AI decides to treat us well or not.
But in a world where the first superintelligent AI won’t be able to immediately take over the world—the world I think we live in—the picture looks different. In that case, there are likely to eventually be billions of intelligent AIs in the world, with a variety of capabilities and goals. Many of them will be benevolent. Some may “go rogue” and pursue goals independent of their creators. But even if that doesn’t happen, there will definitely be some AIs created by terrorists, criminals, bored teenagers, or foreign governments. Those are likely to behave badly—not because they’re “misaligned,” but because they’re well-aligned with the goals of their creators.
In this world, anything connected to the Internet will face constant attacks from sophisticated AI-based hacking tools. In addition to discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities, rogue AI might be able to use technologies like large language models and voice cloning to create extremely convincing phishing attacks. And if a hacker breaches a computer system that controls a real-world facility—say a factory, a power plant, or a military drone—it could do damage in the physical world…
it would be a good idea to make sure that computers controlling physical infrastructure like power plants and pipelines are not directly connected to the Internet. Middelsteadt argues that safety-critical systems should be “air gapped”: made to run on a physically separate network under the control of human workers located on site. This principle is particularly important for military hardware… Over the longer term, we should keep the threat of rogue AIs in mind as we decide whether and how to automate parts of the economy.
Book of the Week
Our recommended book this week is Trade Wars are Class Wars, by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis, in which the authors argue that trade disputes are not really conflicts between countries, but between competing interests within countries:
Trade war is often presented as a conflict between countries. It is not: it is a conflict mainly between bankers and owners of financial assets on one side and ordinary households on the other - between the very rich and everyone else. Rising inequality has produced gluts of manufactured goods, job loss, and rising indebtedness. It is an economic and financial perversion of what global integration was supposed to achieve. For decades, the United States has been the largest single victim of this perversion. Absorbing the rest of the world's excess output and savings at the cost of deindustrialization and financial crises has been America's exorbitant burden.
But Americans are not the only victims. All the peoples of the world suffer from this arrangement, because the U.S. financial system and consumer market function as a safety valve for exploitation elsewhere. America’s openness to international trade and finance means that the rich in Europe, China, and the other major surplus economies can squeeze their workers and retirees in the confidence that they can always sell their wares, earn their profits, and park their savings in safe assets…
By preventing political and industrial elites in the surplus countries from facing the consequences of their actions, the open system has enabled destructive behavior in the rest of the world. From a certain perspective, the United States - and the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, all of which play a similar role in the global economy - therefore resembles the imperial colonies of Europe of the late nineteenth century. Back then, subject peoples were forced to buy Europe's excess production in exchange for taking on unneeded debt. Remarkably, a similar situation exists today. Instead of violence, however, the modern regime depends on the English-speaking countries' political commitment to open markets. This is a choice, but in democracies, the people have the option to change their mind...
Addressing trade imbalances through tariffs is likely to be ineffective at best and harmful under certain conditions. That is why it matters that capital controls are becoming increasingly popular, especially in the other English-speaking economies. New Zealand recently banned all nonresidents from buying residential property. Australia limits foreign buyers to new homes, which has helped stimulate construction, and it taxes foreign purchases, although the rates vary by state. Some local governments in Canada have begun taxing foreign purchasers of housing. The United States could go even further. On July 31, 2019, two U.S. senators one a Democrat, one a Republican-introduced a bill that would direct the Federal Reserve to force the current account deficit to shrink to zero by discouraging foreign investment with a “market access charge”…
plenty of Americans have prospered producing financial assets to accommodate the rest of the world's excess savings. The world's preference for American markets and the U.S. dollar inflates the incomes of the financiers who control access to these markets - as well as their domestic political clout. For decades, the U.S. Treasury's approach to international finance was driven largely by what made sense for the major American commercial and investment banks and the owners of financial capital. The interests of everyone else in the economy were largely ignored, if not outright opposed by counterproductive commitments to maintain a strong dollar. This was always justified on the grounds that deregulating capital and increasing its mobility would lead to the best possible investment outcomes.
The resulting increases in wealth, they explained, would inevitably trickle down to all Americans - never mind that international capital flows are far more likely to be driven by speculation, investment fads, capital flight, and reserve accumulation (often for mercantilist purposes) than by sober investment decisions about the best long-term uses of capital. Many American companies adapted to the massive financial inflows coming into the United States by relocating their production to countries where workers are underpaid and then selling goods back to U.S. consumers at higher margins.
Quick links
GDP fell by 0.3 per cent in March, but was up 0.1 per cent in quarter one overall.
Interest rates have increased again as inflation remains above ten per cent…
… but supermarkets say food prices will soon start falling.
EU countries are re-introducing border controls.
After Brexit, the haulage industry is training homegrown drivers.
Kemi Badenoch has explained her approach to retained EU law.
Britain is supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine.
The US has accused South Africa of sending arms to Russia.
The TransPennine Express will be nationalised after persistent poor service.
Manufacturers say “we can’t accept a laissez-faire approach” when the world economy is “not a level playing field.”
Industry experts say Britain’s electric battery failure could destroy our car industry.
Ministers want to limit the number of dependants foreign students bring to Britain.
Sir Mark Rowley has defended the Met’s policing of the coronation.
Google is incorporating AI into its search engine.
Tesla is recalling 1.1 million deficient foreign and Chinese-made cars.
Chinese deflation continues, reflecting weak consumption demand.
52 per cent of those sentenced to prison have more than ten previous convictions.
The leader of Plaid Cymru has quit after a report found misogyny, harassment and bullying in the party.
Tory MPs say the Conservative Democratic Organisation is invisible in their seats.