The Conservative Reader
Issue IV: How to avoid a wipeout; the case for democratic pluralism; the UK's underpowered cities; and the dangers of depending on Elon Musk.
We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So we are starting this newsletter so we can share with you the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.
We will send an email out 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.
Best wishes, Nick and Will
Towering columns
William Hague on how to avoid a Conservative wipe-out in The Times:
In her first address as prime minister, Liz Truss vowed that the country could “ride out the storm” to come. This phrase showed the right instinct. There is indeed a storm coming — of global recession, intensified war, energy shortages and inflation. If, at the next election, she can fairly claim to have taken people safely through that storm, she will be rewarded for it.
But you do not ride out a storm by locking half the crew below decks, frightening the passengers and cutting at right angles across a mystified flotilla while shouting at them all to unite. It would be better to bring a talented crew to action stations, avoid bringing up issues bound to divide them, steer away from well-known rocks and reassure anxious travellers that the discomforts will be fairly shared. Captains that get through a storm certainly expect unity, but they know that the conditions for that are something they alone can create.
Michael Lind on the case for democratic pluralism in Compact:
While there are as many first principles as there are philosophies and theologies, a case can be made that there are only three basic models of modern, urban, industrial order: liberalism, technocracy, and pluralism.
For liberals, the ideal social order is one that emerges spontaneously from voluntary transactions among free individuals. This vision is usually associated with classical liberalism or libertarianism, but versions of libertarian socialism and anarchism can be assigned to the liberal model as well.
In recent history, Marxist-Leninist state socialism and non-Marxist democratic socialism like that of the British Fabians have been examples of the technocratic model. For technocrats, the ideal social order is one that is planned and directed by experts with specialized knowledge of social and natural science, or perhaps a specific philosophy or theology.
For pluralists, the ideal society is a community of communities, in which the central government has direct and unmediated authority only in a few spheres like defense and law enforcement and public markets. Outside of the civic realm, the territorial government reigns, but does not rule, over largely self-governing communities of various kinds: familial, religious, ethnic, occupational, and industrial.
Joel Budd on the UK’s underpowered cities in The Economist:
In Britain just 6% of taxes are raised locally. Local authorities levy taxes linked to the value of property and keep some business rates, but these do not fund all their operations—and they are in charge of much less than Swedish local authorities. They have less incentive to allow home-building. In 2011 the central government tried to prod them with a “new homes bonus” but this has become stingier over time. Cities and metropolitan areas rely on the national Treasury to pay for almost everything—even things like transport, over which they supposedly have control.
The system of bidding for Treasury cash has made British cities into perpetual supplicants. “Governments announce pots of money and then ask local authorities to fight for them,” says Mr Rees. As a result, local politicians and officials spend their time competing for what money is available rather than thinking about what their cities really need. And some of the pots are comically small. Onward, a think-tank, pointed out earlier this year that the national government had invited local authorities to bid for cash to build public toilets for disabled people. Bristol was awarded £123,814 for three toilets.
Gillian Tett on the dangers of depending on Elon Musk:
There is a wide lesson about utility dependence — and diversification. Ukraine became dependent on using Starlink to get internet coverage this year since it needed to act fast, and the system was far better than alternatives, and initially quite cheap. As Fedorov notes, it has delivered enormous benefits. But this reliance also creates a potential vulnerability (not dissimilar to Germany’s previous heavy use of Russian gas, or US dependence on Taiwanese computing chips).
I have little doubt that if Ukraine needs to reduce its exposure to a billionaire in the future, it would eventually find a way. But in the meantime, the events will be carefully studied by other small nations — be that Taiwan or Estonia — who fear they might also need to defend themselves one day, and need distributed internet systems.
And, more widely, the saga should be a big wake-up call for any business leader, investor and policymaker. The war in Ukraine underscores in a very extreme form the degree to which we live in a digital world, where platforms are the lifeblood of the economy and much else. The question of who controls them, and whether we trust their reliability, thus matters deeply in these unstable times. Trust when shattered is hard to restore. Diversification matters.
Wonky thinking
Michael Pettis published Bad Trade for American Compass, arguing that the global trading system is depressing wages rather than raising productivity:
The point is that as long as countries can improve their international competitiveness by directly or indirectly suppressing wages and reducing domestic demand, and as long as they can externalize the resulting cost by exporting savings abroad, the incentive for countries to increase their international competitiveness ends up depressing global wages and global demand. This is especially a problem for countries like the U.S., whose deep, flexible, open and well-governed capital markets mean that they must automatically absorb these excess savings, in which case the American savings must decline to accommodate the flood of foreign savings. This decline must occur either in the form of higher unemployment, higher household debt, or higher fiscal deficits.
The problem is not free trade per se. The problem is a system in which trade depresses wages rather than raises productivity. The United States should take the lead in reforming this very unbalanced global trade regime, not by turning against trade but rather by eliminating the conditions that allow grossly unbalanced trade. Either Washington should pioneer new trade agreements that directly restrict the ability of countries to run large and persistent surpluses, much as John Maynard Keynes proposed during the Bretton Woods conference, or it should unilaterally refuse to continue playing its role of absorber of last resort of global excess savings and instead force its own trade and capital flows into balance.
Richard Ekins published a paper on the limits of judicial power for Policy Exchange:
The prorogation judgment invented new law, putting the rule of law and the integrity of the political constitution in doubt. It made the problem of judicial overreach strikingly clear. Happily, in the three years since that judgment, the trend has begun to improve. In early 2020, Lord Reed succeeded Lady Hale as President of the Supreme Court and there has been further change in the membership of the Court since then. In a succession of judgments, the new Supreme Court has adopted a more disciplined disposition than in past years, correcting some wrong turns in human rights law and the law of judicial review. This welcome change in disposition on the part of the Court has been heavily criticised by some academic and activist lawyers, including Professor Conor Gearty KC (Hon) and Jolyon Maugham KC of the Good Law Project. Nonetheless, the Court has continued to hand down occasional but significant problematic judgments in this period, including (a) its decision to allow Gerry Adams’ appeal against his 1975 conviction for escaping from custody, accepting an extraordinarily unmeritorious technical argument on premises that put in doubt a fundamental presupposition of our constitution and (b) its decision in the Ziegler case, which has significantly compromised the criminal law and the policing of public protest.
Book of the week
This edition’s Book of the Week is Two Faces of Liberalism, in which John Gray distinguishes between liberalism as pluralism, and liberalism as ideology. We can choose to manage diversity, tensions and conflicts in values and interests, he says, or we can suffer the paradox of ideological illiberal liberalism:
Liberalism contains two philosophies. In one, toleration is justified as a means to truth. In this view, toleration is an instrument of rational consensus, and a diversity of ways of life is endured in the faith that it is destined to disappear. In the other, toleration is valued as a condition of peace, and divergent ways of living are welcomed as marks of diversity in the good life. The first conception supports an ideal of ultimate convergence on values, the latter an ideal of modus vivendi. Liberalism’s future lies in turning its face away from the ideal of rational consensus and looking instead to modus vivendi.
The predominant liberal view of toleration sees it as a means to a universal civilisation. If we give up this view, and welcome a world that contains many ways of life and regimes, we will have to think afresh about human rights and democratic government. We will refashion those inheritances to serve a different liberal philosophy … Human rights are not immutable truths, free-standing moral absolutes whose contents are self-evident. They are conventions, whose contents vary as circumstances and human interests vary.
Quick links
Why are liberals less happy than conservatives?
Yields on UK 30-year bonds exceeded those of Greece this week.
The taxpayer will spend £103 billion on debt interest next year, according to the IFS.
Michael Gove had lunch with the FT.