The Conservative Reader

Harry and Meghan; blame for the strikes; stopping the crossings; alliance with Japan; doomed youth; NHS productivity problems; the truth about Trojan Horse; energy crunch; why we need skin in the game

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

Giles Fraser says Harry and Meghan represent the narcissism which is the logical endpoint of liberal individualism:

The history of how this idea of individual choice came to dominate our moral landscape is complex and interesting. What began as a worthy cry of individual freedom against exploitative elites — the state, the medieval church and so on — greatly exceeded its intended power, eventually becoming a weapon that could bend reality around the will of individual choice. These days, for example, I can be a woman simply if I choose to be one, irrespective of any biological givenness. Philosophically, this means there are no givens that human will cannot and should not be able to overcome. Truth requires a possessive pronoun, making it submissive to individual will: my truth. All that matters is the choosing. There is only one core moral situation and that is when I point to something and say: “I want it”. The paradigmatic setting for moral reflection has shifted from kneeling in the church pew to standing in the shopping aisle…

From the Palace perspective, we are born into a network of relations to which we are obligated from before we take breath. William would use words like “duty” and “service”, a crucial aspect of which is the belief that my life is not all-about-me. It’s not about my will or my having chosen something. Not even about my own personal happiness. I live in the service of something greater than myself. As today’s episodes reveal, while William was somewhere up the M1 opening yet another Community Centre or Homeless Project, Harry was in the departure lounge, giddily breathing into his mobile phone: “We are on the freedom flight.” Little wonder so many of us saw his abdication of responsibility as a betrayal of duty, to both his family and to his country — which, given the nature of the obligations he was born into, amount to the same thing.

Philip Johnston says the public will blame the Government, not the unions or the Labour Party, for disruption caused by strikes:

Some Tories think this mayhem will work to their advantage because voters will blame Labour, but this is wishful thinking. People tend to hold governments to account rather than the opposition. Another winter of discontent, even one more limited than 1978-79, will be held against Rishi Sunak unless he gets a grip on the public sector unions. What has happened to the legislation requiring a minimum level of service to be maintained, as promised in the 2019 manifesto? Moreover, why is it limited to transport and not extended to the NHS and other essential sectors?

… a problem remains when employees can strike in sectors that in some cases are literally a matter of life and death. The health service is in a big enough mess without nurses, doctors and ambulance drivers walking out, however aggrieved they feel at the failure of pay to keep up with prices. If these high demands are met, inflation will continue to rise. As we discovered after 1979, when the subsequent recession pushed unemployment above three million, the consequences can be devastating. For Mr Sunak, as with Callaghan, they could prove terminal.

Juliet Samuel argues that the moral case against the tough policies that will stop the Channel crossings is dishonest and dangerous:

The doves, of course, do have one point. There is real, anguished need in the world and Britain has a duty to take in a share of the world’s refugees. The question is how we should go about fulfilling this duty. There is a case that the present system of ad hoc schemes (Ukraine, Syria, Hong Kong) is insufficient. We ought to assess claims more broadly according to actual, urgent need and bring in refugees in a way that maximises the likelihood of successful migration, both for the refugee and the society they are entering.

But rationing this precious and limited resource – our capacity to take people in – using a Hunger Games-style race across the Channel is a pathetic and preposterous way to proceed. It can be defended only on the basis that virtue means lying prostrate before the actions of others. It is the ethics of the doormat.

The European migration crisis of 2015 and the 2016 Brexit referendum ought to have been a warning to political elites: ignore the popular mood at your peril. Yet here we are again. The people most appalled by Brexit are precisely the ones advocating passivity in the face of another migration challenge. Technology, climate change and policy weakness are likely to make this grow and grow. For now, the Channel doves can still delude themselves that they occupy the moral high ground. But at some point, the tide will sweep them away too.

Roger Boyes says the new fighter jet deal between Britain, Italy and Japan is good news, and Japan will be a good British ally:

Co-operation with the US has its problems for the Japanese, who want to retain the right and ability to upgrade advanced planes such as the F-35, bought in from the US, to meet their own evolving needs. Politically, for many Japanese defence specialists, it is a question of national sovereignty: they don’t want US technology hidden in a black box without access to source codes. Britain, they say, presents itself as more collaborative. If the UK and Italy can share technology as equal partners with Japan and the new fighter can be sold on within Nato, then Japanese voters are more likely to respect the government’s decisions. There is already an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Britain. It may be possible to bring Japan even closer to the Five Eyes club that pools critical data about China and Russia.

Japan has eyes in parts of Siberia that most countries do not. As the Siberian permafrost melts, the formerly frozen region will become an even more important factor in the relations between a declining Russia and a nervously assertive China. The tacit agreement between Beijing and Moscow, just before the Russians invaded Ukraine nine months ago, has yet to be fully tested. It could yet fall apart. “China should see that Japan and others around the world are preparing for the possible financial and commercial earthquake that would immediately accompany a war with the US and Japan over Taiwan,” says the shrewd former presidential adviser Philip Zelikow.

In Europe and Asia alike, autocrats have been dumbstruck by the sheer firepower handed over to an enemy of Putin by an array of democratic countries. Japan’s readiness to go beyond its postwar military reticence should be welcomed. It will be a good partner for Britain.

John Oxley says young British people are giving up hope - and this is a huge problem for the Tories:

Wages have stagnated in real terms since the financial crisis. The under 40s have never really known an era of increasing wages. At the same time, they have seen house prices become unaffordable in much of the country and the end of defined benefit and index-linked pensions. Many have paid expensive tuition fees and found the promise of professional jobs at the end of it lacking. It’s a common refrain to hear people say that on every metric they have outperformed their parents – but have ended up feeling poorer. For the Conservative party, this represents a significant electoral problem.

Some in the party reassure themselves with the received wisdom that voters move rightwards as they age, but this is far less certain than many envisage. When the Tories have done well in the past, they have received a good number of votes from the young… Equally, it is not simply the case that older voters naturally become conservative. In the past, older voters leant more Tory because they had more of a stake in the things that mattered to the party. Tory voters have tended to be homeowners with families and higher incomes. Indeed, during Macmillan’s success in the 1950s voting Tory itself felt like a mark of success.

The Conservative party now faces an almost existential problem when it comes to the young. It’s hard to make a demographic which is excluded from accruing capital support a capitalist system. It’s hard to make a cohort which sees no point in ambition support a party that believes in aspiration. It’s even harder to do this when you also represent the big winners of this change – the older buy-to-let landlords who rode the property boom into prosperity and the NIMBYs who see any attempt to build more houses as an intrusion on their idyll.

Wonky thinking

The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the NHS is managing lower treatment volumes for most types of care, despite having a greater number of staff and more funding than before the pandemic:

For five of the eight care types, the NHS is treating substantially fewer patients than it was in 2019. Focusing on the latest month of data, there were 13.8% fewer outpatient appointments, 13.8% fewer emergency admissions (despite this including COVID-19 admissions), and 11.1% fewer elective and maternity admissions than in 2019. Because many elective admissions and outpatient appointments are for patients on the waiting list for care, the number of patients treated from the waiting list was also down 10.5% compared with the same month in 2019.

There were also 9.5% fewer incidents recorded by ambulance services (and 19.1% fewer conveyances to A&E, despite 4.1% more 999 calls – which, in part, reflects a deliberate effort to treat more people outside of hospitals). For the other three care types, volumes were at or above their 2019 levels. The number of A&E arrivals in November was 1% above its pre-pandemic level, and the NHS carried out substantially more GP appointments (4.0% more in the latest month of 2022 data compared with the same month in 2019) and first cancer outpatient appointments (8.6% more). The increase in GP appointments is particularly striking, as the number of GPs has fallen while the number of hospital staff has increased.

Policy Exchange published a report establishing the facts of the Trojan Horse scandal, when schools in Birmingham were taken over by activists seeking to impose a hardline Sunni Muslim ethos upon them. In a foreword to the report, Michael Gove and Nick Timothy wrote:

The notion that the events in Birmingham had nothing to do with extremism is as dangerous as it is false, since it conceals an ugly truth that too many prefer not to acknowledge: we have a problem in Britain with Islamist ideology and its adherents, who seek to impose their intolerant values on Muslim communities, including children, through nonviolent means including the capture of important institutions such as schools. The fear of being branded “Islamophobic” has only made it more difficult to speak up about such extremism…

Little wonder that the [New York Times] podcast was such a travesty, when one of its reporters admitted he knew the conclusions of his investigation before it even began. Hamza Syed declares on the podcast: “I never believed Tahir Alam was masterminding the sinister Islamic plot. I never believed Birmingham City Council. I never believed Peter Clarke. I never believed Michael Gove. I never believed Rizvana Darr and I never believed your sisters wrote those resignation letters. What I believe is, I’m going to change this narrative, inshallah.” These are the words of an activist, not a credible journalist…

The facts of the Trojan Horse scandal were established in independent reports by Oftsed, Peter Clarke and Ian Kershaw. Those facts are not open to debate, for they are facts. It should not be necessary to reassert what happened in a new report like this, but thanks to campaigners and useful idiots in publications like The New York Times, it sadly is. This is an excellent report and we should consider it the final word.

Book of the week

Today we recommend Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

It is not just that skin in the game is necessary for fairness, commercial efficiency and risk management: skin in the game is necessary to understand the world. First, it is bull**it identification and filtering, that is, the difference between theory and practice, cosmetic and true expertise, and academia (in the bad sense of the word) and the real world. To emit a Yogiberrism, in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is.

Second it is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some of the price for it. Just as you should treat others in the way you’d like to be treated, you would like to share the responsibility for events without unfairness and inequity. If you give an opinion, and someone follows it, you are morally obliged to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences. In case you are giving economic views: Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

Third, it is about how much information one should practically share with others, what a used car salesman should - or shouldn’t - tell you about the vehicle on which you are about to spend a large segment of your savings. Fourth, it is about rationality and the test of time. Rationality in the real world isn’t about what makes sense to your New Yorker journalist or some psychologist using naive first-order models, but something vastly deeper and statistical, linked to your own survival.

Do not mistake skin in the game as defined here and used in this book for just an incentive problem, just having a share of the benefits (as is commonly understood in finance). No. It is about symmetry, more like having a share of the harm, paying a penalty if something goes wrong. The very same idea ties together notions of incentives, used car buying, ethics, contract theory, learning (real life v academia), Kantian imperative, municipal power, risk science, contact between intellectuals and reality, the accountability of bureaucrats, probabilistic social justice, option theory, upright behavior, bull**it vendors, theology…

Quick links

US scientists achieved a net energy gain in a fusion reaction - increasing hopes of limitless zero-carbon energy.

UK wholesale electricity prices reached record highs as the weather got cold and the wind stopped blowing.

The number of days lost to strikes is the highest for ten years.

The number of nurses leaving their jobs is up by a quarter.

7.2 million are going without the basics, and 4.7 million are behind on their bills, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The Social Mobility Foundation says professionals from working-class backgrounds are paid an average of £6,718 less than middle-class peers.

The Centre for Cities wants a £14.5 billion growth fund for Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.

HSBC said it would stop financing new oil and gas projects.

Sterling is now at its highest value against the Dollar since June.

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican Bishop, says Britain does not have a monopoly on the moral obligation to accept refugees.

European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili has been charged with corruption.