The Conservative Reader

Race in Britain; falling wages; Scotland's gender bill; lessons from 2008; creeping "Bregret"; Victorian self-improvement; green jobs for the Red Wall; Christianity and Western culture

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.

You can find more about what we think on Twitter here and here.

Best wishes, and a very merry Christmas to all, Nick and Gavin

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Towering columns

Tomiwa Owolade says Britons of all races have more in common with one another than with any other ethnic group around the world:

We ought, therefore, to distrust anyone who celebrates a universal black identity, anyone who assumes that a black person is attached to the multiple cultures of Africa simply on the basis of skin. Black people are like white people; they are shaped as much by their nationality as by their race, by their local environment as much by the colour of their skin. This is something that the reactionary right don’t get — they think black Britons are essentially foreigners. But many on the liberal left indulge this nonsense too when they assume that a black person in one continent is necessarily attached to a black person living in another.

The British historian David Olusoga is guilty of this. He argued in the recent Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan that what makes Meghan’s exile from the royal family so terrible is that she is an icon for black people in Britain and the rest of the world. As he put it, an “even bigger disaster is that at the centre of the argument for the monarchy in this country is the Commonwealth. She was a woman who looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth.” This is poppycock. How can a mixed-race woman from California stand in for people in countries as widely different from each other as Antigua and Kenya, Bangladesh and Barbados? Meghan resembles such people in only the most superficial way; she doesn’t share their languages, their customs, their religions, their histories.

Duncan Weldon says the Tories are in danger of abandoning Boris Johnson’s vision of a high-skilled, high-wage economy:

The scale of the current wave of disputes is still a long way short of those seen in the 1980s or 1970s but it is now a material factor impacting British GDP for the first time in almost three decades.

And as long as the pay squeeze drags on, the industrial unrest will likely continue. The outlook for real pay is frankly abysmal. While the most recent inflation data showed a fall in the annual rate of price rises from 11.1 per cent in October to 10.7 per cent in November and sparked hopes that the peak has passed, it remains uncomfortably high. Based on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)’s latest forecasts, inflation will still be at 8.9 per cent next summer and almost 4 per cent by the end of of 2023. More worryingly, the OBR expects the recession to cool wage growth over the coming months, meaning that real wages will, on its central forecast, keep falling even as the rate of inflation declines. The wage squeeze, in its estimate, will last until the second quarter of 2024. Given a forecast of two years of continuously falling real earnings - alongside tax rises and rising interest rates - the rise in the number of days lost to strike action is hardly surprising.

Alex Massie says Scotland’s new gender recognition bill is ill thought-out and that Labour should take heed:

Maleness is the problem, not being trans. For instance, trans women prisoners typically fit male, not female, patterns of criminality. Sometimes biology cannot be bucked and 50 per cent of trans prisoners in Scotland only acquired their new gender identity after their arrest. This is, to be sure, a small sample size but also a mightily suggestive one. Rather than address this, Sturgeon says inconvenient questions are simply “not valid”.

Doublethink abounds. In court, the Scottish government argues a GRC changes sex “for all purposes” but in parliament ministers insist it is only a piece of paper of no great significance whatsoever. Bafflingly, it is now possible for an individual to be simultaneously male and female in Scotland. A trans woman — that is, a biological male — may be considered a woman for the purposes of achieving gender-balance in public sector boardrooms while still being reckoned a man if they seek access to single-sex spaces protected under the terms of the Equality Act.

“In that circumstance,” says Shona Robison, the minister responsible for stuffing this turkey through parliament, “they might be a genuine trans woman trying to enter a service that excludes them.”

And there you have it: when ministers talk about “genuine” trans women they implicitly accept the prospect — indeed the reality — of “non-genuine” trans women. It is not obvious how service providers, or the Scottish prison service or anyone else, are supposed to distinguish between these two types of trans people.

What happens in Scotland does not stay in Scotland. The impact of Sturgeon’s gender reforms on UK equalities law remains untested. Equally, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour is committed to introducing self-ID in England. Should that happen, it would be wise to learn from Scotland’s experience. By all means be kind, but be better too. A lot better.

Noah Smith interrogates the lessons we learned after 2008, arguing both austerity and expansionary borrowing can be economically damaging:

One notable thing about the recovery from the Great Recession is that having governments borrow a lot of money turned out to be a good thing; countries that engaged in austerity generally fared poorly relative to countries that turned on the spending taps. The effectiveness of fiscal stimulus, especially in a deep recession when interest rates hit the zero lower bound, was one of the enduring and important lessons of the 2010s.

Some people worried that all that borrowing would cause interest rates to soar, but it didn’t. This caused a lot of macro critics — especially Post-Keynesians, British socialists, MMT people, etc. — to declare that the “loanable funds” model of government finance is dead…

…the experience of Europe and the U.S. in the 2010s, and of Japan in the 1990s, certainly seemed to reduce the general worry among the econ commentariat and the finance industry that government borrowing would lead to high interest rates. After all, these rich countries borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, and their rates just went down and down. The legendary “bond vigilantes” that were supposed to swoop in and raise rates to punish excessive borrowing never showed their faces.

Then came the 2020s. Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Liz Truss released a package of tax cuts (which, I should note, the MMT people generally support), with disastrous effects. The interest rates on UK government bonds (called “gilts”) soared.

Keep in mind that these are long-term interest rates, so this wasn’t the doing of the central bank.

Why did this happen, when all that government borrowing in the 2010s never had this sort of effect? There are two likely answers here. First, the financial crisis put pressure on banks and other financial companies, forcing them to put their money in very safe and liquid assets — i.e., government bonds. Second, international investors also felt this need, and so they poured money into the safest places around — i.e., the U.S. and the EU, which hold the world’s reserve currencies.

Neither of those things were in effect for the UK in 2022. The pound isn’t a major reserve currency, and there isn’t a flight to safety or liquidity in effect right now because there isn’t a major recession in effect right now. So when the UK government declared its intention to borrow too much, people became less willing to lend it money, and rates went up.

Matt Goodwin says “Bregret” is gathering political steam among older, apathetic Leavers as well as Zoomers now of voting age:

Few of the blue-collar, non-college-educated, and older voters who flocked to the Conservatives after 2016 want to realize the Davos class’s dream of a finance-led economic powerhouse centered on London. This growing gulf between how Conservative elites view Brexit and how the mainly working-class, non-graduate and older voters they won from Labour see Brexit is now also stoking Bregret.

Many of these voters clearly no longer believe today’s Conservative Party is interested in representing “people like them” and so, since 2019, the party’s support among Brexit voters has crashed by some 30 points. Such is the failure of the party to stay connected with these voters that, today, only a minority of Brexit voters plan to support the only pro-Brexit major party in British politics. This speaks volumes.

Where might this be leading Britain? One potential future is now obvious. Boris Johnson’s initial success was partly rooted in winning over three-quarters of the people who had previously backed Britain’s populist in chief and Trump ally, Nigel Farage. But today, the Conservative government’s failure to curb immigration, control Britain’s borders, and improve the lives of non-London-dwelling Brexiteers is creating space for another populist revolt in British politics.

James Marriott says we have lost the Victorian habit of spiritual and cultural self-improvement:

It is a curious irony that our age of rigorous “self-optimisation” has so little to say about the inner life. Your abs must be toned in the gym, your bowels cleansed with smoothies of exotic concoction, your body relaxed on expensive holidays . . . but your spirit? Towards these matters, the tone of our present culture is increasingly one of hostility or suspicion. A growing number of sub-optimal mental states (nerves, melancholy) fall under the expanding category of “mental health issues”. Inner turbulence is to be smoothed away with meditation or therapy or the digital sedatives of Netflix and TikTok.

The recent collapse of humanities degrees (numbers are down 40,000 in a decade, even as university admissions have grown) is a symptom not just of fretting about the economy but changing priorities. We are less ambitious for our interior lives…

…There is obviously room for Love Actually (a film I like). But it cannot be everything. We should take our leisure time more seriously. Would Gladstone have been a worse prime minister without his theology, his china collection, his love of Tennyson? Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. The human spirit is worth cultivating for its own sake.

Wonky thinking

Onward published a report, Green Jobs, Red Wall: Why Green Industrial Jobs are Critical to Levelling Up. The green industrial revolution is a big risk for UK manufacturers; government must work to bring new green jobs to the regions now most reliant on high-carbon industries.

The North and the Midlands are uniquely exposed to the challenges and the opportunities from the Net Zero transition. Risks abound, from car manufacturers in the West Midlands, to steel producers in Scunthorpe and South Wales, and high-carbon industries in Teesside and Humberside. But there are huge opportunities too, already seen in Nissan’s investment in electric vehicles in Sunderland, Siemens’ offshore wind turbine factory in Humberside and the ongoing redevelopment of the huge Teesworks site under the leadership of Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen.

Geographically, some parts of the UK have significant natural advantages for manufacturing, including access to ports and proximity to some of the best offshore wind resources in the world. Other areas, particularly the West Midlands, have fewer geographical advantages, so a more concerted Government effort will be needed to secure factories and green industrial jobs, such as in the manufacture of electric vehicles.

Realising the opportunities of Net Zero to create green industrial jobs in places like the Red Wall should be a core mission of this Government. To overcome the risks, and to seize the opportunities, the Government will need a detailed and joined up strategy.

Book of the week

In the spirit of the season, this week we recommend Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland. Holland argues for the uniqueness of the cultural and ethical heritage bequeathed to the West by Christianity. Our competing modern political traditions, together with the moral norms we take for granted, are rooted historically in the New Testament, he says.

Today, at a time of seismic political realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable - indeed the inescapable - influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as separate entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West. Even to write about it in a Western language is to use words shot through with Christian connotations. “Religion”, “secular”, “atheist”: none of these are neutral. All, though they derive from the classical past, come freighted with the legacy of Christendom. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism. The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.

There are those who will rejoice at this proposition; and there are those who will be appalled by it. Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about. In the West, and particularly in the United States, it remains easily the most dominant faith. Worldwide, over two billion people - almost a third of the planet’s population - subscribe to it. Unlike Osiris, or Zeus, or Odin, the Christian God still goes strong…

Quick links

The High Court ruled the Rwanda asylum plan lawful.

UK GDP fell 0.3 per cent from July to September 2022, and production output fell by 2.5 per cent.

31 per cent of Albania’s GDP is accounted for by overseas remittances.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for further support in a rallying speech before the US Congress.

Scotland’s new gender recognition law could place it on a constitutional collision course with the UK Government in Westminster.

The King has rejected suggestions of a pared-down coronation in favour of the traditional ceremony.

A majority of Scots would vote “No” to independence for the first time since the SNP’s high court defeat.

The poorest 20 per cent are twice as likely to have depression as the richest.

More voters blame the Tories for winter strikes than the unions.

40 per cent of voters believe immigration is higher because of Brexit.