The Conservative Reader

SNP gender wars; Pacific trade deal; depopulation crisis; morality of growth; self-hating West; conversion therapy ban; British manufacturing; junior doctors; postliberalism; EU industrial strategy

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

John Lloyd says Nicola Sturgeon’s gambit on gender may have misread public opinion:

Perhaps the largest prick to the balloon of righteousness, curiously little referred to, is the SNP project’s unpopularity. Recent polls reported in The Times suggest 62% do not support age-reduction decisions from 18 to 16, while only 19% support them. The proposed cut in the waiting period before a new gender is recognised — from two years to three months — is opposed by 50% and approved by 25%. Ending the need for a medical diagnosis is supported by 26%, but opposed by 39%. (In these, the “don’t knows” range from 19-35%, suggesting widespread lack of knowledge of the issue.) Earlier polls by various pollsters show roughly similar results: in none is the SNP approach approved.

So far, the large force of the project, which has gathered every Scottish party save the Conservatives into the SNP camp, has been that of the progressive vanguard. But the UK government still has the legal advantage over the Scottish nationalist and cultural radicals. The population, now better informed, seems inclined to the former’s view. The larger questions, now being unpacked, have yet to divide our still united state.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says British membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would present a challenge to EU supremacy:

Britain’s Rejoiner caucus reacts to CPTPP with disdain but also irritation, betraying a creeping awareness of the threat. The refrain for now is that the UK’s accession bid is empty posturing: a risible attempt to put flesh on the bones of Global Britain. It can never be a swap for EU trade. The "gravity" trade model is invariably invoked: the Pacific is far away and volumes are too small to matter.

This is a straw man argument. The CPTPP is not intended to be a swap. It is a different animal entirely. “I think it is going to emerge as the alternative to the World Trade Organisation,” said Professor David Collins, a WTO expert at City University…

…The EU looks like an omnipotent trade hegemon only if your angle of view is regional: it looks like a declining slow-growth bloc to the rest of the world. Its share of global GDP is shrinking by one percentage point every three years and has already slipped below 15pc.

Paul Morland says China, like the West, is now facing a depopulation time bomb:

As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets….

…Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

Robert Colvile argues that achieving economic growth is a moral imperative:

The fact that malnutrition, poverty, infant mortality and all other indices of deprivation have plunged across the world in recent decades is the blessed fruit of the economic growth that has taken place. The faster you grow, the better the lives your citizens are able to enjoy – and the more you can invest in either mitigating the damage from climate change, or developing the kind of technologies that might actually bring it to a halt…

…the idea that our troubles began with the financial crisis, or the fact of Tory government, is wrong-headed. Even in the years before the 2008 crash, growth per capita was only running at between 1.6% and 2.4% – which may look like unimaginable prosperity now, but was still much lower than what had come before. 

To put it another way, when our politicians promised to ‘abolish boom and bust’, it turns out that they actually just abolished booms.

Doug Stokes says the West’s self-repudiation is now being noticed by our global rivals:

This grievance politics, which often takes the form of a transnational solidarity with distant others, complements the post-national cultural order. It serves to create a hierarchy, in which the university-educated, ‘enlightened’ post-national citizen is elevated above the lumpen, non-degree-holding and ‘unenlightened’ national citizen. The worldview of (usually white) upper-middle-class professionals is seen as the only ‘correct’ one. And those challenging the common sense of the PMC [professional managerial class] are presented as in need of education…

…Authoritarian states have now started to notice the West’s ostentatious self-repudiation. They have seen how it might be possible to exploit the PMC worldview. And this has resulted in them weaponising wokery against the West. For example, in 2021, in his first high-level summit with Chinese leaders, President Biden was admonished by Yang Jiechi, then director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the CCP. Yang argued that Biden should not criticise China’s human-rights abuses, as ‘the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the United States itself as well’ (my italics)…In its editorial on the summit, China’s Global Times followed up with a statement that could have been penned by a Black Lives Matter activist: ‘Everything Washington talks about is centred on the US, and on white supremacy.’

Kathleen Stock says the proposed ban on trans “conversion therapy” could criminalise parents and endanger children:

It is essential for the safeguarding of our children that life-changing decisions such as embarking on gender realignment are carefully interrogated. Organisations like Stonewall tend to amplify the myth that “gender identity” is permanent and innate, even when it is at odds with your biological sex. Yet identity claims come and go, and there are a range of background factors relevant to whether or not a child might temporarily reject their biological sex. These include autism, same-sex attraction, a history of trauma, time spent in the care system, a girl’s discomfort at impending sexual maturity, or simply being in the grip of a social media fashion. 

Studies suggest that many children who say they are trans will change their mind as they mature. There is also evidence that, once socially “affirmed” by parents, teachers, and health professionals, desistance later is made less likely. Yet social affirmation is the approach heavily mandated by activists, who tend to present it as transphobic or even a hate crime to do anything less…

…In the last few years, a generation of post-adolescent detransitioners has emerged, recanting on former claims about their own trans identities. Many are both literally and psychologically scarred from encountering a mindlessly affirmative approach in the past. With bitter irony, a relatively large proportion of them have turned out to be gay or lesbian, with bodies now irrevocably damaged by the approach demanded in the name of “LGBT” people generally.

Wonky thinking

The Centre for Social Justice published a report, Making the Change: A Plan to Reboot British Manufacturing and Restore Growth. The report calls on the Government to bring back the defunct industrial strategy with the aim of increasing UK manufacturing from 9 per cent to 15 per cent of GDP, and to use regional industrial strategic councils as vehicles for levelling-up left-behind communities.

The average job in manufacturing pays around one pound more per hour worked, and this remains true across the qualification spectrum. Manufacturing jobs pay 12 per cent more than the UK national average, and this is more acutely true in the UK’s less affluent regions. A rejuvenation of UK manufacturing would address the UK’s regional economic divides. Every region other than London and the South East is less productive than the UK average, but look beneath the surface and pockets of high productivity can be found across the country – usually in areas with high manufacturing density.

Britain has high potential in manufacturing, but manufacturers face challenges. The present energy crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to a slump in output akin to that seen after the financial crisis. Taking a more long-term perspective, manufacturers have not, in general, enjoyed the policy support their competitors have in other developed economies, and now face an unprecedented energy crisis which threatens to make their cost base unsustainable. Yet further manufacturing decline threatens jobs and communities across the country.

In a report for Policy Exchange, former Downing Street adviser Andrew Gilligan says the British Medical Association has been captured by left-wing activists.

Junior doctors in England have just started balloting for strike action in pursuit of a 30 per cent pay rise. The ballot is due partly, of course, to the general inflationary squeeze on living standards; and to wide, long felt and genuine staff dissatisfaction in the medical profession, the NHS and the broader public sector. That discontent is rising, reflected in staff survey results and a significant increase in the number of doctors seeking to work abroad.

But there is another factor - which may also help explain the unusually high pay claim, and might mean that finding a solution to the dispute is harder. As this report reveals, substantial parts of the doctors’ union, the British Medical Association, have been taken over by young, self-declared “entryists” in a planned campaign similar to that in the Labour Party at the time of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Corbyn is, indeed, explicitly cited by some of those involved, and key people are former activists in his supporters’ club, Momentum. As the activists say, “never in the history of the BMA has such a large-scale, coordinated effort been made.”

Book of the week

Our recommended book this week is Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal. Pabst argues for a new politics beyond both social and economic ultra-liberalism, in which community and belonging provide an alternative to the extremes of both the market and the state:

The postliberal politics which this book develops is emphatically not antiliberal. Rather, it begins with a sense of the limits of the liberal project: the damage done by individualism; liberty reduced to the removal of constraints on private choice; individual rights disconnected from mutual obligations; the erosion of intermediary institutions by the combined power of the free market aided by the centralised state; global disorder based on coercion; trade deficits and permanent war.

By contrast, postliberalism views human beings as relational and freedom as a balance between autonomy and self-restraint. Rights are not just indissociable from duties but also ineffective without them. States and markets only generate shared prosperity together with social cohesion when they are embedded in strong civic institutions and structures of self-help that sustain a sense of belonging. A genuine international order requires cooperation between nations and peoples anchored in social and cultural ties, fair trade as well as military restraint.

Quick links

The Government used “Section 35” powers to block Scotland’s gender recognition bill.

NHS England is 10 times worse than in 2011 on four different measures.

Wages grew at fastest pace for 20 years but slower than inflation.

Inflation fell, but remains high at 10.5 per cent.

The number of days lost to strikes has hit a 30-year high.

Ministers backed down after Miriam Cates sought to amend the Online Safety Bill.

Two thirds of tagged Albanian migrants have cut off or tampered with their tags.

Keir Starmer abandoned yet another promise.

Tory support has fallen fastest among over-40s and Leave voters.

New levelling-up funds are higher on a per capita basis in the North.

Asia now produces 80 per cent of global semi-conductor chips.

The EU unveiled plans to keep industries from moving to the US.