The Conservative Reader
Issue V: Fraying fabric; Britain's chronic under-investment; how tech changes society; learning from Harold Macmillan; better civics; and revolting elites.
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
Sarah O’Connor on how Britain's fabric is fraying, for The Financial Times:
Lower investment makes public services less efficient and therefore more expensive in the long run. Take health, for example... Parts of the NHS estate “do not meet the demands of a modern health service”, a report by the National Audit Office found in 2020. Indeed, 14 per cent of it predates the formation of the NHS in 1948. The NAO said “high-risk” backlog maintenance had grown by 139 per cent between 2014/15 and 2018/19. “High risk” is defined as “where repairs/replacement must be addressed with urgent priority in order to prevent catastrophic failure, major disruption to clinical services or deficiencies in safety liable to cause serious injury and/or prosecution”.
Capital spending on healthcare is much lower in the UK than similar OECD countries, according to the Health Foundation. It’s not just about buildings, it’s also about modern equipment and technology. Among the EU15 and G7 countries, the UK has the lowest number of CT and MRI scanners per capita.
Juliet Samuel on Britain’s chronic under-investment, for The Daily Telegraph:
The truth of our economy – and that of many other developed economies – is that for a generation we have created the synthetic feeling of growth without actually enjoying much real improvement in productivity. That feeling of enrichment has come from two sources: ultra-low interest rates and cheap goods supplied by outsourcing production to places without the same regulatory and environmental standards as the UK. This has left us free to borrow heavily and regulate ourselves into economic oblivion while still being able to buy lots of stuff.
Then, last year, inflation came back. From then on, it was game over and the pain had begun: the transition from a long era of ultra-low interest rates to a more “normal” level, a transition never before made by any developed economy.
None of this can be fixed by a short-term cut in taxation. Indeed, rising taxes are actually the symptom of these problems, a sign that economic dynamism has failed to keep pace with our expectations of the state and with living standards. As any market type would tell you, suppressing a symptom, rather than addressing a cause, just leads to distortions, market failure or backlash. Slashing taxes before you have demonstrated any serious ability to address the reason for them is like trying to dress the economic mutton up as lamb.
Jon Askonas on how technology changes society, in Compact Magazine:
Conservatism failed because it didn’t consider how to build technologies to fortify tradition and advance human flourishing, or understand that it needed to. A technological society is incompatible with a blithe conservatism, but not with the furtherance of human flourishing and the transformation of wilderness into garden. As Grant notes, before we recover a human way of thinking, we may first need to address a more practical question, first posed by Nietzsche: “Who deserve to be the masters of the earth?” Corporations? The Chinese Communist Party? The National Institutes of Health? The Department of Defense? Or human beings living according to their natures?
If we believe in a human future, we must build it, not with kind words or tax credits, but with a serious program of technological development. Marx showed how a material transformation of the economic order could have enormous social and cultural effects. Forging the human order anew means building technologies that make it easier to live well. In some places, the renewal, revival, and reoccupation of the human order of things requires a return to what was done within living memory. In other places, however, it will need to be far more radical in the literal sense: It must return to human nature rooted in man’s bodily dwelling upon the earth. Simone Weil called this process enracinement—actively putting down roots where none exist.
David Cowan on lessons from Harold Macmillan, for The American Conservative:
Even in the face of the Thatcher revolution, Macmillan remained a believer in the state’s capacity to promote the common good, speaking up for the interests of the working-class communities to which he had formed such a close attachment during his years of service in the First World War and as MP for Stockton-on-Tees.
The economic reforms of the 1980s, and the market consensus that followed, are now collapsing in turn. Conservatives find themselves questioning how prudent it is to embrace the market and trust it to resolve today’s problems. Macmillan believed in putting the prosperity and influence of his country first, adopting a radical pragmatism that focused on what would work in practice rather than theory. Underneath the carefully curated Edwardian persona, Macmillan helped his country to reject economic orthodoxy and embrace state interventionism. It is for modern conservatives to follow his example and to rebel against the status quo.
Wonky thinking
The Niskan Center published The Virtue Cure, making the case for better civic engagement to bridge partisan divides:
Rather than continue to look to our institutions to save us, we need an updated version of a philosophic tradition that emphasized the importance of local communities rather than our governing institutions; common citizens rather than leaders. The republican tradition and its concept of “virtue” can be traced from the Ancient political philosophers through the arguments made by the Anti-Federalist critics of the Constitution and on to the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville. The tradition’s key insight is that while institutional arrangements are certainly important, they are far from sufficient. As the Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindsey has recently emphasized, a polity also requires a populace with virtue, understood as a commitment to citizenship and engagement in one’s community.35 People aren’t born into virtue, but they are capable of developing it through practice. It is therefore important to actively cultivate virtue, and this is best done by regularly engaging with one’s fellow citizens. In contrast to an institutional mindset, an emphasis on virtue is more about the process than the outcome because it is the process of engaging with others in a collective enterprise that develops the habits of the heart that a free society depends on.
Book of the week
This week’s book is The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, by Christopher Lasch, first published in 1995. With unnerving prescience, Lasch argues that democracy is not threatened - as people once feared it would be - by the masses, but by the elites. Highly mobile and internationalist in outlook, these elites deny limits and responsibilities and ties to nation, community and their fellow citizens. Lasch calls for a return to the virtues of community, responsibility and faith:
Today it is the elites - those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate - that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West. For many people the very term “Western civilisation” now calls to mind an organized system of domination designed to enforce conformity to bourgeois values and to keep the victims of patriarchal oppression - women, children, homosexuals, people of color - in a permanent state of subjection…
All these habits of mind, I submit, are now more characteristic of the upper levels of society than of the lower or middle levels. It can hardly be said that ordinary people today look forward to a world of “limitless possibility”. Any sense that the masses are riding the wave of history has long since departed. The radical movements that disturbed the peace of the twentieth century have failed one by one, and no successors have appeared on the horizon… It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution; their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.
Quick links
Britain’s productivity problem might be down to a lack of big businesses.
A new book lifts the lid on the Metropolitan Police.
Deaths from drug and alcohol abuse are on the rise.
A study showed ongoing support for levelling-up.
The Institute for Economic Affairs disowned the Budget it inspired and celebrated.