Time for a new Tory populism

Could cultural conservatism with a radical economic agenda prove a winning combination?

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

In The Times, Danny Finkelstein argues there is a gap in our political market for a new Tory populism - provided it is willing to challenge economic orthodoxy:

A more serious obstacle for [Matt Goodwin] is that his supporters are predominantly (not exclusively, but predominantly) economically orthodox Conservatives. They have explained away Johnson’s high-spending, high-tax past (absurdly) as the act of a “socialist” Rishi Sunak, diverting their hero from his true path as a free marketeer. They would not react well to him actually advocating the high-tax policy he drifted into when in power.

Because Tory populism is confused. It is ready to fight a culture war, sometimes searching rather desperately for a battle to engage in. But it ignores the other half of Goodwin’s analysis. And advocating orthodox economics leaves a big gap for the culture war to fill, which is why it often seems more than a little strained. The Republican Party has gone half crazy trying to attract populist voters while continuing to advocate small-state policies.

There is a route to left-wing Tory economics, however. It runs through security. It begins by mounting a robust (and merited) attack on China’s human rights record and leads ultimately to protectionism. This can be accompanied both by a policy of subsidy for firms affected by such protection and an attack on the business “elite” that wants to trade internationally. This business “elite” will also be attacked as “woke”, thus uniting two populist preoccupations. The Tory party was the party of protection for decades and fought several elections on the issue (unsuccessfully). An explicit (as opposed to accidental) high-tax, anti-free trade, anti-business Tory stance may be hard to imagine right now, but it certainly isn’t impossible.

Also in The Times, Juliet Samuel says the Online Safety Bill risks becoming a Trojan Horse for censorship models crafted in Silicon Valley:

Yet despite improvements, the current version (likely to be the final one) still contains effective incentives for social media companies to censor excessively, and inadequate protection for the free-speech rights of people using these platforms. The bill will require tech firms to roll out a set of tools whereby users can filter out content that is “abusive” or “incites hatred” and, if they fail to do so, they can be punished by Ofcom.

As campaigners such as Big Brother Watch have pointed out, this effectively merges Silicon Valley’s particular interpretation of acceptable norms, policed by algorithms and hyper-progressive censors, with state enforcement power. Once this approach is run through workplace cultures and corporate structures that demand “psychological safety”, “equity”, “inclusion” and so on, the likelihood is that a large slice of the UK population is about to get railroaded on to a “safe mode” version of the internet as determined by some computer formula built 5,000 miles away.

Ministers may want to protect academics like [Kathleen] Stock and say they believe in a free society upheld by open debate. But they are still adding huge new aspects to a legal edifice in which those who actually want to exercise free speech, whether they be civil servants, academics, workers or students, have to go through months of expensive and stressful legal shenanigans in order to do so. The government’s “free speech tsar”, Arif Ahmed, is a free-thinking and effective campaigner for his cause and he will hopefully be able to make use of the legislation that created his position. But one officer does not make for a turning tide. The net result of this government’s activities is not likely to be a new era of free debate, but an ever-encroaching tide of bureaucracy and censorship.

In The Economist, Bagehot warns policymakers not to put their faith in ill-defined “reform” agendas as a substitute for adequate funding:

The Reform Fairy flutters over the National Health Service (NHS). Both parties think that the NHS, the biggest chunk of state spending, is glaringly inefficient and that pumping cash into long-term health rather than emergency care would be a fine thing. There is a problem, however. Making fat people thin will help in the long term but it will not reduce A&E demand next year. Plugging the £10bn ($12.4bn) backlog of capital investment has to come from elsewhere in the health budget without extra funding. Training more doctors will lessen the expense of using agency workers to fill gaps in hospital rotas, but medics will not arrive fast. All require money, unless the Reform Fairy flaps its wings.

…Today, although practically every Conservative MP agrees the state needs reform, the government shows little willingness to do much about it. Backbench Tory MPs dream of sweeping, painless post-Brexit reforms that would overhaul everything from procurement to financial regulation. Mr Sunak once believed in the Reform Fairy. During his leadership pitch, he promised to shred EU legislation (with reams of paperwork put through a shredder for good measure in one campaign video). Reality intervened. Now the Houses of Parliament are filled with thumb-twiddling MPs, waiting for a legislative agenda that will never arrive.

If Labour is to have more success, it must learn from a Conservative government that did manage to overhaul Britain. Margaret Thatcher is associated with a supply-side revolution that shook the state and broke Britain’s unions. But it took both strategy and spending. Before Thatcher smashed the miners, she had to pay the police. As one of her first acts in office she handed the police a pay rise of 45%, on the ground that broke cops would not break strikes. While in opposition, Thatcher planned: she picked allies, identified enemies and worked out where the cash would come from.

In The Critic, Poppy Coburn offers plentiful examples of left-wing ideological capture in Britain’s charity sector:

This process, called the Long March Through the Institutions, called for the raising of political consciousness within organisations. A critically-thinking minority would then replicate the process to push the limits of discourse. The process need not be a conscious one, nor need it be explicitly Marxist. There is no better way to understand the way in which the “Civil Society” has metamorphosed. 

Attempts to reform the sector from the Right have broadly come to nothing. Conservatives have the reins of the Charity Commission — Orlando Fraser, the current chair, is the son of the Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser, and stood as a Conservative party candidate in 2005. Prior to him the chairman was William Shawcross and then Tina Stowell. But leaders can do only so much within an unbalanced legal framework. And by placing conservative voices at the head of industries that lean left, the Conservative party left itself open to accusations of “stoking a culture war”. 

The Charities Act (2011) is indisputably biased towards left-leaning organisations operating under the “promotion of equalities” clause. Migration Watch — a group that questions mass immigration as the cure for Britain’s ills — is a company limited by guarantee. The difference between it and a group such as Praxis is that they are allowed to be defined as “promoting racial harmony”, while Migration Watch is boxed in as a lobbying organisation. It’s my human rights campaign versus your culture war politics. 

In The Telegraph, Julian Jessop argues that the end of free movement has reduced UK dependency on cheap overseas labour:

As for the services economy in the UK itself, the labour shortages faced by many businesses are often blamed on an exodus of EU workers after Brexit. But this is hard to square with the fact that net migration to the UK hit a new record of 606,000 last year. In reality, the end of “free movement” has reduced the UK’s dependency on cheap labour from the EU, with the transition made easier by the more liberal rules for migration from the rest of world.

Many European countries that have previously relied heavily on migrant workers are in the same boat. Germany, in particular, is also struggling with labour shortages as workers from the rest of the EU returned home during Covid and have not come back. What’s more, it is harder for any country to attract workers from Eastern European economies, notably Poland, which are now booming themselves…

…Economic inactivity is already falling as better pay and conditions attract more people back to work. Finally, the UK has only just started to take advantage of the freedom to negotiate new agreements which will open up more opportunities for international trade in services, as well as goods. These opportunities too will only grow over time.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bojan Pancevski examines the argument that Angela Merkel’s decisions may have emboldened Vladimir Putin:

Merkel’s role in shaping NATO policy toward Ukraine goes back to 2008, when she vetoed a push by the Bush administration to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official and presidential adviser on Russia. Merkel instead helped to broker NATO’s open but noncommittal invitation to Ukraine and Georgia, an outcome that Hill said was the “worst of all worlds” because it enraged Putin without giving the two countries any protection. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 before marching into Ukraine.

After Putin first attacked Ukraine, Merkel led the effort to negotiate a quick settlement that disappointed Kyiv and imposed no substantial punishment on Russia for occupying its neighbour, Hill added. “No red lines were drawn for Putin,” she said. “Merkel took a calculated risk. It was a gambit, but ultimately it failed.”

Some observers believe that the failure to establish red lines and Germany’s continuing economic cooperation encouraged Putin to attempt a full-scale attack in 2022. “OK, so I could get away with that,” Putin concluded in 2014, according to Rasmussen. “So why not continue?”

Wonky thinking

A new report by Onward, Missing Millennials, shows that 25-40 year-olds are not becoming Conservative voters as they get older. While culture wars fail to resonate with them, economic issues such as housing and taxation are priorities they feel the Tories are failing to address:

What Millennials think matters. They are currently 26% of the electorate, which will grow steadily over the next decade. They are already the largest generation in 51% of parliamentary constituencies and outnumber the older Generation X in two thirds of seats. They are dominant in seats where the Conservative party is challenged: central London, but also increasingly in the surrounding Home Counties. This generation should contain the foundations of the Tories’ future core vote, yet the party faces a significant challenge in winning their support.

Millennials are the first demographic cohort not to become more right wing as they age. They are failing to acquire many of the attributes that have traditionally moved voters rightwards: home ownership, secure and stable employment, starting families. Without a stake in society, their political preferences are trending in the opposite direction. In fact, they are the first generation to become more left wing as they age.

…Within the findings, the greatest hope for the Conservatives is that Millennials are ‘shy capitalists’. When asked whether governments generally should prioritise equality or growth, this cohort prefers equality - as do Generation Z. But when asked whether they should keep more of their own money or pay more tax to support redistribution, they opt for lower taxes - similar to Boomers. This clash between centre-left and centre-right positions is true in other areas. Millennials agree with the younger Generation Z that a person's position in society is mostly the result of elements outside their control instead of individual effort. But they agree with the older Boomers that big business provides opportunities for ordinary people instead of viewing them as exploitative.

Book of the week

We recommend Fractured: Why our societies are coming apart and how to put them back together again by Jon Yates. In his brilliant study of relationships, community and the social fabric here and in the US, Yates says it is possible to restore the human connection so many of us have lost:

We humans are social animals. We connect, form friendships, fall in love. Our highest highs and our lowest lows are nearly always about our relationships. But it is in these relationships that our nations have become divided. Our social groups have become full of people ‘just like us’.

The average British professional knows nobody on unemployment benefits and hardly anyone who is working class. Half of Brits and Americans with degrees have either one close friend who didn’t go to university or none at all. Around half of Britons have friends only from their own ethnic group. A quarter of Remain voters have no friends who voted Leave. A fifth of Leave voters have no Remain-voting friends.

The reason for these divisions is as old as human beings. We evolved with a People Like Me syndrome – a natural bias towards people ‘like us’. Left to our own devices, we naturally surround ourselves with people who remind us of ourselves. To some extent – this really doesn’t matter. The problem is – at too high a level – these social divisions mess with our democracy, slow down the spread of good ideas, fertilise extremism and make us anxious.

The good news is that we can put our societies back together. Our situation is not terminal. Our divisions do not have to last. How do we know this? Because we’ve been here before and found our way out. When we first became farmers and settled into village life, the nomadic common life, made up of animalistic rituals, that had united us for generations withered away. Division and violence spread. We became so unable to solve problems collaboratively that we had to abandon many of the early villages we settled into. And yet, we found a way back. We built a new common life – one based on feast days, religious services and rites of passage. We overcame our divisions. Millenia later, we lost our way again. As we left the villages for factory work in the cities, we left the villagers’ common life behind us. Once again, division and violence spread, with revolutions threatening and breaking out. And yet, once again we found our way out. We built a new common life – this time based on clubs and societies, schools and the workplace. We brought our societies back together. If we have done it before, it must be possible to do it again.

Quick links

Boris Johnson reportedly made a large impromptu concession on the much-criticised Australia trade deal during the course of dinner while serving as PM.

The Prime Minister has backed Professor Kathleen Stock in a row over free speech.

An American AI-controlled military drone killed its operator during a simulation.

China now accounts for 30% of global manufacturing value added, but Chinese growth is expected to slow in the years ahead.

Inflation is remaining ‘sticky’ across European economies.

UK house prices fell at the fastest pace in 14 years in May.

The Trade and Energy Secretaries are in a dispute over whether to impose a border tax on high-carbon imports.

A majority of voters would not mind if Northern Ireland left the UK.

Sir Keir Starmer held talks with a major Just Stop Oil donor days before announcing his support for an oil licence ban.

Labour has proposed forcing landowners subject to Compulsory Purchase Orders to sell land at a lower price to councils to capture the value of planning approvals.

The Foreign Secretary said Ukraine’s “rightful place is in NATO”.

The Met will no longer attend 999 calls related to mental health incidents.

31 RAF servicemen will receive compensation for training delays following an order to stop providing courses to “useless white male” pilots.