Translating Burke: How the Conservative Party can overcome its crisis

Edmund Burke, the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. Photo: Roger Marks (Flickr)

The Conservative Party is in a crisis, there’s no doubt about that. Apart from the polls – Labour has taken a 12 point lead – the party seems unable to cope with a serious identity crisis, a crisis that makes one think of the fundamental questions the Republican Party in the United States is currently facing.

So how to characterize this identity crisis? In an article for the Spectator philosopher Roger Scruton argues, reacting on the recently published books Britannia Unchained and Tory Modernisation 2.0, that the conservatives are having trouble formulating a coherent and genuine ”conservative” philosophy. The so called modernisers, including David Cameron, are leading the party to ”a new kind of conservatism which conserves nothing, changes everything, and is guided by the very same rhetoric of equality (the Conservative Party website says on equality: ‘We want a fairer society and will use every lever to tear down barriers that prevent equality’) and human rights that shapes the left-liberal agenda.” The modernisers, Scruton says, don’t seem to understand that their efforts to reformulate the conservative philosophy are actually counterproductive.

But the attempt to modernize the Conservative Party does not mean making it ‘2.0’, ‘innovative’ and ‘fresh and colourful’. Neither does it mean that some sort of post-modern conservative agenda has to be developed. It does mean however, that conservative principles, rooted and clearly traceable in British history, must be reformulated and translated to our century.

In reformulating, the Conservatives are confronted with the fact that their philosophy is not like that of other parties. Labour has had it’s Clause IV and the Liberal Democrats too value their party constitution. For the Conservative Party however, a constitution or a pamphlet has a different, less fundamental, meaning. The American political theorist and historian Russell Kirk (1918-1994) wrote that conservatism ”being neither a religion nor an ideology…possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata.”

Where to start then? From the very beginning, I would say, without ignoring both the history of conservatism and the realities of the twenty-first century. The eighteenth-century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is generally considered to be the father of (British) conservatism, and it is Burke that the Conservative Party shoud take as a starting point.

In order to understand Burke properly, one needs to keep in mind that (and this is self-evident yet of crucial importance) that the eighteenth century differs in almost everything from modern times and this requires a translation of his ideas. Conservatives tend to forget that ideas are no ‘solid rocks’, that they do not exist in isolation and that their meaning changes over time.

What is Burke’s philosophy all about? Without popularizing his thought, it comes down to the following statement made by Burke in the House of Commons:

Combine devotion to liberty with respect to authority; hope for the future with reverence for the past; support of party with service of the nation; profound patriotism with sincere goodwill to all the vincinage of mankind; essential moderation with zealous enthusiasm; a sane conservatism with cautious reform.

The first ‘object of translation’ that the Conservative Party should derive from Burke’s philosophy, is his notion of constructive change. Constructive change means that one needs to be very careful with reform, whether it’s economic, legal or political. Take the issue of gay marriage which many people experienced as an attempt to ”enforce social equality” upon the nation. The Burkean conservative would stress the importance of public support or opposition in this matter. Issues that lead to great turmoil, such as gay marriage or the European Union, should either be left alone in order to let time do its work or seen as long-term matters. Change must be organic. At the same time change as a political term has changed : the change Burke talked about cannot be compared with what we see in our century. Translating Burke’s constructive change therefore means two things: seeing cautious reform or gradual development as the cornerstone of policy making, but also acknowledging that social hierarchies and traditional orders do change, and sometimes even rapidly in this century, whether you like it or not.

Burke believed that the state ”ought not be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern…” and he stated that the end of government is the welfare of the nation. The Conservative Party should turn to the idea of the state again with Burke’s central thoughts as a guide. Burke believed in the classical liberal laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, but he would also admit, if we interpret his philosophy properly, that a libertarian stance towards government, markets and people in a  globalised, interconnected, world of multinationals and NGO’s would contradict his conservatism, which sees the role of the state as something more fundamental than just a ‘sleeping regulator’. Translating Burke’s notion of government to the 2013 reality therefore means moving away from libertarian politics without embracing an articial ‘planning and control’ view. This is not necessarily incompatible with Big Society, the Conservative Party greatest tribute to Burke (despite it’s failed execution).

Reinterpreting the state also means reviewing the market. The Conservative Party should develop a critique on the market (‘the’ referring here to the larger companies and banks) based on a moral premise (something which the Christian Democratic party in the Netherlands tried to do during the last Dutch general elections), as formulated by Burke: ”…liberty with respect to authority”. Burke always stressed the importance of virtue and moral consciousness, just as much as liberty. Moral critique provides an opening to critize the market without advocating state regulation, and it may help get rid of the Conservatives’ toxic image. In this sense the crisis makes it the right time (constructive change) to let Burke colide with Thatcher.

Last, Burke had a great disposition for spiritual values and he saw religion as an essential element in society. Cameron sees this as well but the problem is that the Conservatives can’t bring about a message that makes non-material values and religion not an object of mockery but  a means for living a good, virtuous and happy live. It could also provide the Tories with a language that goes beyond the pure political and sees a party as more than a mangerial organisation, something which Burke maybe more than any other politician in his time expressed.

In conclusion, translating Burke for the Conservatives means acknowledging the rapidness of change in our modern age as well as the significance of constructive change, perceiving the different meaning of state and market in modern, post-industrial society as the ‘adapting’ Burke would have seen them, and stressing the importance of spiritual values in an increasingly materialistic world.

Daniel Boomsma is an Associate Editor of Politiker

Book review: The Conservatives: A History by Robin Harris

”At first sight it does not seem difficult to be a Conservative”, the essayist and journalist Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) once wrote. And indeed he was right. But it will occur to those who study conservatism thoroughly that it is only ”at first sight” that conservatism seems a simple way of thinking. Being a conservative is not an easy business. It asks for a different view on politics, one that is not less complex than a liberal or socialist outlook. And above all, it requires a thorough understanding of one’s own history.

In his The Conservatives: A History Robin Harris shows what it means to be a conservative. At the same time his book is an elaborate history of the Conservative Party, though Harris is not particularly interested in organisational matters. Conservatives with a small c, as Harris defines them (though he finds Michael Oakeshott’s definition ”the single best”), are in favour of keeping the country recognizable in its identity and secure in its future, an echo it seems of Edmund Burke who had ”a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve.”

Starting with the Tory beginnings in the eighteenth-century, with the eloquent and ‘philosophical’ Burke – a politician is a philosopher in action, Burke stated – the practical William Pitt the younger, Robert Peel and the consistent Derby, Harris accurately illustrates the rise of the oldest and most successful political party in, arguably, Europe.

The success of the Conservative Party was not self-evident however. By the mid/end of the nineteenth-century, Harris points out, a majority of political commentators were convinced of the fact that the liberals and later the socialists or Labour movement would ultimately be victorious, simply because they ”understood their time better”. The liberals had their democracy, and the socialists a growing working class.

But commentators proved to be wrong. Harris shows that it was because of their great leaders that the Conservative party survived. Indeed, their personalities are the key to understanding the Conservative party, a party that is essentially an elective dictatorship. Control lies fully with the leader. Consultation is really a Labour thing.

Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Baldwin, Thatcher; they all had an appetite to lead and, indeed, lead well. Disraeli set the party on a new path with his one nation politics, the ”fastidious aristocrat” Lord Salisbury achieved real dominance by staying in office for fourteen years, Baldwin, who had ”a kind of magic in his day”, made it the ”natural party of government”, and Thatcher ”rescued and strengthened” the party, re-established the country’s reputation and crushed the unions after a period of stagnation.

So what about David Cameron, one is inclined to ask? Harris ends his book with a chapter on the current prime minister and he is not particularly positive. First of all, Cameron, Harris says, ”owes his leadership of the part to Michael Howard’s patronage, David Davis’s errors and his own talents, in roughly that order. In short: he’s had a lot of luck. Cameron is not like Thatcher or Disraeli; he is too polished and too little a thinker or a strategist. Secondly, Harris thinks Cameron has failed concerning his big idea, the Big Society. It’s ”yet another ‘Third Way’ strategy – in this case, a third way between the Scylla of Thatcherite individualism and the Charybdis of Big Government socialism.”

The Conservatives: A History is well written, elucidating and especially a must read (with John Ramsden’s An appetite for power. A history of the Conservative Party since 1830), for Conservatives (with a capital C that is) who want to understand their party and their politics.

The Conservatives. A History
Bantam Press, 640pp, £30.00
Published December 2011, London

Daniel Boomsma is an Associate Editor of Politiker

Reflections on Blue Labour

Photo: Kat Kam (Flickr)

Blue Labour was born in April 2009. Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour’s intellectual godfather, must have had his ‘eureka-moment’ in a dusty library, ‘surrounded’ by old ideas already written down, analysed and debated in the past.

Blue Labour, as described by Glasman, is ”a deeply conservative socialism which places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity.” Just like the Big Society, Blue Labour has been the subject of debate. The idea raised a lot of questions: Do we still have a need for big stories? Do we want a blueprint that fits society? Is Blue Labour an acceptable alternative story to adopt for Labour? And what are the similarities with Philip Blond’s Red Tory?

Obviously the answer is yes. People welcome big stories and theorists tend to answer that call. The list of ‘Big Idea’s’ in Britain has been ‘updated’ thoroughly with Cameron’s Big Society and Philip Blond’s Red Tory. Now we can add Blue Labour to that list. Ed Miliband endorsed the idea (”it’s our families, friends and the places in which we live that give us our own sense of belonging”) so the expectations are high.

Glasman’s idea for a Blue Labour isn’t original; it’s quite the contrary actually. Blue Labour first of all tries to recover a Labour strand buried somewhere in the early 20th-century. Glasman’s idea is based on the idea that Labour’s fundaments have been obscured since the establishment of the welfare state since 1945. Glasman’s analysis comes straight from Blond’s Red Tory idea (‘Red Tory: How Left and Right have Broken Britain and How we can Fix It’). Blond stated that ”our ills” derive from the 1945 settlement which ”effectually nationalised society.” The welfare state carried on all the roles that community and family used to do. Blond labels this ”self sufficient individualism”.

Glasman used Blond’s conclusions and applied them to his own party. It’s left individualism that obscured Labour’s traditions and made disappear society as a ”functioning moral entity”. Glasman blames Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee, social democrats that shaped postwar Britain, for producing a bureaucratic state, which culminated in the ”managerialism” of New Labour. Blond blames the left as a whole for creating a top-down, technocratic and centralized state. Blairites drew the same conclusion from a different analysis, arguing for post-bureaucratic state.

Blue Labour is deeply opposed to globalised capitalism because it threatens their constituency. The starting point, Glasman says, is marked by the end of New Labour economics. In an article in The New Statesman (‘Dave must take the Red Tory turn’, 2 October 2011) Blond proclaimed that his idea tends to fill the ‘ideological poverty’ that has occurred after the eighties and nineties. It’s worth citing the whole phrase: ”When economics and social paradigms shift, the politics that prevails is the one that most quickly adapts to new circumstances in the light of its core beliefs. Labour determined the shape of post-1945 politics. Margaret Thatcher dominated after 1979. But nobody has yet come forward to shape the politics of the post-financial crisis era.”

Glasman tries to outplay the Conservatives with his idea but it seems Red Tory and Blue Labour are two of a kind. Glasman and Blond depart though when it comes to Christianity. Blond, a former theology lecturer at the University of Cumbria, argues that Christian values are essential to society (Oliver Kamm, writer and journalist for the Times, expressed his fear that the Red Tory hawks back to ”Christian paternalism”), Glasman does not mention them at all. Blue Labour is based on the traditional working class values. In that sense the big difference between Blue Labour and Red Tory is, paradoxically, socialism. Both have a different interpretation of the term ‘socialism’. It does not mean the ‘social movement’ or the socialist, former Marxist, settlement. Socialism means mutual solidarity, community and the values of family. They both reject the state focused theory of traditional socialism.

If we depart from the thesis that the welfare state was Britain’s, and indeed Europe’s, ”last great attempt to organize society from the common good” (‘Labour is already to Blue’, Guardian, April 2011), Blue Labour is quite a toxic because we don’t know what Glasman’s alternative is. What can we derive from his idea apart from the abstract theory on community and the revitalization of Labour’s postwar values? Does he want to abolish the welfare state? Obviously, that will empower markets. Does he want to stand up against markets? Obviously, you need a central authority in order to ‘tame the beast’. State and market will remain big powers either way and you can’t leave community to the mercy of both. Glasman should decide whether he wants to shape his idea trough the state or not.

Blue Labour is essentially the opposite of liberalism. Liberals could compromise with small c-conservatism but conservative socialism is a bridge to far. The rejection of individualism – Blond called liberalism (and the left) the first individualist ideology – is unacceptable for any decent liberal. Glasman’s idea is based on a notion of communitarianism which is by itself not necessarily incompatible with liberalism. But liberals believe that the communitarian vision is premised upon sameness whereas the Glasman does not see the value of the individual in relation to society.

I doubt if Blue Labour can be an alternative for the Labour party. It’s strongly reactionary concerning globalisation and internationalisation. At the same time it’s deeply nostalgic. What I want to argue is that Blue Labour has two main problems. First of all it’s extremely political (Cameron’s Big Society is quite the contrary!). It opposes right-wing liberals, social-liberals as well as the center left way of thinking and leaves no room for a compromise. Secondly, it builds on, as brilliantly expressed by Billy Brogg in The Guardian, an ”idealized insular vision of the past”. If Glasman wants to capture Labour politics, he needs to take off the old coat.

Daniel Boomsma

This article featured in the first issue of NuPolitics Magazine, which you can read here.

No Big Society without a strong government

When using ‘Big Society’ rhetoric, David Cameron must realise that it’s a government’s job to prepare society for more responsibility, writes Daniel Boomsma.

“It is a guiding philosophy, a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control”. This is the very essence of the idea of the Big Society. Empowering communities should lead to a society where people can run post offices, libraries, transport services and shape housing projects. But since Prime Minister David Cameron launched his ‘Big Idea’ in July 2010, it has been subject of debate. Those who oppose the Prime Minister’s plans often state that it’s just a cover for substantial cuts in public services.

The most fundamental critique however, should be based on a long term vision of Britain’s future: mending a broken society. In order to do so, the Tories must realise that the Big Society is not the ‘mending-tool’, it’s the other way around: it’s a government’s job to prepare society for more responsibility. This approach would increase the chances of success of a project that more people than just the Tories are willing to endorse.

Britain has a tradition when it comes to radical thinking on state and society. In an elaborate essay, The Economist analysed this ”outsized role promoting radical thought” by falling back on the 19th century philosophy of John Stuart Mill and other New Liberals (also known as social liberalism). The night-watchman state was a generally accepted concept in Britain until the 19th century’s ‘wave’ of (philosophical) modernisation and reform. Mill and others couldn’t accept the fact that, with ”liberty flourishing”, still many people lived in poverty and misery. It was this thought that lead to the idea of aiming at an active state instead of a night-watchman state. This would eventually lead to compulsory education, laws on labour and other social legislation and an increase of tax-funded public services.

Anti-state sentiments – The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek (who, on his turn, influenced great economic theorists such as Milton Friedman and John Hicks) of course as one of the most famous libertarian works – rose again after the destruction of the Second World war, though classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer already rejected the 19th century ideas on reform and modernisation in his book The Man versus the State, written in 1884. These sentiments are still very much alive today.

The developments I mentioned above resulted in what we call the idea of the post-bureaucratic state, originally formulated by former Labour leader, and pragmatist, Tony Blair. It’s testimony to this way of thinking that the state itself is bureaucratic by definition. Therefore state services should be outsourced to third parties (in the private sector). You can also, in a way, call this a characterisation of Thatcherism.

So when we look at Britain’s history, the idea of a big society isn’t really new and it’s certainly not an original ‘Tory conception’.

It is relatively new however in the sense that it calls on localism rather than the same old right-wing creed of ‘more market less state’. That’s why most political parties do not necessarily reject the idea of a Big Society. In fact, they are even willing to endorse it.

Blue Labour for example is a movement within the Labour party that endorses the idea. Rethinking the creation of the welfare state in 1945 is Blue Labour’s central theme; It’s not just about redistributing the wealth but also about giving power back to local communities. ‘Intellectual godfather’ of this response to the Big Society, Lord Maurice Glasman, made some strikingly true comments on the post war welfare state: “1945 was a wonderful achievement of solidarity. But the sting in the tail of 1945 was that it broke all the mutual solidarity – the ways we took care of each other – and handed them over to the state.” It’s this historical perspective that makes the Big Society interesting and worth the effort for more people than just Conservatives or hardcore rightists.

However, you have to meet some very important criteria if you want the Big Society to work. Local communities can do a lot by themselves, I’m absolutely sure about that. But in order to enable communities, and society as a whole, to ‘regain ground’ you need resources and the helping hand of a government. Reshaping the order of communities as we know it isn’t just a matter of pulling out some stops.

In order to create a real ‘post-welfare state’ Britain – the idea of a big society obviously aims at reinforcing communities but will certainly influence Britain’s society as a whole, causing a policy that’s no longer focused on the state/market dichotomy – Cameron has to do something quite contradictory to conservative
policy: start at the left and slowly move to the centre. A so called top-down traditional leftish strategy.

Mending a broken society by cutting away vital elements of the state isn’t going to work. The New Economic Foundation (NEF) correctly pointed out that “if the state is pruned [too] drastically…the effect will be a more troubled and diminished society, not a bigger one”. That’s why Cameron should start working the other way around. He said it himself: “We should not be naive enough to think that simply if government rolls back and does less, then miraculously society will spring up and do more. The truth is [that] we need a government that helps to build a big society.”

Daniel Boomsma

Prison reform: Business as usual or radical change

Photo: .v1ctor. (Flickr)

In order to reform the criminal justice system and cut the prison population, taking radical decisions is inevitable, writes Daniel Boomsma.

Since Friday the 19th of August the prison population in England reached a new record of 86,821. Already plans to accelerate the opening of new prison buildings have been made. Prison service tried to calm things down and assured that they are ”developing contingencies to increase usable capacity should further pressure be placed on the prison estate”. The truth is, however, that there’s something wrong with the criminal justice system. Since the mid-1990s the prison population has even doubled – but at the same time (recorded) crime has fallen since 2000. It’s time to rethink the system as a whole.

The failing prison and criminal justice system isn’t (entirely) new. New Labour, keen on ‘reform’ in the broadest sense of the word and trying to out-tough the Tories on crime, didn’t come up with fresh new ideas. Tougher sentencing turned out to be Tony Blair’s ‘reform’. Ironically, Blair’s own strategy unit wrote a report a couple of years ago that proved his failure; 22 per cent increase in the prison population accounted for only 5 per cent of an overall 30 per cent drop in crime. Tougher sentencing didn’t seem to work at all. Just locking people up won’t solve anything on the long term. In the New Statesman Andrew Neilson pointed out that reoffending rates ”reveals that people become more likely to reoffend after each spell in prison”.

In June 2010 justice secretary Ken Clarke announced that he had plans for a radical prison policy change. Now, more than a year later, we can see the results. Clarke then made some great remarks though. ”Locking people up ”for the sake it is a waste of public of public funds,” he said. Clarke even proclaimed that prison proved to be “a costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens”. Clarke also called the rates considering reoffending a big problem: ”More than half of the crime in this country is committed by people who have been through the system”, he said.

When reconsidering an entire system one should be careful with cutting away too many resources. Unfortunately, the justice secretary forgot about that. Shadow home office minister David Hanson said: ”he is now planning to cut the resources to the justice department and to probation by 25% over the next four years.” In order to reform properly, cuts like these aren’t going to help. On the long term, it’s even going to cost more. It was quite depressing to see Clarke’s huge ambitions become worthless after he announced his budget cuts.

In order to reform the criminal justice system and cut the prison population, taking radical decisions is inevitable. That’s what the cross-party Justice Committee already pointed out in January 2010. Chairman Sir Alan Beith was perfectly clear: ”Whoever forms the next government, they face a choice between unsustainable ‘business-as-usual’ in the criminal justice system, and making some radical decisions.”

Daniel Boomsma