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

Book review: Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

It will long be remembered as the year of ‘the protestor’; as uprisings originating in the Arab world swept across the globe like a wild bushfire. Paul Mason, the economics editor of Newsnight, is therefore well placed to draw on his wide-ranging reportage in 2011 to answer the key question; how has this happened?

The global economy, troubled by a ‘shortfall between stagnating wages and increased consumption met by credit’, was bound to ‘explode’ Mason argues. Thus the influence of economics on the protests of today draws parallels to those in history; inflation correlates ‘closely with revolt: the higher the cost of bread, the more revolutionary the outcome’. Indeed, economic concern was so widespread in 2011 that the protests were populated by an unprecedented range of participants. Mason proposes three distinct socio-economic groups; the ‘graduate without a future’ of the discontented middle class, organized labour and the urban poor.

However, Mason argues that we cannot rely on economics as an explanation alone. If the uprisings are rampant flames, then technology rather than economics is the fuel spreading the fire. Social media, Mason argues, helped the movements ‘grow with dizzying rapidity’, observing the events in Tahrir Square as ‘a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube’. As such, technophobes may find themselves horrified at the prevalence of social media references – certain protesters are referred to by their Twitter names for example – but despite the fact that ‘there is no quantitative research’ on the impact of social media ‘on politics and political campaigns’ Mason is by no means guilty of hyperbole.

Influenced by sociologist Barry Wellman, who ‘long before Facebook’ noticed that ‘people preferred to live with multiple networks, flat hierarchies and weak commitments’, Mason argues that a ‘networked individualism’ allows groups to form with the aim of completing only a single task. In many ways, this poses an interesting paradox to the ideas of Robert Putnam, who in Bowling Alone (1975) argued that a breakdown of ‘social capital’ had caused a disconnect between people and forms of social organization. Perhaps then, we’re still bowling alone, but online we’re in the company of millions.

The book loses momentum in the latter half, as Mason travels through the mid-west of the United States and the slums of Manila, describing, at odds with the general theme of the book, people who rather than ‘kicking off’, are tolerant, if not satisfied, with the troubled lives they live.

Notwithstanding the value of such first-hand experience of humanity, the downfall of Mason’s connection with the grass-roots is that he is occasionally guilty of failing to take into account a wider picture. Despite his BBC connections, he is unashamedly Neo-Marxist in his critique of the global system whereby the root problem is ‘globalization, and the resulting monopolization of wealth by a global elite’. A theme throughout the book is that amidst ‘the near collapse of free-market capitalism’ a ‘desire for individual freedom’ is fundamental to the uprisings. However, if Mason is so dissatisfied with the former then surely his attitude fails to accommodate the desires of his subjects; for if Mason knows of a global system which provides individual freedom in greater abundance than liberal democratic capitalism, he is yet to reveal it.

The book, and the movements it explores alike, can therefore be credited for raising logical points and intriguing questions, but denounced for failing to suggest valuable answers or alternatives. ‘The future hangs in the balance’ warns Mason. Perhaps then, the forthcoming ‘Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’, will provide more evidence of the way in which Mason believes the balance should tilt.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Verso, 244pp, £12.99
Published January 2012, London

Robert Smith is Editor of Politiker. Follow on Twitter @RobertSmithUK