David Frost
‘We are not ideologically committed to limiting government in all circumstances.” So says the summary to a new report on the Future of Conservatism for the Onward think tank, with a foreword by Michael Gove. No, really? In a way it’s a tribute to the strength of tax-cutting in the Tory brand that, having presided over the highest tax and spend burden since the Second World War and a state that spends a trillion pounds every year, some party figures still feel the need to rebut it.
The real question is whether anyone at all in British politics actually is committed to limiting government – not just taxation, but the whole panoply of the regulatory state, and the government-knows-best policies that encroach on every aspect of our lives and show no sign of shrinking. Obviously Labour won’t do that. This week, Sir Keir Starmer painted a picture of the protecting state, shielding British workers from the great economic and political forces sweeping the world. Quite how he would do this was left unspoken, but it is a safe bet that it will come back to more regulation and control. We’ve tried that and it isn’t working.
In truth, Labour’s vision of social democracy, welfarism, and statism is lemming politics – go this way because we can’t think of anything else – and it will just as surely take us over the cliff. But the Conservative vision as presented last week is not so different. Yes, there was pro-growth excitement on the fringe, but with little purchase on the leadership. Those currently in charge of the party show no anxiety about the vast powers they exercise or the cost – they merely claim to be able to use them better.
So not surprisingly the party conference season has not changed much. Neither party has shifted perceptions or commands much enthusiasm. I think there’s a reason for that. I suspect that people see both parties as skating over the surface of Britain’s problems and not engaging in the country’s real difficulties. This week’s events have brought some of this to the surface. Nobody can look at the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Britain, or the equivocation of so many of our intellectuals and commentators when faced with mass murder, and not think that some deeply troubling habits of thought have got embedded in our society.
Let’s sketch out some of them. The first I have already alluded to – the generally accepted belief that the state can solve all problems and is the fount of all wisdom. The second is the gradual growth of the view that a strong society is not made up of individuals and families, as we have always understood, but of identity groups; that the important thing about society is which group oppressed another; and that it is the government’s job to rectify historical wrongs, to promote appropriate diversity, and to equalise outcomes. The Human Rights Act and the Equality Act have helped create this regime of group rights. Entirely predictably, the result has been race-baiting and grievance-mongering, a proliferation of protected beliefs of all kinds, and – worst – the developing sense that everyone needs their own identity group to protect their interests. We have seen some of the consequences of all this on our streets this week.
And the third is the belief that the nation state itself is outmoded. In fact, the nation state is the best way humanity has found for nations to manage their politics, control their territory and settle their differences within an ordered set of rules. But nations are now unfashionable, borders are seen as disagreeable, political decisions are delegated to national or international courts, and territory starts to become a convenience of the rulers, not “home”. We have seen these attitudes starkly in the ambivalence of much commentary towards the Israeli nation state and its right to defend itself. Such beliefs are at the root of our problems. Their advocates say that they are “progressive”, but in fact they are more accurately described as “regressive”, because in all cases they are a reversion, a step back to pre-modern forms of thinking.
They represent an economy of mercantilism, of guild and monopoly capitalism rather than the churn and experimentation of free markets. They have their own secular religion in net zero, shaping every aspect of political and economic life. And they replace the modern concept of national identity with pre-modern group solidarity, with a politics that is about seeking advantages for your group not the nation as a whole. Not surprisingly, these ideas have produced pre-modern growth rates, pre-modern group conflicts and a pre-modern zero-sum mentality: the belief that I need to get what I can out of government or society, because if I don’t someone else will. The task of modern Conservatism is, or at least ought to be, to tackle these regressive ideas and defeat them – to get us back to a flourishing society of free individuals pursuing their own ends to create prosperity within the commonly-accepted framework and loyalty of a nation state.
These ideas are of course widespread across the West, not just here, but as so often the fightback began in Britain and in the Conservative Party, in the great revolt that delivered Brexit and helped us, more or less, reconstitute the British nation state. But it is only a first step. I have written many times here about what needs doing. We must get tax and spend down, open up trade, rethink net zero, begin serious NHS reform, and of course build more houses. We must abolish the Equality Act and replace it with a simple anti-discrimination rule, pass a Free Speech Act, and put in place a Government Modernisation Act to give politicians proper control over the machine. And we must recover proper control over our national territory by getting inward migration numbers down dramatically, by reviewing the extent of devolution to both Scotland and Wales, and by coming back to the Windsor Framework in Northern Ireland.
In their different ways, they are all seeking to win a single argument in the party against those who have no core beliefs or those who want us just to go along with the zeitgeist. In my small way I aim to be part of this argument. That’s why I have decided to actively look for a Conservative association that will have me as a candidate in the next election. Before then, I’ll be setting out at greater length a vision for how we get Britain back on track: the stepping stones that can take us to a brighter future.
This is the supreme argument of our times: the fight against collectivism, for individuals and the family, for the nation, for freedom. Conservative supporters and sympathisers should not sit on their hands and despair but come and join in. For we must win this argument as a prelude to winning it in the country. I don’t want a gloomy, shabby, statist, collectivist future for Britain. Let’s come together and help the Conservative Party stop it.
The Telegraph
