Conservative Values 2024 (Part 4)

Why are we Conservatives?

To conclude our report on our membership-wide survey on Conservative values, let’s test the values that Party members have decided on in a different way to see where they fit into the history of our great Party.

Edmund Burke, first elected in 1766. The greatest thinker of his day, he wrote the heavily worded Reflections on the Revolution in France in response to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. In this, Burke showed the profound understanding that our greatest freedoms are not guaranteed by a state, but by the negotiated rights and responsibilities within families, communities and between people. His little platoons of small entrepreneurial groups solving problems is how he saw the reality of life, not the liberal-left claim that we can invent a set of perfect rights written by humans for all time and that a magical state will protect us. He wasn’t anti-state, but saw the pillars of the established institutions, slowly evolving where necessary, as the core to our stability: Royal family, Parliament and the Army, of course, but also such institutions as the Bank of England, Lloyds Insurance brokers and the Law. 

“And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.” (Margaret Thatcher, Womens Own, 1987)

Derided by the left as a clarion call to selfish individualism, the quote above is a cry to Burkean communities. Personal responsibility supported by small units of family and communities rather than a people looked after by a socialist state. This is the true meaning of Mrs Thatcher’s comments.

Your values highlight something of Burke’s profound understanding of humans. 83% of members thought family is important or very important (though only 53% said the same about localism) and support for community saw the biggest increase. 74% thought tolerance is important or very important, and 75% openness, though inclusivity and diversity scored only 51% and 34%. This may show we value our communities but aren’t interested in the modern fixation of identity politics.

With Burke stating that the small platoons and families provide the best support for each other it isn’t surprising that 75% thought prioritising the vulnerable in our communities is vital to our Conservative values and caring for others is necessary for a proper understanding of what Conservatives mean by responsibility.

Burke also showed how evolution and slow change is better than radical new laws and a search for man-made rights. After all, we don’t trust rights if they don’t have responsibilities. “If it aint broke, don’t fix it” comes naturally to Conservatives, who aren’t looking for the perfect liberal solution of a perfect constitution, a perfect House of Lords, a perfect government. We know these will never exist. But your values show that we do believe in institutions such as the army, the sovereign, the city institutions that go with a capitalist democracy, where slow change happens.

Edmund Burke would have recognised our members values. But what a pity he is so unreadable in our modern age. Perhaps this is why he is so rarely taught, whereas Tom Paine is taught as a foundation text of the right way to think.

Next in line in the search of our values in history is Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister twice: in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. Winning a huge landslide, he is famous for the concept of One Nation Tories, as well as derided by the left for jingoistic patriotism.

The strong importance you assign to the values of compassion and prioritising the vulnerable come from this strand of our Party’s past. As do justice and fairness, both of which some 90-95% of you said are important or very important.

While the Left might not be proud of our country, Disraeli also made it a Conservative value to be patriotic. With 86% of you saying patriotism is  important or very important, and 96% of you the need for a strong national defence, this shows that Disraeli still chimes with modern Conservatives.

Interestingly, he was adored by the newly enfranchised lower middle class and upper working class. The modern-day Cs and Ds who our votes even today depend on. The term jingoism apparently came from a song in the dance halls and referred to being patriotic, when the British government stood up against Russian aggression in 1877-78, by jingo it did! But perhaps Labour want to abolish dance halls as well as everything else.

Stanley Baldwin, who presided over three governments, might be an odd choice, but he is a great example of a key value that you highlighted, that of a pragmatic Conservative—someone who understood, in the words of Otto von Bismarck, that “Politics is the art of the possible.”  84% of you said pragmatism is important or very important, in contrast with the Left’s fixation on ideology. Alongside the 90% who thought fairness is an important or very important part of our values, 84% of you thought equal opportunity is important or very important and 75% highlighted the importance of social mobility as a Conservative value.

Well Baldwin is your man! Having lost to Labour in 1923 he won back the voter in 1924 with a government that addressed the concerns of many working-class and female voters, including “preservation of unemployment insurance, a large extension of the pensions system, public support for slum clearance and increased house-building, improved facilities for maternal and child care.” Don’t ever let Labour tell you that Conservatives don’t care!!! 

Even better though, by being pragmatic and bringing in responsible government for those in most in need, he destroyed the Liberal base for a hundred years as the Conservatives became associated with aspiration, enterprise, social mobility and fairness. Pragmatism works!

92% of members agreed that responsible free markets is important or very important, and both of our next two thinkers take this as their principle. With apology to economists, here’s an historian’s two-minute take on two of the most influential economic ideas of the 20th century: John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, who influenced Milton Friedman and the Chicago school.

Keynes, in his Oxford College, helped save the world from The Great Depression of 1929. Banks were too scared to lend, all money disappeared from the financial world, and catastrophe ensued in the financial markets.  It was he who understood that if governments could borrow, where no-one else could, then they had a duty to do so and to spend in order to get money into a system where there was private market failure. So a responsible free market and government intervention went hand-in-hand

Hayek as a young man in the mid-1920s observed an opposite weakness of government. Churchill’s great failure of sticking to the gold standard had led to low inflation and poor productivity, with stagnant Britain starting way before the Second World War. The idea that too much government prevented the free market from finding its entrepreneurial  solutions was developed by our own Diana Spearman in the Conservative Research Department (CRD), who worked with Hayek in the 1950s.  Like the gold standard decision, it was a time of too much government after the war machine had controlled all production, and government needed to step back. Diana personally influenced a complete generation of young politicians coming in after the great defeat of 1946, including Richard Law, Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell and Peter Lilley.

Which takes us to the last of our great thinkers, Mrs Thatcher, around whom coalesced all those young men, now older and wiser in 1979. A world revolution in economics was born. And those of you who said that aspiration, enterprise, limited government, responsible free markets and equal opportunity for all are all important to Conservatives might now see how Mrs Thatcher took the ideas and used them and how she cemented these values in our Party.

Yet even Mrs Thatcher didn’t DO Thatcherism at first. It took time to stabilise the economy. Income taxes stayed high, inflation was only tamed by a vicious recession, short and sharp —and don’t forget that in 1983 Mrs Thatcher put taxes up.  And her expenditure reached 48.5% of the economy. This did not drop below 40% until 1988. So, Rishi Sunak didn’t do so badly in the past two years by comparison.

So, let’s not forget that pragmatic streak she showed, just like you, and how she understood that “Politics is the Art of the possible”, like 92% of you who said it is important or very important that we should always live within our means. This is a true Conservative value.

Going back to Edmund Burke, your values survey shows that we are people who believe we don’t just have rights, but also have responsibilities. We know that the state is a useful tool to manage the economy, look after the vulnerable and provide opportunity. But we also know that too much state in our lives kills the entrepreneurial solutions dead and, paradoxically, lets down those most dependant on it. That is why we are Conservatives.

[Adapted from Why Am I a Conservative? by Fleur Butler OBE, CPF Vice-chair and President of the National Conservative Convention]