There would have been a word or two about the importance of community spirit, along with the recklessly controversial proposition that peace is to be preferred to war. Those who have behaved heroically in the past year would have been commended as an inspiration to us all. There would also have been praise for people who serve those less fortunate than themselves, punctuated by a few irritable comments about “this stinking autocue”. People enduring hardship would have been exhorted to persevere in their misery. Kindness and tolerance would have been elevated over conflict and brutality. There might even have been a mention of homelessness, though not of its social causes, or of antisemitism, but not of the fact that massacring Palestinians in their thousands doesn’t help in laying this monstrosity to rest.

The trouble with speeches by figureheads is that the moment they say anything definite they’re likely to be divisive. To avoid splitting the nation into warring factions, you have to keep your pronouncements as bland and vacuous as possible. The Pope, for example, has just denounced war, which isn’t likely to send many generals into a blind panic. Perhaps the King would do better simply to sit there nodding and smiling for five minutes, with the odd wave of the hand or twitch of his bat-like ears.

Or perhaps the whole concept of the speech should be overhauled so that it becomes a practical report on the nation. Charles might point out that two or three potholes still need filling in in Lower Staughton Street in Derby, and that St. Swithin’s primary school in Abergavenny could do with a few more slates on its roof. There’s still a petty thief on the loose in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, and a Mr Worthing of East Grinstead admirably resisted the temptation to ride his bike through a red light. All of this would be unbelievably boring. But so is the speech at present. And at least it would be saying something.

Why do we need a monarch? To symbolize the unity of the nation, some would argue. But the nation isn’t united, and nor should it be. People who are being ripped off and exploited shouldn’t reconcile themselves with their exploiters simply in the name of their shared nationhood. Teachers and pupils in schools which can’t afford to mend the roof shouldn’t feel solidarity with managers thinking of selling one of their several sports fields to a property developer. The idea of national unity is far too convenient for the minuscule elite who actually rule the country. If the King symbolizes the unity of the nation, then it is a bogus one. Most appeals to unity are attempts to displace attention from divisions rather than tackle them. The royals are a family, so the argument goes, and so is the nation. As a conscientious father, the King loves all his children equally, and is prepared to make a handsome profit out of any of them at all.

More from this author

Andrew: the half-buffoon prince

By Terry Eagleton

Nations are abstract phenomena, in the sense that nobody has ever clapped eyes on one or taken one for a walk, so it’s arguable that they need some tangible incarnation to persuade people that they exist. (Jesus Christ is supposed to have served this role for God.) And this is what the monarch provides. But so did Hitler. Countries can get along perfectly well without seeing a particular individual as incarnating their very essence. Nobody asks this of the banks or the railways. We continue to shop at Tesco even though there is no Mr Tesco to make us feel that buying a bunch of bananas is more than just a sordidly commercial affair. Tesco don’t fall apart because they have no figurehead to signify their unity. Besides, if there were a King Tesco it would have to be an individual, and the problem with that, as the royal family abundantly shows, is that the defects of the individual are always at risk of undermining the symbolic role he or she performs. King Tesco might turn out to hobnob with pedophiles or sell the possibility of an interview with his partner to a fake journalist for an eye-watering amount of cash.

The best way to avoid this problem is to select individuals for this role who are as boring and low-profile as possible. Kate Middleton fits this bill, as a demure, excessively well-behaved daughter of the Home Counties without an unconventional view in her head, as does her colorless spouse. Downplaying yourself has the advantage of turning yourself into a blank screen on which other people can project their fantasies; but if you press this blankness too far you end up with the likes of the former Prince Andrew, one of whose more minor defects is to look like everyone’s bank manager. The late Queen maintained a reasonable balance between individual personality and symbolic role by intimating that she had quite a bit of the former but was muting it in the name of the latter. She did this, of course, as a form of service to the nation, which these days is the chief rationale for royalty as a whole. It’s a scandalous piece of hypocrisy. As that other scion David Dimbleby lately revealed in his TV series, the Crown pumps an enormous amount of money out of the country, not least in the Duchies, only to present this rip-off as a selfless service. Cutting the odd ribbon is what it gives in return for this barefaced plunder. The King’s swollen retinue of cooks, valets, shirt-buttoners, trouser-zippers, senior sock adjusters, assistant armpit fresheners and so on is all in the service of the common people.

But the royals were always likely to run into headlong collisions with the modern age. One can see this conflict as a shift between two different meanings of the word “cool”. Before Princess Diana arrived on the scene, “cool” in royal circles meant emotionally restrained, as with the kind of public-school off-handedness which remains just an inch or two short of outright insolence. From Diana onwards, however, “cool” came to mean what Robbie Williams would mean by it. Charles is cool in the old-fashioned sense, whereas Harry is cool in the postmodern sense. That culture had begun to penetrate the inner sanctum of traditionalist Britain, and the path was prepared by the likes of Sarah Ferguson, who as a personality has about as much in common with the late Queen as Danny Dyer has with Jeremy Irons. The monarchy needed urgently to modernize, yet modernizing would nearly prove its downfall. All families, however sealed to outsiders, have a chink in their armor known as marriage, through which all sorts of potentially deadly viruses can enter. Had the royals but known it, a particularly lethal strain of infection was on its way across the Atlantic in the form of Meghan Markle.

Suggested Reading

Can King Charles re-enchant Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Or, to put it another way, sham show business is now up against the formidable resources of the real thing. Real jewels contend with fake ones designed for the big screen. One kind of glamor and mystique is in the process of ousting another. It’s a battle between the values of Holyrood and those of Hollywood, and the latter has a lot more wealth, power and influence than the former. There’s more than the royal family at stake in this confrontation. Britain survived the loss of its Empire with its traditionalist values still pretty much intact. If it had lost Cecil Rhodes, it could still boast of Richard Dimbleby, father of David and suave, unctuous, eminently reasonable voice of the nation.

As for the younger Dimbleby, he’s surely living proof that nepotism isn’t always a form of corruption. No doubt his surname helped him into the BBC, but once established he proved himself at least the equal of his father. Now, though, even settled traditions like the Dimbleby dynasty are under threat from the eternal Now of a consumerist culture — with a series of recent assaults on the BBC just one sign of this onslaught. If it weren’t for his ample girth, Dimbleby would be turning over in his commentator’s box.

There are global forces at work behind this conflict. In a roundabout sense, the Harry and Meghan spectacle is a consequence of Margaret Thatcher. Her reign marked the beginning of the demise of traditional, one-nation Toryism in the face of a deep-rooted capitalist crisis. Yet it’s on this paternalist ideology that the monarchy depends. Throughout Europe, the kind of solid, long-established, cultivated bourgeoisie that Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust would have recognized and applauded has given way to an army of sharks, grifters, financial thugs and high-class swindlers. In royal circles, greed is no longer simply a matter of quietly siphoning off common resources by long-approved procedures but of selling yourself to media corporations. Nothing could symbolize this whole dismal situation more aptly than electing a New York real estate mogul to the most powerful position in the world. There was a time when the political class kept a certain discreet distance from the big capital in the name of which, by and large, it governs. That age is about as unlikely to return as King Arthur.

The split between traditional paternalism and capitalist acquisition runs right down the personality of Prince Harry. A man who remains the very epitome of the service ethic — loyal, honorable, full of military ardor and a passion for the so-called underprivileged — is also the helpless captive of Hollywood. If he’s an enemy of the media, he’s also an exploiter of it. His only alternative to the hidebound conservatism of the Palace is the commodity culture of postmodernity. There’s no middle ground between the stuffed shirts and the stars. Those who, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are both city financiers and country squires don’t realize that in the long run the former role is scuppering the latter one.

One argument in favor of the monarchy is that it provides a thread of continuity in an otherwise fragmented world. Yet the very concept of continuity has been under fire for several decades now, in contrast to the notion of self-fashioning. Rather than drawing your identity from the past, you make yourself up as you go along. The idea of having only one self is as absurd as having only one handbag. Contemporary culture claims this is just the way identity is. It isn’t going to fall apart because we abolish the monarchy or the House of Lords. It’s in pieces already, and that’s simply how it works. The past is just a great storehouse of styles and images which we can draw on when we need to, but which provides us with no kind of moral guidance. This is a scandalous matter for the political Left, which as Leon Trotsky remarked has always lived in tradition. It’s simply that our traditions are those of the Jacobins, Chartists, Suffragettes and hunger marchers, rather than the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Changing of the Guard.

Over the past 15 years, Gramsci’s so-called “interregnum” passage has been quoted and repeated ad infinitum. This is because it speaks so appositely to our current condition: an era of economic stagnation, collapse in liberal norms, and destruction of old party loyalties. There’s a sense of permanent flux, of implosion. We are in a void between the old regime of globalized economic and social liberalism, which began crashing down in 2008, and whatever system eventually emerges to take its place. 

But for now, nobody is in control. Growth remains elusive to Western governments of all political stripes. State capacity is shot, which means that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver on projects or promises. As a result, economic stagnation has been corrosive to the authority of both the Tories and Labour.

And so Nigel Farage has the opportunity to end the interregnum by leading a new type of government in 2029. For now, he sits at the head of a top-down, personalized party. If Reform wins, it would be the first government in over a century not headed by a Labour or Tory politician, and it would enter office on the basis that it would reconstitute the British state: rewired for harsher, harder times. Liberal Britain, watching Farage’s ascent in horror, has not yet processed the full implications of a Reform government. The commentators read the polls, and know the numbers, but on some level still think of a Farage majority as an outlandish nightmare scenario. Yet it is a Farage majority that is the likely outcome of the next general election, even though the contours of Farageism are still being formed. We still do not know whether the British New Right would govern in the vein of a Giorgia Meloni or a Victor Orbán. 

These two respective leaders of Italy and Hungary represent two poles of possibility for Reform. Orbán’s self-described “illiberal democracy” in Budapest has combined big-state interventionism, and pro-natalist, pro-welfare policies, with economic nationalism and authoritarian creep. Meloni, meanwhile, has eschewed her roots on the fringes as part of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, and has instead governed as a traditional center-right politician — reserving additional rhetorical venom for migration and the culture wars. Farage has praised both leaders at different moments: Orbán, he once said, is “the future of Europe”, while he has also praised Meloni’s uncompromising stance on migration. His policy prescriptions veer unpredictably between Meloni’s relative moderation and Orban’s more robust, statist, abrasive populism. 

But Farage, like the best continental populists, has managed to successfully crystallize into a single issue all the fears, anxieties, and collective fantasies of a desperate public. Crime, dilapidated high streets, shoddy public services, falling real incomes, ballooning state spending — all have been distilled into the symbolic subject of the Migrant. Progressives still object, but within every creation myth is a kernel of rationality. In recent years, inward migration has hit an unprecedented scale. The electorate has made repeated injunctions to keep migration within sustainable limits, but the Left-liberal cultural and political establishment has refused to listen. The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible “adults in the room”, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.

Reform’s task, therefore, has been to articulate a broad message that explains the country’s malaise. The party’s offering — big tent, low-migration patriotism — is enough for them to pose as a “none-of-the-above” option for the growing proportion of the electorate that is now prepared to reject technocracy. But beyond Farage’s intuitive communicative flair, and his instinctive penchant for projecting good-humored but no-nonsense defiance towards Labour and the Conservatives, Reform still does not quite know what the party is for. This week, the party attempted to add a veneer of economic credibility to its fiscal plans, abandoning the last manifesto’s promise to replay Trussomomics with a splurge of deficit-financed tax cuts. Instead, Reform promises that spending reductions will now precede any changes to the tax code. Deregulation will summon the animal spirits of British entrepreneurialism, Reform claims, and the state’s ever-expanding welfare commitments will be scaled back. This is a strategy of Meloni-ism writ large.

More from this author

The Green Party's shallow revolution

By Jonny Ball

And yet it is a model of political economy that is wildly unsuited to our age of chaos. New political forms are emerging from the interregnum. For decades, Chinese state planners have been administering breakneck growth and dirigiste development via industrial subsidy, currency and capital controls, state-owned enterprises and hard protectionism. In the US, Donald Trump has upended 50 years of globalization and open markets, embracing a dog-eat-dog American nationalism that brings the age of liberalized trade and economic integration to a close. On the continent, the formerly austerity-happy EU and Germany have belatedly adopted public investment in strategic industries. In a geopolitically febrile climate, they are “derisking” and “reshoring” domestic production of critical commodities.

Set against this global context, a dogmatic return to free-market fetishism appears inadequate. The Austrian School, and the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, no longer have the answers. Farage, a consummately protean politician, appears to have understood this. In his more Orbánite moments, he has parked his tanks on the fallow lawns of the Left. The steel sector could be nationalized, he has mused, along with water and utilities. Domestic industry would be supported by public procurement, and an industrial strategy would aim to boost manufacturing. The two-child benefit cap would be lifted for working British couples: a policy reportedly adopted after Reform’s meetings with Orbán officials. And, perhaps most radically, the Bank of England would be subject to political interference not seen since high Blairism’s granting of its independence in 1997. (The Old Lady would be instructed to end the loss-making rounds of quantitative tightening, and cancel the high interest rates paid to commercial banks.) 

Earlier this year, Farage even saw fit to talk approvingly of a fellow rebel from the other side of the political divide, Arthur Scargill. There’s a case to be made that during the miners’ strike it was, in fact, the “dry” cabinet monetarists who were the iconoclasts and radicals. In this view, it was the miners’ leader, fighting to protect provincial Britain’s traditional communities, families, and dignity of labor, who was the unlikely “small-C” conservative. And yet all this tentative Left-coded positioning, as well as the reheated Thatcherism, is belied by this week’s more anodyne, conventional pronouncements. In a speech on Monday, Farage tried to calm the nerves of onlooking deficit-hawk think-tanks and quangos. With Reform consistently ahead in the polls, the party is trying to demonstrate its commitment to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy, lest the markets begin their dangerous jitters.

Suggested Reading

Why Farage is a Burkean

By Aris Roussinos

As the Farageists attempt to build their own grand coalition from the army of the dissatisfied, glaring questions are coming to the fore. How will commitments to a small state and lower tax be reconciled with improved public services? How will a commitment to lower the welfare bill go down in Reform’s own constituencies, in which an increased share of the populist vote correlates strongly with the share of adults who are dependent on benefits? How will the angling towards free-markets and low-regulation sit with public ownership, or robust industrial policy? And who will win in the inevitable clash between Reform’s pro-development, anti-planning law Yimby free marketeers, and the homeowning voters and local councillors in peri-urban England who oppose new building at every turn? 

If Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Gramsci, were alive today, in analyzing the chaos of our interregnum he may have identified Nigel Farage as an embodiment of “Caesarism” — a “great ‘heroic’ personality” that appears, in either a reactionary or progressive form, to either break an impasse or resolve a “historico-political situation characterized by an equilibrium of forces, heading towards catastrophe”. Our interregnum may be reaching such a Caesarist conclusion, or else reaching catastrophe. There is a space for a hard-edged, syncretic brand of politics that combines elements of an unleashed free-market with a statist reflation of national production, critical industries and infrastructure: just imagine a mixture of Chinese, Singaporean and East Asian developmentalism. But this is yet to be articulated; Reform is still without a governing ideology. And if the party absorbs all the trappings of respectability that launched us into the age of perma-crisis in the first place, they will merely be placeholders, the next in the queue to manage decline. And in that case, our long interregnum will stretch out further.

Yet Israel, too, has very little to show for its incursion, launched with sudden fury, but no discernible exit plan. As the IDF has withdrawn the vast majority of its troops, the Hamas leadership remains intact, the group can still fire rockets into Israel and is still killing Israeli soldiers on the ground. Netanyahu’s fragile Right-wing coalition — which survived months of mass protests even before Hamas’s brutal October rampage — is increasingly unpopular within Israel, with 71% of Israelis desiring him to step down.

Even as Netanyahu, against the Biden administration’s expressed will, pledges to launch an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees have fled, his own defence minister openly contradicts him, asserting that no date for the operation has been set. When even the most committed American supporters of Israel, such as the New York Times’s Bret Stephens, and Thomas Friedman, feel compelled to state that “In a thousand years, Jews will remember Netanyahu’s name with scorn” for his “utterly insane strategy” which has “locked Israel into a politically unwinnable war”, it looks increasingly apparent that Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War will be remembered by history as a diplomatic and strategic error of historic proportions.

Yet there is very little reflection of these dynamics to be found in British conservative discourse which, for parochial culture-war reasons, committed itself to Israel’s ill-thought-out campaign early on and now finds itself held hostage by Netanyahu’s ineptitude. Like much of Britain’s talk-show populism, as a political strategy it is not a very popular one: even a plurality of Conservative voters now believes Britain should withhold arms sales to Israel, a debate roiling our moribund Conservative Party. While the optics of simultaneously dropping aid on Gaza and arming Israel indeed look absurd, in truth British arms sales represent only a miniscule fraction of Israel’s military capabilities, with the increasingly heated debate on both sides existing in a purely symbolic realm. Britain has no cause to enter this war, yet our political class seems determined nevertheless to reap all the domestic turmoil involvement would bring. Indeed, the full-throttle support for Israel’s war displayed by Suella Braverman or the Daily Mail columnist  Boris Johnson is worthy of analysis for its pure novelty. It signifies a partisan approach to the Middle East’s most intractable conflict that is a startling divergence from a century of British, and particularly Tory, policy.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

For a party that has failed to escape Thatcher’s long shadow, afflicted in its dotage with a cargo-cult weakness for matronly blondes of dubious merit, perhaps what is most remarkable is how far the current Conservative Party’s aspiring populist wing diverges from Thatcher’s own approach to the conflict. Following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a disaster that she correctly foresaw would birth new and harder threats to both the Western order and Israel’s own security, Thatcher placed an embargo on British weapons sales to Israel, a policy that was not lifted until 1994. Her rationale, as she told ITN, was that Israeli troops had “gone across the borders of Israel, a totally independent country, which is not a party to the hostility and there are very very great hostilities, bombing, terrible things happening there. Of course one has to condemn them. It is someone else’s country. You must condemn that. After all, that is why we have gone to the Falklands, to repossess our country which has been taken by someone else.”

A famously unsentimental woman, Thatcher framed the conflict in terms that seem strikingly empathetic to today’s eyes. In 1985, she visited an “utterly hopeless” Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, where, as she recounts in her 1993 memoirs, The Downing Street Years, “I talked to one old lady, half blind, lying in the shade of a tree outside her family’s hut. She was said to be about 100. But she had one thing above all on her mind, and spoke about it: the restoration of the Palestinians’ rights.” For Thatcher — perhaps counterintuitively, viewed through the prism of today’s Conservative party — the “plight of the landless Palestinians” was a major foreign-policy concern. Under her helm, the British government worked hard to bring about a peace deal, though her efforts were frustrated at every turn by both Israeli and American intransigence: as she “scrawled” on one cable from the British ambassador in Washington: “The US just does not realise the resentment she is causing in the Middle East.”

Striving to find a workable peace, Thatcher asserted the only possible solution to the conflict was an approach which balanced “the right of all the states in the region — including Israel — to existence and security, but also demanded justice for all peoples, which implied recognition of of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination”. Writing of her visit to Israel in 1986, the first by a British prime minister, Thatcher remarked that “The Israelis knew… that they were dealing with someone who harboured no lurking hostility towards them, who understood their anxieties, but who was not going to pursue an unqualified Zionist approach.” Instead, she “believed that the real challenge was to strengthen moderate Palestinians, probably in association with Jordan, who would eventually push aside the… extremists. But this would never happen if Israel did not encourage it; and the miserable conditions under which Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza were having to live only made things worse.”

The British-Jewish historian Azriel Bermant’s excellent 2016 book, Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East, makes for enlightening and perhaps discomfiting reading in the light of the Gaza War. An idealistic supporter of both Anglo-Jewry and Israel, whose own daughter Carol volunteered on a kibbutz, Thatcher nevertheless approached the country with a critical detachment. With a keener eye to Israel’s internal dynamics than Braverman or Johnson, Thatcher viewed the Right-wing Likud leaders Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir with distaste, as former terrorists against the British state with whom she was forced to deal by circumstance. Her preference throughout was for the Labor leader Shimon Peres who she viewed as a moderate, committed to a lasting peace settlement. To Thatcher, peace would entail not an independent Palestinian state — she thought this unviable, and most probably undesirable — but the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza under the rule of Jordan’s Anglophile King Hussein.

Yet when Thatcher signed on to an European Community declaration of support for Palestinian statehood, just days after the PLO confirmed its commitment to the destruction of Israel, and was condemned for this by the Labour leader Jim Callaghan — British attitudes on the conflict were yet to assume their present form — Thatcher responded in robust terms. “The words in the communiqué I support entirely,” she told the House. “They concern the right of the Palestinian people to determine their own future. If one wishes to call that ‘self- determination’, I shall not quarrel with it. I am interested that the Right Hon. Gentleman appears to be attempting to deny that right. I do not understand how anyone can demand a right for people on one side of a boundary and deny it to people on the other side of that boundary. That seems to deny certain rights, or to allocate them with discrimination from one person to another.”

Strikingly, Thatcher condemned Israel for its annexation of the Golan Heights from Syria, for its attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear power plant, and for its seizure of Palestinian land for settlements, including the housing of Soviet Jewish refugees: as she told the House in 1990, “Soviet Jews who leave the Soviet Union – and we have urged for years that they should be allowed to leave – should not be settled in the Occupied Territories or in East Jerusalem. It undermines our position when those people are settled in land that really belongs to others.” Indeed, as she later remarked in her memoirs, “I only wished that Israeli emphasis on the human rights of the Russian refuseniks was matched by proper appreciation of the plight of landless and stateless Palestinians.” With such sentiments, it is doubtful that today’s self-proclaimed Thatcherites would find a prominent place for Thatcher herself in their nascent faction.

While Thatcher’s views on Israel were balanced by the need to placate opinion in her 20% Jewish seat — the stated “Finchley factor” frequently cropped up in moments of self-doubt — her moderate stance on the conflict was sustained by the diversity of opinion then held by British Jews on Israel’s conduct. As Bermant notes: “Within British Jewry, the consensus on Israel had been seriously eroded with the invasion of Lebanon and, particularly, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” with the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, releasing a statement condemning the massacre, while “an editorial in the Anglo-Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, called on Begin and Sharon to resign in the wake of the killings”. In some ways, it could be argued that British Jewish opinion on the Palestine question back then was more akin to the conflicted attitudes expressed by American Jews today, while Thatcher lamented the then hardline American support for Israel, which she felt distorted US policy in self-defeating ways.

Yet just as Labour’s about-turn on Israel followed the 1982 Lebanon invasion, American attitudes to the country are today undergoing a historic convulsion, with what are sure to be significant consequences to Israel’s future security. The Biden administration is under increasing domestic pressure for its support for Netanyahu’s campaign, with even organs of middlebrow liberal opinion like The Atlantic, CNN and the Daily Show turning against Israel’s war and America’s support for it. The increasingly radical American Right is also turning against Israel, expressing dissent in often markedly antisemitic ways. In this dramatically shifting political landscape, the discourse in Britain’s media sphere seems strangely parochial, partly a reflection of American conservative fashions a generation ago, and partly an expression of Britain’s own anxieties over mass immigration, projected, like Brexit, onto more comfortable rhetorical ground.

Cameron’s largely moderate stance on the conflict, supporting Israel’s right to strike Hamas after its October brutalities while emphasising Britain’s opposition to Israel’s immoderate violence against Palestinian (and now British) civilians, and its commitment to a future Palestinian state, is broadly the correct one, even if the Conservative party’s Overton Window has drifted closer to Likud in intervening years than Thatcher would have permitted. Thatcher herself, as Bermant notes, “underlined that Israel’s policies were having a problematic impact on the geopolitics of the region: it was very unhelpful that the United States was being perceived as ‘Israel’s lawyer’, while the Soviet Union was being seen ‘as the friend of the Arabs’” — a dynamic Putin is happily exploiting this today, while America’s stock dwindles in both the Red Sea and the court of world opinion. Instead, Bermant observes: “Thatcher argued for Britain and the EC to play a role as ‘a third party’ which was ‘not bound by US or Soviet policies.’” Though perhaps, as I argued at the beginning of the war, it would have been better for us to stay out of the matter entirely: better for Britain, better for the Palestinians, and ultimately better for Israel and its Western advocates.

Suggested reading

Israel is no longer Britain's war

By Aris Roussinos

When the war ends, when journalists are allowed into Gaza as the full civilian toll is unearthed and counted, the more outlandish expressions of solidarity with Netanyahu’s campaign made by Right-wing pundits will surely come to be seen as a needless, unforced error. As Bermant recently observed: “the Netanyahu government refuses to spell out its objectives for the end of the Gaza war and has allowed the most extreme elements in his government to exert influence over the management of the war… Israel’s prime minister has yet to come out against those in his government who have called for the displacement of Palestinians and the Jewish resettlement of Gaza.” The results have been, and will be, precisely what any detached observer or sufficiently critical friend would have expected.

Losing the American support on which its continued existence depends, with France now mooting sanctions against Israel, and a simultaneous genocide case working its way through the Hague, Netanyahu has dramatically worsened Israel’s strategic position. Within the context of this self-inflicted diplomatic injury, the focus on Right-wing discourse or campus radicals or pro-Palestine protests looks, at the most charitable interpretation, wrongheaded.

Perhaps the last word is best left to Thatcher herself. Summing up her years-long engagement with the region, she noted that “the United States, which was the power most responsible for the establishment of the state of Israel, will and must always stand behind Israel’s security. It is equally, though, right that the Palestinians should be restored in their land and dignity: and, as often happens in my experience, what is morally right eventually turns out to be politically expedient. Removing, even in limited measure, the Palestinian grievance is a necessary if not sufficient condition for cutting the cancer of Middle East terrorism out by the roots. The only way this can happen, as has long been clear, is for Israel to exchange ‘land for peace’, returning occupied territories to the Palestinians in exchange for credible undertakings to respect Israel’s security.”

More Likudist than the vast majority of Israelis, more uncompromisingly heartless than Thatcher herself, the Tory commentators who claim the Iron Lady’s mantle would do well to reflect on her example.

For a party that is trailing in the polls and uncertain of its direction, hostility to Net Zero has an obvious allure. As a rallying cry, it can speak both to the tax-cutting, libertarian wing of the party and to its culture warriors, eager to renew the fight against experts, elites and international organisations. It offers a bridge between the tech-bro-utopianism of the prime minister and the concerns of motorists and lower-earners, who are facing rising emissions-costs. For many Conservatives, Net Zero smacks of subsidies, price guarantees and market interventions: a centralised re-planning of the economy that owes more to socialism than to science. And while the Uxbridge by-election centred on air-quality, not Net Zero, it offered a glimmer of electoral light to a party raking through the ashes of its recent poll-ratings.

But climate scepticism does not (yet) have a monopoly on Conservative thought. The Conservative Environment Network lists more than 200 MPs and peers on its website, drawn from across the party spectrum. The conflict over Net Zero, then, is not a contest between the “woke” Left and the “radical” Right. It brings into collision different visions of Conservatism, in a struggle for ownership of the Conservative tradition.

Tory environmentalists can point to a strong record on the issue, stretching back to the Fifties. It was Conservative governments that created the Department of the Environment, the National Parks Authorities, the Environment Agency and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research. Tory administrations introduced the Clean Air Acts, the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Environment Act, as well as the Landfill Tax, the Road-Fuel Escalator and, in England, the Plastic Bag Charge. And it was a Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, who made Net Zero a legal obligation.

When global warming first entered public consciousness in the Eighties and Nineties, it was Margaret Thatcher who sounded the most trenchant warnings. Addressing the World Climate Conference in 1990, she accused the world of “playing with the conditions” of life. “We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin”, endangering “the biological balance … on which human life depends”. This was a distinctly Conservative environmentalism — even taking care to warn business that “there will be no profit… for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet”.

For Conservative environmentalists, this is not simply a record to defend. It is a reminder that there are powerful strands within Conservatism that can be mobilised against its climate sceptics. The first is the instinct to “conserve”: the idea on which both “conservatism” and “conservation” are founded. For the Conservative intellectual Roger Scruton, global warming engaged “a fundamental moral idea to which conservatives attach great importance: the idea that those responsible for damage should also repair it”. He drew inspiration from the writings of Edmund Burke and his call to partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. For Burke, the living were but the “temporary possessors and life-renters” of society. As such, they had a moral responsibility not to “commit waste on their inheritance by destroying at their pleasure”, or “to leave to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation”.

Suggested reading

The great Net Zero lie

By Thomas Fazi

That belief intersected with an emphasis, drawn from Christian conservatism, on “stewardship”: the belief, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, that humans were not the lords of creation but “the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged… with preserving life itself”. As she told the Conservative party conference in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy — with a full repairing lease.”

For much of its history, the Conservative Party was pre-eminently the party of the land; rooted, not just in the “landed interest”, but in a patriotic commitment to the natural environment. As Stanley Baldwin put it: “England is the country and the country is England.” Its sights, sounds and smells — “the corncrake on a dewy morning… the wild anemones in the woods of April” — should “be the inheritance of every child born into this country”. Scruton called this “oikophilia”: the love of home, understood not as nostalgia, but as a desire to pass on the heritage into which we were born. It was an impulse, he noted, that had mobilised millions behind the cause of environmental protection, through bodies such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Conservatism also has a tradition of thinking critically about markets, though it has been less visible in recent decades. For Scruton, markets were not a “quasi-religious” institution but a means to an end. In so far as they tended to equilibrium, markets were a useful “social organism” that contributed to “the maintenance of the social ecology”. But if costs could be dumped on “future generations”, or if “waste and spoliation” were treated “as cost-free externalities”, markets would become “anti-social and exploitative machines”.

Scruton offered a passionate, Conservative critique of the view that “growth” was always to be prized: “Growth is good only if it does not fill the sinks. In this sense much of the growth that we have seen since the Second World War has not been a gain but a loss — a vast appropriation from the future of assets that are being used up and not replaced.” Even Thatcher insisted that “free markets” would “defeat their object” if they did “more damage to the quality of life through pollution” than the well-being they promoted by “the production of goods and services”.

In this spirit, not with the laissez-faire insouciance they’re remembered for, the Thatcher governments intervened directly in markets, using taxes to discourage leaded petrol and banning products containing harmful CFCs. This owed something to Thatcher’s respect for scientific opinion: as she warned in 1988, “a nation which does not value trained intelligence is doomed”. It also marked her aversion to debt and her belief in “precautionary action”. If it was wrong to burden future generations with the costs of borrowing, it was equally wrong “to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up”. She compared climate action to household insurance, warning that it would be “more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.

This was climate politics as good housekeeping. It was also ecology as national security. “Spending on the environment”, Thatcher told an American audience, “is like spending on defence — if you do not do it in time, it may be too late”. In the decades that followed, the security implications of climate change would become ever more pressing. The 2021 Integrated Review, published by Boris Johnson, listed climate change alongside terrorism as a threat to security and prosperity. It was in response to such warnings that Johnson named “tackling climate change” as his “number one international priority”.

What does this mean for the future? Climate change asks new questions of all political traditions, but Conservative environmentalism has rich resources on which to draw from across its intellectual firmament. For those who are not Conservatives, the results may sometimes be frustrating. Conservative environmentalism may be more drawn to market solutions, or more sceptical of international agreements. The localism prized by Scruton may seem hopelessly inadequate to a global crisis, while the commitment of the Conservative Environment Network to “grow our economy faster” will alarm for whom “growth” itself is the problem.

More from this author

Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

By Robert Saunders

Conservative environmentalism will not look the same as its Labour or liberal equivalents — but that is precisely why we need it. Faced with such an awesome challenge, conservatism can bring a set of tools, ideas and insights that would otherwise be missing, in a mutually enriching exchange. As John Stuart Mill reminded the liberals of his own day, “from points of view different from his, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees”.

If Conservatism turns its back on the climate question, it will be a dereliction of the Conservative tradition and those who claim to represent it. In 1936, in a debate over German rearmament, Winston Churchill, issued a warning that is as resonant today as when it was first delivered:

“Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger… The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

“We cannot avoid this period,” Churchill concluded; “we are in it now”. Conservatives, and everyone else, should rise to the challenge.

British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.

The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.

Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.

Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.

Suggested reading

The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.

But Thatcher’s personal style — her flamboyant awkwardness and her obvious distaste for her political enemies — did not suit the new mood. She was never comfortable with consensus, even when the consensus in question was one that she had helped create. The personal myth of Margaret Thatcher began to diverge from Thatcherism. Earlier in the Eighties, for all her strident tone, Thatcher had been a politician, intuitively conscious that she needed to compromise and sometimes even retreat if she was to survive and achieve some measure of what she wanted. Later in the decade, she was increasingly prone to present herself as a kind of British de Gaulle — a national saviour who was above politics.

The emphasis on Thatcher as a person created problems because, as the writers behind Marxism Today had rightly sensed, Thatcherism had not really been about Thatcher. Her government had contained able and powerful ministers who pushed through different aspects of its policy. Indeed, Thatcherism was built on a kind of coalition that involved compromises and alliances between different kinds of people with different priorities. Keith Joseph was the most prominent political thinker behind the whole thing but useless at practical politics. Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker were indifferent about — in Walker’s case hostile to — some of the economic theory that underlay Thatcherism, but both men delivered spectacular practical results.

More from this author

Conservatives rely on inequality

By Richard Vinen

Not surprisingly, Thatcher’s emphasis on her own personal significance and her alienation from the mundane compromises of domestic politics annoyed her colleagues. (It was an alienation that was increased by the fact that she came to think of herself more and more as an international stateswoman rather than a British politician.) It helped precipitate her eviction from the leadership of her party and thus from Downing Street. Thatcher’s fall was, though, a revolution within Thatcherism rather than a revolution against Thatcherism. The economic policies of the Thatcher government continued. Indeed, in policy terms, Major was more Thatcherite than Thatcher: he privatised the railways — something that she had hesitated to do — and closed the last British coal mines.

Thatcher’s fall further divided the cult of Thatcher as an individual — let’s call this “Thatcherianism” — from the policies of Thatcherism. Thatcher had been on the Conservative front bench for most of her political career. Now for the first time she was freed from the constraints of practical politics. She became more extreme and was deeply bitter towards party leaders, especially Major, whom she believed had betrayed her. The myth of her martyrdom was cultivated by a small number of loyalists who had followed her into political exile, as well as by younger people who came into parliament too late to have direct experience of what the Thatcher governments had actually done.

“Thatcherianism” began to acquire its own political identity, separate from Thatcherism. It revived the social conservatism that had been part of Thatcherism in 1979 but had largely disappeared from the policies of the Thatcher government by 1989. Most important, it pushed a ferocious hostility to the European Union — particularly after Thatcher presented herself as the standard bearer of opposition to the Maastricht treaty in the early Nineties. This was quite a break with the past: it had been Labour that spoke of leaving the European Community in 1983. Thatcherites had welcomed West-European unity as a means of resisting Communism and promoting free markets. Thatcher was always emotionally ill-at ease with Europe but, during most of her years as prime minister, she was also realistic enough to know that emotion is a bad guide to politics. As late as 1988, she would regarded leaving the European Union as bat-shit crazy.

Suggested reading

Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

In an odd way, the rise of a personalised “Thatcherianism” cult played into John Major’s hands in the early Nineties. The intemperate, ungracious nature of attacks by Thatcher and her remaining allies occluded the extent to which the Major government was really continuing her economic policies. It also contributed to the sense that Major was a moderate and consensual figure — and this, in turn, helped make policies that might once have seen as highly controversial seem like a new kind of common sense. Tory frontbenchers in the Nineties managed to imply that they had moved on from the savage conflicts of the Eighties and that it would be unreasonable to hold them responsible for the policies of the Thatcher governments — governments in which many of them had served as senior ministers.

Of course, the success of Thatcherism extended beyond the Conservative Party. The truth is that large parts of the British establishment — civil servants, Labour politicians and even the occasional trade unionist, such as Frank Chapple — regarded much of what the Thatcher government did, notably breaking the miners, as necessary. There was also a more general shift in public opinion and behaviour. Dozens of small-scale actions — buying shares in privatised companies, voting for demutualisation of buildings societies (or taking the bonuses even when we voted against) — made most of the British middle class complicit in one way or another. Indeed, it is extraordinary how the free-market pervades everyday life in modern Britain. I am writing these words in Delhi. When I first came here, in 1984, the notion of haggling over money when, for example, one took a ride in an auto-rickshaw, still seemed odd. Now we are, in effect, haggling over money every time we book an Uber online.

Andrew Gamble was the single most important person to write on Thatcherism for Marxism Today. When he kindly came to speak to my students about this part of his career, he remarked on the brief commercial success of the magazine after it was stocked by W.H. Smith. The students asked whether this meant he got paid more. He grinned ruefully and said that he — and, so far as he knew, the other contributors — never even thought to ask about payment. Things have changed. A friend of mine gave a television interview after Thatcher’s death. A child of the Eighties herself and with a keen entrepreneurial instinct, she was much impressed that the leading public intellectual with whom she shared the studio negotiated ruthlessly about his appearance fee. Finally, the cameras went on and the interviewer asked what Thatcher had done to the country. The leading public intellectual paused to compose his features into an appropriately solemn expression and said: “I am afraid that she made us all much more selfish.”

Lord Hailsham famously wrote that Toryism was about fox hunting and religion (by which he meant the Anglican religion of the Book of Common Prayer). More generally, Conservatives were united by a moral belief that people had the right to dispose of their property and a practical sense that capitalism was likely to provide people with the most property to dispose of. Most of all, Conservatives believed in inequality. They thought that some people deserved to be richer, more powerful and more respected than others.

Well, fox hunting and the prayer book have both gone and no Conservative government is going to bring them back. The positions of capitalism and property are more complicated. Boris Johnson must have been the first Conservative prime minister who would not have been mortified to see it reported that he had said “fuck business”. This is partly because the Conservative Party has changed. Its leaders are relatively young, and if they pursued any career outside politics, it is likely to have been journalism.

It is also because capitalism has changed. Once it could be taken for granted that captains of industry were Right-wing in ways that bore no direct relation to their business interests. In 1977, when the CBI was asked to canvas opinions from its members about what a Conservative government should do, suggestions included restoring national service, controlling immigration and deterring couples from “living in sin”. Such opinions would be unimaginable now.

Toryism and capitalism were once joined together in institutional terms. The heads of large companies who funded the party took it for granted that their opinions would be sought and that they would count for more than rank-and-file party members. Today, however, the whole nature of business has changed. The very notion of a British company seems quaint. Note the studied vagueness of BP about what the “B” stands for and remember Margaret Thatcher’s fury when British Airways replaced the Union Jack on the tailfins of its planes with an abstract design.

Most of all, though, the Tories have lost contact with the central core of their beliefs, from which everything else springs: inequality. Just before the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the historian Maurice Cowling edited a collection of conservative essays in which he dismissed the idea, which had become widespread during the Cold War, that Conservatism was about the defence of freedom. Conservatives, he insisted, only believed in freedom as a means to create inequality or defend existing inequalities.

I doubt if the smooth young men in Conservative Central Office would have put it in such blunt terms, but they (especially those who had recently been taught by Cowling) would have understood what he was driving at. Conservatives are less likely to defend inequality now. This is partly because nothing makes rich people more uncomfortable than the discovery that some people are even richer than themselves. Globalisation has created, and made visible, a class of super-rich people who make a Chancery QC feel like a pauper. Rishi Sunak must surely be the first Conservative politician whose career has been damaged by the fact that he is, in the eyes of many party members, too wealthy.

More from this author

The myth of Tory Birmingham

By Richard Vinen

Real Tories believed in inequality for reasons that went beyond economics. They lived in a world of hierarchy and authority. It was a world in which tough-minded magistrates gave stiff sentences to poachers. It was underwritten, for much of the 20th century, by military experience. No institution in England reflects the class system more faithfully than the army and no social distinction is more ruthlessly policed than that between “officers” and “other ranks”. The two World Wars and the retention of conscription until the early Sixties meant there was a time when most British men had military experience. This did not make them all Conservatives — servicemen gave the Labour Party a large majority in 1945. What it did mean was that those people who were already Conservative had their belief in hierarchy reinforced.

Conservative leaders — captain Macmillan, lieutenant colonel Heath — derived much of their prestige from military rank, as did the local notables who organised the party at local level. Yet only a tiny fraction of the population has military experience now. In spite, or because, of this, Conservative fantasies focus ever more on a certain image of the military — but it is an image that is, in its odd way, democratic rather than hierarchical. For instance, one of the strongest themes in Conservative thinking now involves not the imposition of authority but the defence of relatively low-ranking soldiers who have infringed criminal law or military regulations — hence the campaign against soldiers being prosecuted for their actions in Northern Ireland or Afghanistan.

The decline in military experience goes with a more general change. Grassroots supporters of the Conservative Party have always been relatively old but the party used to have complicated relations with this group. An internal document from the early years of the Thatcher government suggested that the party’s support among the retired was a source of problems: “The Government’s economic policy is a long-term policy and the elderly do not think long term.” Of course, real Tories used to think long-term because they saw themselves as part of institutions that would continue beyond their death or simply because they spent a great deal of energy devising trust funds to benefit their grandchildren.

But this kind of long-term thinking is rarer now. Almost the defining feature of Conservative policy — with regards to everything from public debt to fossil fuel — is a slash-and-burn attitude that focuses on material gains to be made in the short term. I sometimes think that the only real Tories are the dreadlocked activists of Extinction Rebellion: people who understand that politics is about debts that might be owed to generations yet unborn and who display a commendable indifference to the short-term vagaries of electoral politics.

Suggested reading

Is this the end for Liz Truss?

By James Sean Dickson

In any case, old age is not what it used to be. Life expectancy and early retirement have both increased — so a disconcertingly large proportion of Conservatives have not worked for many years. A person born in 1926 could claim, with some justification, that they had had a harder life than their own children and might, therefore, have been exposed to harsh realities. This is conspicuously not true of someone born, in, say 1948. These are people who were born into peace and the welfare state. They bear a disconcerting resemblance to their contemporaries who joined student protests in 1968. A part of the press serves the same function for Tory activists that hallucinogenic drugs served for the soixante-huitards: the Mail and the Express are now so removed from reality that their readers might as well be getting their information from the website of David Icke. In fact, the most notable feature of Conservative supporters is often their reluctance to grow up — which may explain why they have, in the past few years, been prone to identify with young or, in the case of Johnson, ostentatiously juvenile, leaders.

A belief in inequality co-existed awkwardly with the extension of democracy. The third Marquess of Salisbury once wrote that it would be absurd if the votes of “two day-labourers” counted for more than that of the Baron de Rothschild. What made the Tories successful in the age of universal suffrage was deference. A political scientist working in the Sixties found that many working-class Tories believed that an Etonian would make a better prime minister than a grammar schoolboy.

The problem for Conservatives now is that democracy has become far too egalitarian. Social media has encouraged the idea that everyone who can hit a keyboard has a right to have their opinion respected. Class divisions count for less as everyone affects a plebeian air — Boris Johnson seems to have been popular with working-class voters not because he is an Etonian but because they think he is “like them”. Worst of all, democracy has infected the Conservative Party itself. It seemed like a revolution when, in 1965, Tory MPs were first given the chance to elect their leader (rather than having him — it always was a him — imposed by a “magic circle” of party elders). Now, power has passed from MPs to party members, and this summer the party members imposed a leader that the majority of MPs did not want.

In easier times, Liz Truss might have been the leader to restore Conservatism. Her own origins are on the Left and her beliefs are probably those of a classical liberal, but, perhaps for that reason, she sometimes seems to understand the traditions and style of Toryism better than people who were born into Conservatism. Most of all, Truss believes in the one thing that has most embarrassed Tories in recent years: inequality. Cutting taxes for the rich would have been as Conservative as cutting benefits for the poor.

Suggested reading

Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

By John Oxley

As it is, things do not look good for the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects but those of us who feel nostalgic for real Conservatism should not despair. Winning elections is over-rated. Toryism was, for much of its early history, a movement of opposition. True conservatism has, of necessity, a pessimistic, almost Sisyphean, quality: its practitioners know that they cannot really hold back change and that they will always be fighting a doomed rear-guard action.

Pessimism can produce two different forms of Conservatism. One emphasises the need to keep things going with as little damage as possible and therefore to hold on to power at all costs; the other appreciates the symbolic value of the hopeless fight. The conflict between the two approaches was incarnated in the bitter rivalry between the managerial Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, who could not see a three-line whip without voting against it or a ministerial office without resigning from it. Margaret Thatcher managed, at least when she was most successful, to combine pragmatic action with principled rhetoric — so that she sometimes seemed like the leader of an opposition to her own government.

If the most dramatic opinion polls of the last few days are correct, the Tories might not just cease to be party of government; they might not even be the Official Opposition. This would be no bad thing. Fifty or sixty Tory MPs would be just the right number. They could make their voices heard without any serious chance of controlling the commanding heights of policy. If they concentrated their efforts, they might even succeed in bringing back fox hunting.

And yet it is in Birmingham that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership will face each other tomorrow, and it is there again that the winner will address the party at its annual conference in October. So, what makes the current Conservative Party so keen to court the city?

Part of the answer to this question lies in the very incongruity of the association between Birmingham and the party. At a time when the competition for Tory leadership pits a woman who began her career at Shell against a man who began his at Goldman Sachs, Conservative spin doctors want to create some distance from the global capitalist elite. Birmingham is a good place to start. Shell had a small back-office there once but most of its back-office work is now done out of Chennai or Manila. As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham — though some of the more erudite ones may recall that there was once a Birmingham stock exchange, which closed in 1986, just as the London exchange took off.

More generally, in the aftermath of Brexit, Conservatives like to see themselves as representatives of “deep England”. Birmingham, an unglamorous city in the centre of the nation, looks like the capital of this fantasyland from the Home Counties. When people, Tories especially, imagine the “real England”, it is almost invariably rural and, to a surprising extent, rural imagery often comes from Birmingham. Think of Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”, a place that seems to derive from the — then semi-rural — suburb of Birmingham in which the author grew up. Radio 4, keen to demonstrate its non-metropolitan credentials, sometimes ships its presenters to Birmingham for a few hours of Today or Start the Week, but practically the only BBC programme that is still produced in the city is The Archers. It was in here that Theresa May delivered her speech of 2016 in which she remarked that “citizens of the world” were “citizens of nowhere”.

Birmingham is also a perfect case study for the current Conservative fascination with “levelling up” the provinces. Joseph Chamberlain, much admired by May’s advisor Nick Timothy, is often presented as having been the incarnation of municipal activism when he was mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s. Later, after he moved to national politics and left the Gladstonian Liberals to join forces with the Tories, he became the incarnation of Right-wing populism.

There are, however, some odd things about Birmingham’s current place in the Tory imagination. The notion that its population is deeply rooted would not survive the briefest glance at the census. If anything characterises the city, it is migration. Work has always drawn people there — from surrounding counties in the 19th century, from Wales in the Thirties (3% of the entire employed population of the principality moved to the Midlands) and from overseas in the period since 1945. Go back a generation or two and the “somewhere” from which Birmingham people come is likely to be Galway, St Kitts or the Punjab. Birmingham Conservatives, by the way, did not always have easy relations with the city’s immigrant population — though were more discreet in the expression of their opinions than their counterparts in neighbouring Smethwick, who became notorious for using a racist slogan in the 1964 general election.

Suggested reading

How Birmingham changed the world

By Paul Lay

As for “levelling up”, the city’s history shows how vacuous the concept is. Joseph Chamberlain was a powerful local figure who had great resources at his disposal. Birmingham’s rise was engineered by its own local elites, particularly the network of intermarried Unitarian families who gathered around Chamberlain. He did not depend on favours from national government. The current Conservative mayor of the West Midlands — Andy Street — is an amiable and well-meaning man but hardly in the Chamberlain mould. He won his position by a narrow majority: the proportion who voted against having a regional mayor at all, in a 2012 referendum, was larger than the proportion who voted in favour of having a Tory one in the 2017 election. He also has little money to spend: Conservatives in the Eighties stripped local government of much of its financial power. And while Chamberlain ran a small empire of municipal enterprises, the initiatives that come from Andy Street are less tangible — I suspect that most people living in the band that extends from the university to the site of the old Longbridge factory (my mother among them) would be surprised to hear that they inhabit the “Central Technology Corridor”.

In any case, Birmingham people with long memories may suspect that central government attempts to level up are more likely to be a source of problems than a solution. Many of the city’s economic problems in the Eighties sprang from the fact that the Board of Trade, keen to move industry to the “Development Areas” of the North, refused to grant permission for the establishment of new factories in Birmingham. As a result, the city was frozen into an economy that revolved around motor manufacture.

The relations between Conservatism and Birmingham are, in fact, so odd that it is worth dwelling on their history — a history that might raise awkward questions. In political terms, Birmingham was born in opposition to Toryism. It first attained parliamentary representation as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill, but not as a passive beneficiary of largesse from London. The Birmingham Political Union had been one of the most important instruments in bringing the Reform Bill about, and it had done so in opposition to the most famous Tory of the early 19th century: the Duke of Wellington. For slightly more than the first half-century of its parliamentary representation, Birmingham only once, and briefly, returned a Tory MP.

Suggested reading

The Haçienda saved Manchester

By Dave Haslam

In some ways, the city was an anti-Conservative place even before there was much in the way of formal political activity there. The ancien régime institutions that Toryism existed to defend were all weak in Birmingham. There was no real aristocracy in the town. It is true that the aristocratic Calthorpes owned the Edgbaston estate — which became the suburb in which much of the local bourgeoisie lived. But the Calthorpes were not really great figures in the city, and a member of the family was trounced when he was foolish enough to stand as a Conservative in opposition to the Chamberlainite Liberal machine.

Meanwhile, in statistical terms, Birmingham was an Anglican town (unlike the industrial towns of the North). Still, it had no Cathedral until the 20th century. The only real centre of Anglican and Tory power, until the City council managed to bring it to heel, was King Edward’s grammar school, which had been run since the 16th century by a self-selecting oligarchy of governors. King Edward’s has indeed produced some significant Tories but the intellectual self-confidence that the school imparts does not always fit easily with the party. One sees this in David Willetts, so intelligent that he sometimes doubts that he is really a Tory, and Enoch Powell, so intelligent that he made the rest of his party doubt that they were really Tories.

No one incarnated Birmingham’s natural anti-Tory bent better than Joseph Chamberlain. At a time when the Conservatives stood for Church and crown, he began his career as a republican and ended it as an atheist. He regarded the aristocracy with open contempt. However, he broke with Gladstone over Home Rule in 1886 and, thereafter, worked in alliance with the Conservatives. Birmingham became a Conservative, or, strictly speaking, a Unionist city, and this was seen most strikingly after Joseph’s death. Between the wars, there were times when Conservative cabinets contained three Birmingham MPs, including Joseph’s sons, Austen and Neville.

Suggested reading

What made Blakenall turn Tory?

By Etan Smallman

Neville, though, was both the epitome of Conservative success in Birmingham and the instrument of its downfall. When he became prime minister in 1937, every single Birmingham MP was a Conservative. In 1945, five years after his death, the Labour Party won ten out of the 13 Birmingham seats. This was partly because appeasement so discredited the Chamberlain tradition (though several Birmingham Conservative MPs had, in fact, opposed it) and partly because the war economy had created a more self-conscious and unionised working class. Factories associated with the motor industry had been centres of Tory power between the wars. Herbert Austin, owner of the Longbridge car factory, was a Conservative MP who often sacked trade unionists and kept his men working late to stop them voting in municipal elections. Austin, like Chamberlain, died early in the war; by its end, Longbridge was heavily unionised.

Birmingham was a boom town after 1945. School leavers could find jobs in days. Conservatives were not always comfortable with full employment. Walter Higgs, a motor manufacturer who had been Conservative MP for West Birmingham, remarked, just after the 1945 election, that “the only way to get Birmingham people to work is have ten men after every nine jobs and empty bellies”. Another notable wrote in a private report that Conservatism in Birmingham was suffering from “over full employment”. But, though prosperity broke the Conservative monopoly of the Thirties, it did not create a new monopoly for Labour. Birmingham voters were what sociologists labelled “affluent workers”. Their support for Labour was an instrumental one based on what they took to be their interests rather than a product of ancestral loyalties. It may be because loyalty to Labour was never particularly deep that the city never turned against the party with the bitterness seen in some Northern constituencies in recent years.

In retrospect, it is obvious that the turning point for Birmingham came in 1979. “Thatcherism” was made in Birmingham — in the sense that Stuart Hall’s article on “The Great Moving Right Show” (published in Marxism Today in January 1979), which first used the term “Thatcherism” in a systematic way, was written while he was at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was made in Birmingham too in that Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to define itself against two displays of working-class power — that seen in 1972 when striking miners and their allies from Birmingham blockaded the Saltley coke depot and that seen in strikes at the Longridge car factory, which was, by now, part-nationalised.

Suggested reading

Why pit villages turned to rave

By Etan Smallman

There was, though, something strange in all this. Significant numbers of Birmingham people voted Conservative in 1979. It was no surprise that Sutton Coldfield (a leafy suburb that had only been annexed to the city in 1974) should have the largest Conservative majority in the country. It was odder that Northfield and Selly Oak — the two constituencies closest to the Longbridge car plant — both went Tory in 1979. Partly, this was the last hurrah of the post-war “affluent worker” — a vote against the pay restraint of the Callaghan government. Sections of the white working class perhaps expected the Thatcher government to be more radical on social and cultural issues (particularly immigration) than it turned out to be. Birmingham people certainly did not expect the Tories to be so radical on economic issues and the city’s economy dived in the early Eighties — this was the era when UB40 were in the charts and when the Kenrick and Jefferson stationery company were said to be almost the only thriving local business because they had the contract to print UB40 forms.

Birmingham has regained much of its prosperity in recent years but the vestiges of the Thatcher years are still visible. The city includes areas with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The Longbridge factory finally closed in the early part of this century and the area around it is the one area that resembles the “Red Wall” Tory seats of the North — it voted for Brexit and voted Conservative in 2019. However, the prosperous commuters of Sutton Coldfield and the white ex-car workers (or their widows) of Northfield are now the only people in Birmingham to vote Conservative. All the other eight Birmingham constituencies returned Labour MPs at the last election.

The oddest thing about Tory evocations of Birmingham is the very idea that the city ought to stand for something. It is a big, heterogeneous place and, partly because of its catastrophic development around busy roads in the Sixties and Seventies, different parts of the city can feel utterly separate from each other. The notion that this is “deep England” is a myth — but then, so is the notion that there is a “deep England”. The Tory fantasy implies something permanent and natural — rural, even (one thinks of Churchill addressing the population “in your cottages”). Yet Birmingham is above all a man-made place. It manufactured an image of rural England as much as it once manufactured the Spitfire. Any local asked to identify a landmark would talk about Spaghetti Junction or the Sentinel towers, rather than a hill or river. Joseph Chamberlain, meanwhile, would have despised all the talk of “heritage”, “ancestry” and “roots” that goes with deep England; he knew that the Tory party he helped create was no more “natural” than the orchids he grew in his hothouse. For him and his associates, Birmingham went, above all, with the phrase “self-made”.

It is a clear and important attempt to address the UK’s deep regional disparities, without relying on traditional fiscal redistribution. But trotted out so much over the past few years, the idea has been emptied of meaning; it has also been almost completely absent from the leadership campaign amid the broader debate on tax cuts and the culture wars. Neither candidate has grappled with it despite Michael Gove’s urging.

Liz Truss, a self-proclaimed Thatcherite, has made much of her plans to deregulate the economy and lower taxes — music to many Conservative member’s ears. But when it comes to urban regeneration and boosting left-behind places her emphasis is on “new low-tax, low-regulation zones”. Her own launch drew parallels with the Thatcher-era regeneration of the London docklands.

But Thatcherism didn’t really have the answers. The hugely-successful London docklands regeneration programme has, for instance, been described by Dr Jack Brown as “an extremely un-Thatcherite mechanism for achieving urban regeneration”, since it saw the state (via the London Docklands Development Corporation) acquire land, spend money on infrastructure, intervene in the market and expand public sector employment. Hardly the free market free-for-all promised by Truss. Neither is Eighties Merseyside a great example of Thatcherite levelling up. All Michael Heseltine as Minister for Merseyside could manage was to prettify Liverpool’s docks and inaugurate a garden festival, neither of which had any long-term impact on the rest of the city.

Meanwhile, Sunak is rigorously and risibly also claiming to be Thatcherite. Patrick Minford, economist and former advisor to Thatcher, is having none of it. He quite rightly claims that no Thatcherite would have raised taxes to a 70-year high. At least Truss’ plan for lower taxes would leave more money in people’s pockets to spend in their local areas, nominally boosting the local economy.

Sunak can certainly talk the talk when it comes to levelling up — he has won the support of Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen and signed the Northern Research Group’s levelling up pledge sheet — but it comes to walking the walk the former chancellor is immobile. During his time at the Treasury, he was a significant barrier to spending more on what should have been the Government’s flagship policy, including granting more money to levelling up when the policy was relaunched in November 2021 and placing his own leafy constituency – in the bottom 20% on the index of multiple deprivation – in the highest category for levelling up funding. If this is counts as having “readily embraced levelling up”, as Seb Payne wrote in yesterday’s FT, then I would love to see what Sunak would do if he were opposed to it. In reality, his instincts are more suited to the austerity era than today’s political context.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Will Lloyd

Neither of them — nor the party at large — recognises the true scale of the problem that levelling up seeks to address; even fewer people in government realise just how expensive the policy will be. The scale of spending needed goes “far beyond anything currently being contemplated” by the government, says the Resolution Foundation; it is on par with the reunification of West and East Germany, says The Centre for Cities, and so is the cost: around £2tn. Yet the Government’s Levelling Up Fund is currently at a paltry £4.8bn, roughly the same as the spending on “Project Gigabit” (roughly around 0.25% of what Centre for Cities say is needed).

Perhaps inconveniently for our candidates, voters are now convinced that levelling up is important. Polling by More in Common in January 2022 found that 59% of voters think progress on levelling up will be important in deciding who gets their vote in the next election. Among the sub-group who swung most strongly towards the Conservatives in 2019, the ones the party desperately needs to retain if it wants to hold the hallowed Red Wall, the proportion rises to 70%.

There are, however, risks to uniformly embracing levelling up as a key policy. It is particularly problematic in areas of traditional Conservative strength in the south of England. In the South East, 25% of voters think it will result in less money being spent in their local area, compared with just 2% who think there will be higher levels of spending. In the South West, the figures are 23% and 5%. The Liberal Democrats have been making hay with this, painting levelling up as something which focuses solely on the north of England and ignores the very real issues people are facing in southern coastal or rural communities. Some Conservatives also fear this is the case. Perhaps it’s no wonder that those leadership candidates, for a party now 10 percentage points behind in the polls, are trying to downplay the policy.

Suggested reading

Thatcher won't save the Tories

By Richard Bourke

But are the Conservatives really in a catch-22, whereby if they focus too much on levelling up they may hold on to some of the Red Wall at the expense of the so-called (and less rigorously defined) Blue Wall?

Not necessarily. There is a chance here for the new prime minister to properly embrace it. Only one quarter of voters know exactly what levelling up means, and one quarter have never heard of it — even though Boris Johnson described it as “the defining mission” of his government. So the new prime minister has the chance to reframe it as a policy for the whole country, one seeking to tackle the causes of poverty and a lack of opportunity wherever these are found.

Does either have the chops to do this? The scale of the costs involved — and the level of spending necessary — means Sunak is completely unsuited to the challenge. Truss, less so. In fact, one of her existing flagship policies might also provide the way forward for levelling up: “Covid bonds”. This is her proposal to package up Covid debt and repay it over a much longer term than the traditional government debt repayments of between 10 to 30 years, and separate it from traditional borrowing on the government’s books. It is an approach that could also be applied to the funding of levelling up.

Consolidated annuities (or “consoles”) — ie bonds that pay a fixed interest rate but have no fixed repayment date — could be used to fund proper levelling up at the scale required to truly tackle the problem. This would allow the government to separate levelling up borrowing from day-to-day borrowing, lock in current low interest rates, and free them from a set repayment date. Putting control of this money in the hands of Department for Levelling Up would also liberate the project from the straightjacketed thinking of the Treasury. The best time would have been when interest rates were truly rock bottom, but the second-best time is now.

Suggested reading

Tory voters say: spend, spend, spend

By David Jeffrey

There have been numerous proposals for what the new government should do under a levelling up agenda, some of it undoubtedly good — bringing back Gove as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, more devolution to combined authorities and councils, county deals, lifetime skills budgets, control of the bus network, prioritising spending in areas of deprivation — but the impact of levelling up will be limited if it is not backed up with significant financial firepower.

A proper funding scheme for levelling up is also necessary to reassure voters in the south of England that they will not be used as a magic money tree to fund spending in the north of England. It is also popular with Conservative voters: as I wrote here two years ago, Conservative voters as a whole think austerity has gone too far, and they want to see more money spent in their areas. This is particularly the case in the Red Wall. Only with enough money to go round, at a level suitable to tackle the UK’s long-term and deep-rooted issues wherever they occur, will the Conservative Party be able to hold on to both Red and Blue Walls.

Johnson himself recognised this, and used his final PMQs to issue a warning and a thinly-veiled dig at Sunak: “I love the Treasury, but remember, if we’d always listened to the Treasury we wouldn’t have built the M25 or the Channel Tunnel.” If we listen to the Treasury today we won’t get real levelling up tomorrow — or ever. And we’ll see Starmer in Number 10 come the next election.

Sunak will always be more comfortable in Davos than Darlington. But just as Thatcher challenged the traditional economic thinking of her time, Liz Truss could — at a push — do the same now.

The modern Tory Party is fond of picking fights with such unaccountable political forces. During the Coalition government, for example, Michael Gove used “The Blob” as a metaphor to describe the interconnected ecosystem of think tanks, teachers’ unions, campaigners and teaching targeted by his education reforms.

The Blob, a 1958 sci-fi movie, depicted a gelatinous alien that consumes everything in its path. And the kind of public and charity-sector organisations Gove denoted as “Blob” are, if not quite all-consuming, at least amorphous: a grey zone between government, charities, committees and other institutions.

Since the Tories rode to power in 2019 on a promise to defeat the Remainer Blob, Tory cannons have increasingly been trained upon this shadowy enemy. Gunfire is now regularly heard in an intensifying battle over the ideological focus of public institutions.

Liz Truss, for example, recently recommended that UK public bodies leave the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme. This “kitemark” programme, which at £3.2m delivers Stonewall’s single largest source of income, charges institutional and corporate members £2,500 a year or more to vet employment policies and practices for “LGBT+ inclusion”.

Led by grassroots feminist and gay-rights campaigns such as LGB Alliance and Sex Matters, there’s been a growing backlash against policies promoted by the Diversity Champions scheme. And in response, high-profile bodies have begun to back away. The Equality and Human Rights Commission allowed its membership to lapse, joined recently by University College London, the University of Westminster and Channel 4, Ofsted and the Ministry of Justice.

But how did Britain get to a point where it seemed reasonable for actual government departments to have their HR policies written by a highly politicised lobby group? How, in other words, did the Blob take over?

Prior to World War II, the relation of civic institutions to government was far less symbiotic — and far less elite. For example, some 27,000-odd pre-war “friendly societies” supported families at times of crisis in return for small regular contributions, and at their peak boasted a working-class membership numbering some 14 million.

But the mass, state-managed war effort made mass solidarity seem imaginable in Britain — and in turn drove the foundation of the welfare state. Civil society bodies and Labour leaders alike worried after Labour’s shock 1945 election victory that rolling out mass welfare would precipitate a decline in voluntarism and civil society institutions.

Four years later, a submission by St John Ambulance to Lord Beveridge observed how the British public assumed “the state will provide” and that “the man-in-the-street considered the Brigade’s work was over’. And so, indeed, it came to pass with the creation of nationwide welfare: membership of “friendlies” began to plummet.

Another raft of voluntarism fell to the pincer movement of declining religious observance and female workforce participation. The Mothers’ Union, founded in 1876, boasted 400,000 members by 1921. But it saw its membership halve to 222,000 by 1993 and haemorrhaged another 100,000 over the next decade. Some 75% of women with dependent children now work, up from 50% in 1975. It’s probably not a coincidence that membership of the Mothers’ Union plummeted over the same period: who has time for charitable fundraising and campaigning on top of kids and a job?

But as historian Matthew Hilton argues, civil society bodies haven’t so much disappeared as changed. Over the twentieth century, “service organisations” — those that do “good work” in particular places — were replaced by state-controlled welfare. And meanwhile, campaign-based NGOs have flourished.

Another voluntary organisation that’s declined dramatically since its twentieth-century heyday is the Women’s Institute. But as WI historian Jane Robinson notes, WI membership fell in no small part due to the WI itself encouraging women to enter public life — where many migrated into the Blob, in which women today make up 68% of the workforce.

And here perhaps we can see how and why such bodies have come unmoored from Britain’s great unwashed. Civil society organising has always attracted middle-class do-gooders; but thanks to the welfare state, there is less need today for those do-gooders to come into direct contact with the objects of their beneficence.

Instead, they join quangos, an acronym coined in the 1970s — the same decade that the bodies themselves drew the ire of Margaret Thatcher, who promised in 1979 to slash this proliferating and unaccountable sector.

But in 1994, The Independent reported that, far from shrinking quangoland, under the Tories quangocracy mushroomed until there was one such body for every 10,000 inhabitants of Britain: 5,521 of them, about three times as many as officially acknowledged by the Government, spending £46.6bn.

This is difficult to confirm, because the actual number of quangos is a highly political matter and depends on how you define them. What’s certain, though, is that quangocracy is by no means a Labour phenomenon. Cabinet Office data from 2002, five years into New Labour, lists 834 quangos. But toward the end of the New Labour decade, a 2009 Tory White Paper counts around 750 “Arm’s Length Bodies” — hardly evidence of growth. That same paper suggested these were funded to the tune of £80bn — which, adjusted for inflation, is not a huge jump on the amount spent in 1994, during the Major years.

In evoking a gelatinous, all-devouring alien life form, Gove’s “Blob” formulation implied that it is a feature of obdurately Leftist bureaucracies. But what if the Blob’s persistence is less evidence of Britain’s pernicious institutional anti-Toryism than evidence that Thatcher-style “limited government” is a mirage?

After all, four out of five quango staff kept their jobs after Cameron’s “bonfire of the quangos”. This stubborn persistence, if not growth, of quangos under Tory administrations suggests “limited government” is, in practice, more a matter of hiving off policy delivery into arm’s-length bodies.

It’s likely the Tories would justify this by claiming that “independent” bodies will be less noxiously Left-leaning than those in the pay of government. For example Ofsted, a key site of battle in Gove’s war on the education “Blob”, was set up under the Major government to replace Local Education Authority school inspections. The Major administration claimed LEAs were biased and inconsistent; but Tories also sought to kneecap a set of institutions they accurately understood as hostile to Conservative policy. Similarly, Gove’s drive to create academy schools spoke the language of school standards, while seeking to sap the power of LEAs viewed as institutionally Leftist.

But it’s far from clear that simply being removed from direct government control makes public bodies less hostile to the Tories. Objectively speaking, quangocracies flourish under Tory rule; but the Taxpayers’ Alliance reported last year that in 2018-19, more quangocrats than not preferred to bite the hand that (however covertly) feeds them. According to the report, 47.4% of political declarations from quango staff were pro-Labour, compared to 31.6% pro-Tory. Et tu, Brute.

Even those bodies created with resounding rhetoric about “independence” have a tendency, it seems, to drift leftwards. Faced with this realisation, the Johnson government has given up pretending that the Blob can be culled or made apolitical, and has instead (rather belatedly) begun populating it with conservatives. Predictably, this has prompted howls of rage from a Blob long accustomed to a pleasant lack of viewpoint diversity.

But while we may watch with interest the Tories’ newly Gramscian approach to Britain’s institutions, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating “the Blob” as something alien. It’s not hostile, and nor is it a plot by “the metropolitan elite” to steal political agency from the masses.

It’s us. For whether it’s whipped into shape by Victorian matrons, self-organised by working class communities or funded by the state, society is more than just individuals and light-touch government.

Over the individualistic twentieth century, we outsourced the purpose of self-organised social provision to the state. As a side-effect, we ended up professionalising the pursuit of social good so that well-meaning people could go on pursuing it. That may have come with advantages and disadvantages, but it wasn’t a Left-liberal conspiracy.

Tory governments presided over this growing quangocracy, whose existence served as a huge accounting fiddle. It shifted off the official government books a host of social and regulatory functions whose necessity was denied by the Thatcherite commitment to individualism and limited government.

But in displacing parts of its own government machinery into superficially “independent” bodies in the name of “limited government”, post-Thatcher Tories succeeded mostly in snookering themselves. They fantasised about an apolitical version of the “good”, and created supposedly “independent” bodies oriented toward this apolitical good. By handing civil society functions to these bodies, they could embrace Thatcherite individualism while pump-priming civil society on the sly.

But there is no such thing as an apolitical version of the good. Nor, naturally, are there independent bodies dedicated to delivering it. If the Tories aren’t well-represented in the (not at all apolitical or independent) Blob today, that’s on conservatives for having so long declined to join and shape it.

It’s late in the day indeed for the Tories to be grasping the magnitude of their misapprehension. And it will take frank reappraisal of some long-cherished Tory delusions before they’re able to address a political enemy largely of their own making.

Even the late Sir Roger Scruton’s worldview represented an uneasy marriage between Thatcherite capitalism and the last vestiges of the world that came before it. It didn’t ever quite perceive that the Thatcher revolution was too successful: by kicking away the last props of the pre-capitalist order that underwrote the traditional conservative worldview, it killed off that which it proclaimed to love. 

The ultimate irony was Scruton’s appreciation, late in life, of the post-Communist, quasi-authoritarian conservatism of Hungary and Poland as a model. For all the anti-Communism of their post-Cold War governments, surely it was the statist paternalism of their communist regimes that preserved in aspic societies fundamentally more conservative than those eroded by capitalist liberalism in the free-market West. Without Marx, there could be no Orban or Kaczynski; without communism, Hungary and Poland would look like Britain or France.

With this irony in mind, perhaps Government officials, ideologically adrift at a time of national crisis, would do well to read the Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s 72-page dissection of Britain’s decline in the latest issue of the New Left Review. A first draft of modern history from the groundbreaking author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson’s savage critique of modern Britain is as far from the court gossip and palace intrigue which characterises political journalism in this country as it is possible to be.

A product of Eton and Oxford, and of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 82-year old Anderson demolishes the British establishment from within. Like many European if not American Marxists, Anderson is a stern critic of the hyper-liberalism, derived from French Theory via American Puritanism, which disfigures much of the modern Anglophone Left. He is, indeed, more conservative in his thinly-veiled and patrician distaste for Anglo-Saxon liberalism than our own nominally Conservative government. So what guidance can this elderly communist give our Conservative leadership at a time of national crisis?

Citing the most doom-laden author of Germany’s interwar Konservative Revolution — noteworthy in itself — Anderson warns that “Decline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead,” for Britain, “is more like the term in Spengler’s mistranslated title — Untergang: not decline, but downfall”.

Britain’s problems are structural, the combination of appalling economic planning over decades and inherent constitutional dysfunction: “Without any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of Ukania  [a term for the UK adopted by Anderson from the Marxist and Scottish nationalist historian Tom Nairn] has been disrupted as never before since 1911–14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components — economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy — have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilised. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired.”

More from this author

Is cosmopolitanism our destiny?

By Aris Roussinos

The outcome, for Anderson, is the inevitable collapse of what he terms “the Westminster state”. As he declares, the “nexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyone’s guess.” Anderson’s essay, which follows the  slow-burning fuse of British decline back to the Early Modern period, is not party political: indeed, like many conservatives, he reserves his greatest ire for the various political and economic innovations of New Labour, which, like Thatcher before it, eroded Britain’s old order and replaced it with something worse. 

It is remarkable, for all his Marxism, how much Anderson sounds like a Tory grandee of old when he observes that Thatcher “had staged an intra-party coup, routing Tory paternalism as well as Labour corporatism with a cult of the market and a petty-bourgeois zeal no longer restrained by fear of the proletariat.” It is difficult, at times, in his dissection of the finely-graded class differences of Conservative leaders, or in his digressive lament for the declining standards of public schools, to discern where Anderson the Marxist analyst of power networks ends and where Anderson the harrumphing patrician begins. Either way, the upshot is the same. By the beginning of this century, he observes, “Tory England in the old sense was dead. What had replaced it in the Conservative Party was not better.”

In foreign policy, Anderson channels Powell as much as any left-wing thinker when he excoriates Blair and Brown’s “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power, whose pay-off overseas was a hugely greater sum of killing and torture”. Paraphrasing the conservative writer Peter Oborne approvingly, Anderson savages the “surrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcasters” which New Labour introduced into Britain’s political life, which, “instrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty world” still dominates our politics.

We think here, of the lobby correspondent Matt Chorley, who gloated on the downfall of Dominic Cummings, like a palace eunuch in the court of the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, that “every genius who arrives vowing to shake up the media, undermine, bypass and destroy the lobby, ends up leaving. And for good or bad, we’re still there.” That is, of course, precisely the problem, and it is Anderson’s open contempt for our elites that guides the path to some form of solution.

More from this author

Why Fukuyama was right all along

By Aris Roussinos

There is, perhaps, an echo of the Neo-Tories of the 1930s in Anderson’s tracing of the roots of Britain’s current day decline to the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, though of course fantasies of cutting a path back to Merry England do not occur to him. The source, for Anderson, of our relative economic decline is that “unlike any of its major competitors, the country knew no second revolution from above after the settlement of 1689, nor intervening convulsion on the road to modernity,” and thus the “fault-lines now becoming visible followed from the original composite nature of the British state itself.” 

Summarising the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis underpinning the New Left Review’s analysis of modern British history, Anderson, like the Scottish nationalist historian and writer Neal Ascherson, traces our current woes to our inhabiting an unreformed Early Modern union of three crowns, in which “the very success of the Anglo-British parliamentary monarchy in overtaking all rivals to become, as early as the 1690s, the most advanced power of Europe, fixed it fast in a shape whose counterparts elsewhere were later swept away”. 

Our early success is thus the cause of our modern failure: “Developmental priority and imperial success had arrested the British ancien régime—‘the grandfather of the contemporary political world’— half-way between feudal and modern forms, leaving its structures an ‘indefensible and unadaptable survival’ of the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism,” with the result that we remain trapped in “a conceptual landscape of Britain swept clean of all but ‘one significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.’”

If Anderson’s thesis is correct then all our problems, in one way or another, lead back to Westminster and the great gothic fantasia on the Thames, the increasing decrepitude of whose architectural fabric is an almost too obvious metaphor for the British state itself. Can it be restored without bringing the whole structure crashing down? The very antiquity of the British state is argued, by some, as a source of potential strength: if devolution could be rolled back, if the almost dictatorial powers available to a confident executive could be wielded effectively, perhaps some of the rot could be cut away, as long as the essential structure underpinning it remains strong?

But the British state is only as strong as the people entrusted with its care, and it is the deteriorating quality of our elites — a theme running through Anderson’s essay — that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of all. It is not, unfortunately, an exaggeration to observe that both main parties are dangerously incompetent, and that the also-rans are, if anything, even worse. The conservative journalist Henry Hill’s recent call for a British “Meiji Restoration,” a reassertion of the power of the central state in a programme of national renewal, “conducted with an eye to tradition and the power and sovereignty of the nation” surely falls at this hurdle: the idea may be good, we are forced to answer, but have you seen who’d carry it out?

So what comes after Westminster? The European experiment — a Tory attempt at “taking Britain into Europe as a surrogate for Empire”— clearly failed, leading to a fraught denouement whose terminal “Brexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations.”

As befits the editor of the New Left Review, whose deep engagement with European politics is not matched by that of Britain’s FBPE media ecosystem, Anderson is notably more critical of the wounded class consciousness or “status anxieties” of Britain’s bourgeois Remainers than of the Brexiteers, noting dispassionately that Remain was a project of the AB social class, support for which has led Labour to be “penned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-class— professional, managerial, clerical— Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives.” 

Suggested reading

Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

As Anderson observes witheringly, “the correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century,” yet in time, “some of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade.” Instead, for our post-1688 political class, it is “peripheral nationalism” that will likely be “their potential nemesis,” yet Anderson’s analysis of Scottish nationalism is entirely devoid of the lust for national self-negation, part romanticism-by-proxy and part-schadenfreude, displayed by the London intelligentsia for whom he shows such disdain.

Following Nairn, Anderson undercuts the self-aggrandising mythologies of the SNP, reminding his readers that Scotland was not a colony but a beneficiary of Britain’s industrialisation, and a keen and active participant in the imperial project. Instead, he traces Scotland’s sudden drive towards independence to distaste for New Labour, “the neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots — Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a man” whose economic mismanagement “antagonised more and more sectors of Scottish society”.

The essential dilemma for the SNP is that Brexit has made independence simultaneously more attractive and impossible to achieve, at least as a member of the European Union. Pleading to enter Europe from without, its way barred by another fragile Early Modern kingdom, Spain, “departure from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped it”. We remain, unfortunately, trapped in a loveless marriage for the foreseeable future, with no preferable partners available and an ugly rift of some kind awaiting us. 

Intriguingly, Anderson takes the case for English nationalism more seriously than does our political class, sounding like a Marxist Simon Heffer in his sympathy for “the country that had not spoken yet, the English, whose voice had long been usurped by a British-imperial class speaking for them”. As it stands, New Labour’s constitutional reordering, by granting autonomy to the peripheries while keeping England subject to the Westminster entity, has set the stage for English nationalism to manifest itself in unappealing forms: “in not affording it any institutional expression” Anderson argues, “Blair’s project made it likely that [Enoch] Powell’s intonation of it would be heard once more.” 

There are two Englands struggling to be born, Anderson argues: the angry, resentful England of the streets and a social-democratic European nation “with a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of ‘Little England’ — insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur.” Indeed, here Anderson approaches a call for what we have in these pages called a certain National Hobbitism. Whether this is what we’ll get is, of course, another matter entirely. More likely, in Anderson’s view, is “a very British attempt to ‘muddle through’ with a model which is itself not working,” treading water as “a dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brussels” until the Westminster state’s final collapse.

If there is a coherent thread to Anderson’s broad sweep of British history, it is that the relentless outward focus of the Westminster establishment set in train a slow-burning decline at home. As he writes, “Imperial expansion had formed this state. When that was no longer available, it followed its traditional outward bent, resolving to ‘press towards the internationalisation of the UK economy as the answer doing most good to the flourishing parts of the system and the least damage to the ailing ones.’”

Yet every attempt at reform, by trying to solve Britain’s structural problems at home through leaping headlong into the wider world, whether Europe, a subordinate role in the American empire or globalised finance, has only patched up the surface cracks and allowed the underlying rot to advance further. From 1945 onwards, British politics has been consumed by “futile attempts at retrieving national greatness, in which the very term ‘decline’ was a lure inviting the notion that ‘revival’ was possible”.

Suggested reading

Why we need populism

By Matthew Goodwin

The essential problem we now face is whether or not Britain can survive as a unitary state. For Anderson, the answer is simply No: Britain was a project of empire, and without empire, the glue that held it together has dissolved. Simply, in Anderson’s thesis, “the stability of the old order had rested on the external forcefield of empire; once that was gone, the patriciate lost its grip at home, deference giving way to a ‘molecular, resentful sort of rebelliousness’, disabling the supports of the old regime, and Thatcher’s lower-middle-class crusade could finish off the grandees”.

The work of misguided destruction in the cause of renewal that Thatcher began, Blair finished, emplacing the charges that now threaten to destroy our state. The British state, for Anderson (sounding at his most like Peter Hitchens), was the British establishment of old: once they and the empire were gone, shuffled off the historical stage by the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War and its consequences, decline and collapse were inevitable. 

The current government, entirely devoid of any meaningful political thought, would do well to read Anderson’s essay. He presents a narrative stripped of all illusions, in which, as in Marx’s famous quote, the British reader “is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. There is a strange unreality to British political life, with the relentless outward focus on the wider world so detached from our material conditions that it has become a kind of tragic delusion.

But there is no purpose pursuing dreams of a Global Britain while the Union fractures at home: any serious attempt to save the British state will require a serious, dispassionate appraisal of the structural flaws threatening to break it apart. If the current occupant of 10 Downing Street does not intend to make his mark in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he could do worse than inject a dose of rigorous Marxian thought into Britain’s body politic, and there is surely no more suitable vessel than the detached, patrician analysis of Perry Anderson, that most High Tory of Marxists.

All political philosophies come with sacred ideas, for which all else must be sacrificed. The Left uses accusations of -ism or -phobia to wall off areas it considers beyond the pale, and while the Right likes to imagine it is above such repressive strictures on debate, this is not quite true. For conservatives, ‘growth’ is a sacred idea, in much the same way as racism and other forms of prejudice are for the Left, and the result has been a steady shrinking of acceptable policy space, with social conservatism giving ground at every turn.

Since Thatcher broke the unions, and started the long march of privatisation through the utilities, conservatism and the free market have been treated as essentially the same thing. In mainstream political discourse, the accepted proxy for a healthy free market is GDP growth. In popular terms, to be conservative is to be for growth. Anything that might impede growth is therefore not conservative.

A prime example would be policies that encouraged — or at least didn’t financially penalise — parents to stay at home with their children. This is off-limits for modern conservatives, because it would incentivise millions of people to spend their days doing ‘economically inactive’ things like caring for the old and young and not contributing to GDP. Instead, modern conservatives mumble about feminism and the ‘gender pay gap’, and implement policies to get all those layabouts out earning and spending.

Today, three-quarters of mothers with dependent children work, and only 1.8 million women under 65 are ‘economically inactive’. But now the decades-long growth bonanza triggered by the movement of women from the home to the workplace is tapering off. So Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice has set its sights on the retired, no doubt hoping for another growth boost from swelling the ranks of the employed, as well as the savings on state pension payouts.

But who will replace all those older people caring for their grandchildren while both parents work? Modern conservatives can add the cost of all that paid childcare to the growth figures, and congratulate themselves on their stewardship of the country, even as the reciprocal obligations and benefits of family life attenuate ever further.

Suggested reading

Why Britain needs Christian politics

By Christopher Rhodes

Once upon a time, conservatism valued home ownership as a way to help young people plan for the future, put down roots, start families and play a full part in the social fabric. But in the interests of growth modern conservatives have encouraged us to treat housing as an asset class, leveraged for loan collateral or snapped up by overseas buyers for investment. Those who can buy move house every few years to ‘climb the housing ladder’, meaning they never put down roots or participate in local civic life. Prices have skyrocketed, closing out the young.

Over 40% of the social housing flogged at a discount under Right to Buy is now in the hands of rent-seeking landlords. Build more social housing? No, conservatives now argue, the free market should sort it out, driving jobs and growth. Chalk up all the money borrowed and spent against rising homeowner equity to growth, along with rising rental spending and of course house prices themselves. Meanwhile, a generation of young people gives up on home ownership, moulders in grim flat-shares, and vows never to vote Conservative. Who can blame them?

Once upon a time, conservatives saw us as custodians of the landscape and rural ways of life. After all, what could be more conservative than conservation? But for farms to become efficient, drive down prices and contribute to growth they must agglomerate into ever larger agribusinesses with minimal staff, using methods that decimate wildlife, degrade millennia of topsoil and turn varied, life-filled rural vistas into monoculture tundras. Laid-off farm workers can get zero hours jobs in Amazon warehouses, farm cottages can be sold for bankers’ second homes. We can import seasonal fruit pickers. When even that stops being economical, modern conservatives can loosen planning regulations and create jobs and growth concreting over the fields to house all the people they imported to bypass flatlining productivity and drive consumption and growth.

Suggested reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Once upon a time, conservatives thought that government should be democratically accountable to the electorate, and that a nation-state was the largest scale at which a legitimate demos could be convened. But as we are witnessing more or less in real time, when faced with the unenviable task of choosing between growth and democratic accountability or the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, a significant number of modern conservatives now prioritise growth.

Tories get caricatured as heartless, punitive plutocrats fixated on crime, cuts and the wealthy, and it is easy to see why, since more or less every other aspect of conservatism is hamstrung by being subordinate to growth. Modern conservatives can’t even touch the classic conservative topic of immigration because reducing the flow will harm growth. The result, as exhibited by every Tory Home Secretary in recent history, is a policy of holding the door open with one hand while making rude gestures with the other.

Immigrants, it is implied, should move here en masse, to plump our consumption figures and wipe the backsides of all the old people whose offspring can’t afford time off work to care for them. But those useful growth-boosters should all also feel jolly grateful and possibly a bit guilty about being graciously permitted to do so. It is an incoherent position, not to mention insulting to immigrants, who must find the doublethink bewildering.

Suggested reading

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

There is a great deal of merit in the argument that free markets and economic growth have overall been a force for good in the world. But today, the benefits of growth accrue to an ever smaller proportion of the population. And while Thatcherism bet on the persistence of ‘traditional moral values’ to provide a bulwark against the disruptive power of markets, the decades since her accession have shown Thatcherite market reforms to be increasingly in conflict with Thatcherite morals.

Nowhere has this battle for the soul of conservatism been clearer than in the Brexit referendum. Led by Conservatives, the Remain campaign hectored the masses about the risk to growth and the economy, and ended up losing to millions who have not benefited from growth for some time, and to whom social and cultural matters are now more important than the economy.

Once upon a time, conservatism appealed to the majority. But modern conservatism’s sine qua non — a commitment to growth at all costs — benefits an ever-smaller proportion of the population, undermines the environment, impoverishes rural life, picks at the social fabric, erodes family life and threatens the foundations of democracy and the nation-state. The Conservative Party’s erstwhile base values all these things, and is beginning to realise modern conservatives do not share this view.

Conservatism must choose. It must either call itself something other than conservative, or it must de-prioritise growth. The alternative is that there will soon not be a great deal left worth conserving, not least of conservatism itself.