What has happened to the UK party system? Part 1 - Conservatives

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“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

G K  Chesterton

“After a long life I have come to the conclusion that when all the Establishment is united it is always wrong.”

Harold MacMillan

One of the most striking things about modern politics is its one size fits all nature and the demos’ inability to get it to change direction. In subsequent posts, I intend to go into a lot more detail on why that is, but first of all I wish to go through the UK party system, identify what parties are supposed to stand for, looking at their good and bad points along the way and then hold this against where they currently stand to illustrate how our democracy, which is supposed to be based around choice, is no longer functioning. First up, the Conservative party. 

The Conservative Party takes its name from conservatism and as such, one would expect it to push for a conservative society. Conservatism does not regard itself as an ideology, having no program to work towards, but rather as an attitude based around an empirical observation of what has been seen to work. As such, it should be prudent, with a cautious approach to change, especially radical change. It has a somewhat negative view of human nature, based as it is, in the west at least, on its Christian roots, with the story of the fall of man. I actually find that one of its more endearing qualities, with its recognition that none of us are perfect and that you cannot create the perfect human, as other ideologies have aspired to, with dreams of fascist man or socialist man. Man is not the all powerful, all knowing master of all he surveys that some have imagined to be, but a flawed creation who makes mistakes and often lets himself down. He doesn’t know it all and the wise human has a modest, respectful and reverential attitude towards creation and is aware of his limits. This is why progressive ideologies with dreams of utopia are mistrusted; because human reason is often overestimated. In a world of infinite complexity, schemes for perfection are always likely to veer off in directions that were not intended.

“The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”

Peter Hitchens.

In such a world, how do people know what to do? The conservative answer is to learn from experience. See the world how it really is rather than how you would like it to be. To a certain extent, conservatism is guided by what it seeks to avoid rather than where it wishes to go. Humans being flawed, they are always in danger of getting themselves into a terrible pickle, so the first priority of conservatives is to ensure stability and security in society. This is doubly important for conservatives, as they emphasise the emotional side of humanity rather than the rational, which is often the part emphasised by progressive ideologies. A breakdown in the social system is likely to lead to fear, anger and ultimately violence. 

As a result, conservatism tends to uphold the status quo. This obviously has a benefit for the ruling classes in society as it is likely to ensure that they remain at the top. Throughout its history, conservatism has upheld property, privilege and paternalism.  Let's just unpack those.

Traditional conservative support for property is linked to conserving. In this sense, it is not entirely personal property. Property owning families would pass their legacy onto subsequent generations, who had a duty to look after it and preserve it for the following generations. That word duty comes up a lot in conservatism and it is one of the things that sets it apart from the atomistic worship of the individual of the New Right. Conservatism believed in community, the emotional bonds that tie us together, starting with the family. Ultimately, that leads to patriotism, a love of country and your fellow countrymen. Ownership of property was not in the sense conveyed in Roman Law, that it was only truly your property if you could do anything you like with it, including destroying it. Ownership of property went with an implicit trust that you would look after it. 

Similar themes emerge with privilege. Traditional conservatism believed in a ruling class, but not just from a wish to preserve their own advantages. Again, there was an understanding of a social contract. Society needed leaders so it needed a ruling class who could lead it in the interests of the whole of society (society being the nation rather than anything broader). Of course, humans being humans, and the wealthy often lacking understanding of and empathy for the poor, the national interest often seemed to coincide with the interests of the rulers. However, it would be an unfair caricature to write off the ideas of noblesse oblige, of power and privilege being linked to responsibility and duty. Generations of the ruling classes joined the military and gave their lives for ‘king and country.’  As people with a lot to lose, there was a genuine wish to preserve the order and stability that society needed. This applied a check to mere selfish authoritarianism. The soft paternalism of the one nation tradition in the UK showed an appreciation of the need for social harmony between the classes

“The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.”

Benjamin Disraeli

With its emphasis on all Britishers together, One Nation conservatism sought to build bridges between classes. Of course, there was a dark side to uniting the nation under the banner of patriotism and that was the imperialism which Disraeli championed, along with the jingoism and racism that often accompanied it. However, even that was in decline by the time One Nation conservatism reached its zenith, around the time Harold Macmillan was making his Winds of Change speech. In some ways, Macmillan’s claim that ‘You've never had it so good’ was no idle boast. Macmillan’s service during the war had given him an officer's regard for his men and as prime minister he had respect for workers and their trade unions. Whilst it had been Labour that had ushered in the sort of changes that cautious and pragmatic conservatives would never have initiated following the war, the fact that those changes seemed to have proved worthwhile was noted by the conservatives, who did the pragmatic thing and built on them. Macmillan built more council houses than the previous Labour government. Social mobility took off as the working classes made breakthroughs in all sorts of areas. The National Health Service became the sort of institution that conservatives revered and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy was not reversed. The cottages were happy.

Then something happened. The cause of it can be linked back to conservatives' support for the status quo. Over time the dominant class in Britain changed. The paternalistic land owning gentry with all their stuffy old ways were replaced or co-opted and absorbed by the dynamic forces of capital. As a result, the conservative party took on the attitudes of capital. There did seem to be common ground between conservatism and capitalism. Foremost here were reverence for property rights and a fear of proletarian revolt and redistribution. However, on closer inspection they were totally incompatible.

Conservatism seeks security and stability. Capitalism is a revolutionary force. Conservatives' gut revulsion at the sickening speed of change, in the breakdown in social norms and cohesion ironically brings to mind Marx’s comment on capitals' effect on the world…

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.”

The second part of the quote also highlights another division between conservatism and capitalism, with the former’s regard for national sovereignty being elbowed aside by the latter’s globalisation in an age of multinational corporations lobbying for trading arrangements which sweep aside or erode such sovereignty. Conservatism, with its organic view of society, believed that each nation develops its own ways, traditions and institutions and there is no blueprint for how society should be organised, hence national sovereignty should be respected. Not only does international finance and globalisation erode nationality from within, but where a nation resists the forces of globalisation, brute force is used to crack them open. 

Whereas a traditional conservative may not approve of how other nations go about their business, they tend to respect the Westphalian system and keep their noses out, if for no other reasons than remembering why the system was introduced in the first place, after the 30 years war. As Thomas Hobbes would have it, a bad ruler is still better than the lawless ‘war of all against all’ that tends to result from coups or cross border interventions to remove them. Look at Iraq, Syria, Libya; can anybody say these countries were blessed by the ‘humanitarian interventions’ of a west that felt it had a ‘responsibility to protect’. Why does the modern conservative party continue to support such actions? Is it because it has embraced liberalism, more specifically neoliberalism, and junked the pragmatic, empirical, realist foreign policy of real conservatives?

The Conservative Party, for all its rhetoric around Brexit, does not respect national sovereignty. It supports an oligarchy led, Washington centred policy of globalisation. It feels none of the traditional obligations towards its own people that a conservative should. It allows them to be ripped off by rail, water, and energy companies as the UKs impoverished inhabitants sink under a tide of filth belched out by infrastructure crippled by a lack of investment, the money having been diverted into corporate ‘profits’ and dividends. 

Not only did New Right conservatives ‘Sell off the family silver’ as McmIllan accused Thatcher of doing, they worked hand in glove with the creators of a new, rentier economic elite that parasitised the real economy and pushed more and more of their own support base, the middle classes, into the poverty that had already engulfed the working classes. They don’t even look after their own. People who voted for Brexit because they wanted protection from the forces of globalist liberalisation that had got an increasing grip on the EU, found out to their cost the only reason the Tufton Street crew wanted out of Europe was because it wasn’t moving fast enough towards total corporate and financial oligarchy. The small businesses, self employed, entrepreneurs, and sturdy yeoman that made up the mass bedrock of the conservative party’s support have been thrown under the bus. They believed that capitalism was all about standing on your own two feet, making your own way without dependence on the state. But it is not. 

Capitalism is a specific type of market. It’s about borrowing to grow. It is debt based and has to keep on growing to service its debts. It’s about growth and competition. This ultimately creates a dynamic in which you have to keep growing to service your debts and beat your competitors and over time the big fish eat the little ones, merging, acquiring and driving competitors to the wall. This leads to concentrations of economic power as corporations become multinational megacorporations along with the mega banks they are beholden to. Arguing, as some apologists for capitalism do, that what we are seeing is not capitalism but corporatism is no more valid than arguing that the Soviet Union was not really communist. By its very nature, capitalism will inevitably work towards the economic system we are seeing today.

Money being power, these corporations and banks have not just influenced, but have fused with the state, capturing those who are supposed to represent us. Burke’s Fourth Estate, the media, no longer performs its function of holding governments' feet to the fire on behalf of the people, because that too is in the hands of the big capital elites. 

The public, both working class and petit bourgeois, are starting to see that there is something very rotten about this system and are turning away from the mainstream media; the elite can only ‘trickle down’ on people and tell them it's raining for so long. In 2008 Wall street got bailed out and small business main street got sold out. In the Covid lockdown, massive online techno corporations thrived whilst more small businesses went under. Since the war in Ukraine, international energy companies have gouged their customers for profits, forcing more small businesses to the wall, while the government has looked on indulgently. Small c conservatives, those who go to church, give to charity and play a role as pillars of their community by taking part in Burke’s little platoons, have been turning away in disgust from the culture of decadence, immorality and greed that is the spirit of the Randian new right. But the little platoons are massively outgunned by the heavy artillery of finance and multinational corporations when it comes to influencing the political direction of the Conservative Party.

Nonetheless, capitalism is nothing if not protean in its ability to adapt and subvert. Global capital sees the populist anger and seeks to divert it away from those responsible. As people turn away from mainstream media, it creates new ‘alternatives’ like GB News, which unlike the mainstream, acknowledge that there is something ‘rotten in Denmark’, connecting with the righteous anger of their audience, but then seeks to shepherd the anger towards bogus targets like ‘Cultural Marxism’. It creates and plays up culture wars, directs anger at immigrants fleeing the fallout of  big capital’s careless military interventions. It focuses on cabals like the World Economic Forum, without looking too deeply into who the WEFs members are, where their interests lie and why it promotes certain policies. It mutters darkly about eco fascism, crypto communism, anything other than the ghost in the machine, capitalism and its voracious desire for profit and growth. 

To allow conservatives to see that it is capitalism which is destroying their world is taboo. They will go so far as to blame Satanic conspiracies, which to be fair, isn’t that far off, considering the ideas of Ayn Rand that have so influenced the New Right are almost identical to those of the Church of Satan; rejection of Christian altruism, compassion and community, in a relentless pursuit of individual self satisfaction, advancement and power.  These are the ideas that have been pumped out through Tufton Street think tanks, often opaquely funded by foreign, mostly American donors. 

Like Schumpetarian economics, capitalism thrives on creative destruction, ushering in careless and radical change that should be anathema to conservatives, doubling down on mistakes by utilising the resulting anger to supercharge the next assault on society, pushing ever forward towards social and environmental destruction in the name of profit. Where are the conservatives to stand up for organic, human values against the cold logic of homo economicus? There are still some around; Peter Hitchens and Peter Oborne for example. However, you won’t find them in the modern conservative party. The capitalist fundamentalists, with their Utopia of ‘free markets’ (meaning rigged markets dominated by big capital) have ushered in their idea of progress and the job of the Conservative Party is now, to return to G K Chesterton’s quote at the start of this piece, to prevent those mistakes being corrected. Conservatism is supposed to preserve what works and change what doesn’t. The Conservative party has done the opposite since the 1980s. Late stage, mature capitalism, in all its ugliness, is the only game in town, however much it destroys families, communities, society, morality and planet. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘There is no alternative’.