In this blog piece George Mitkov offers his verdict on ‘The Good Right’ and on the challenges facing the Conservative Party, if it is to govern successfully in times of economic prosperity.
The Conservative Party is in a funny old place. Since 2010 it has presided over an economic recovery during which the budget deficit has halved, the employment rate has reached an historic high and GDP growth has begun comfortably to outstrip inflation. This has all been achieved against the backdrop of anaemic growth, sclerotic labour markets, and discord between members in the Eurozone. The Conservatives’ coalition partner is haemorrhaging support and the Opposition is led by an object of derision. The government’s track record has not been perfect. It can take little credit for the current blessing of low inflation; the deficit remains considerable, in large part thanks to weak tax receipts; Prime Minister David Cameron’s foolhardy diplomacy has tarnished Britain’s international brand. Nevertheless, logic dictates that the Conservatives should be in line for a comfortable victory at the general election, less than two months away. Yet polls have the Tories and the Labour Party neck-and-neck. The electoral arithmetic makes the situation even bleaker for Mr Cameron on two counts: firstly, constituency boundaries favour the Labour Party and secondly, the left-wing Scottish National Party (SNP), which, according to polls, will have the third-largest block of MPs after the 7th of May, would be much more likely to offer informal support to Labour than it would to the Conservatives.
The Tories have failed to convert economic recovery into public support and it is Lynton Crosby, their chief strategist, who is bearing much of their ire. Under his watch, the Conservatives’ pitch to the nation has been one-dimensional and uninspiring, focusing on their economic stewardship of the country. (Polls routinely give Mr Cameron a clear lead over his main rival, Ed Miliband, on economic competence.) There is no positive message as there was at the last general election. Since entering office, the Tories have largely forgotten two mainstays of their 2010 pitch, the much-mocked “Big Society” and Mr Cameron’s pledge to lead the “greenest government ever”.
In response, two conservative heavyweights of Fleet Street, Tim Montgomerie of The Times and Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov, a polling firm, have created The Good Right to fill what they see as an ideological black hole in British conservatism. The Good Right argues for a more paternalistic, compassionate brand of conservatism, more akin to Germany’s Christian Democrats than to the small-state liberalism on which much of the Conservative Party’s platform is based. Their tentative manifesto features ideas drawn from both the right and the left: Messrs Montgomerie and Shakespeare would put marriage “back at the heart of public policy”, but they would deliver above-inflation rises in the minimum wage. They have attracted Tory bigwigs such as Michael Gove and Syed Kamall to their cause, but they have also left free-marketeers such as Donal Blaney fulminating.
That this nascent campaign has already become the target of fierce invective is worrying for the party’s future. Most young Tories are socially liberal and hostile to big government. It is easy to see why bright, talented young people who have their entire adult lives before them feel inspired by an individualistic doctrine which prioritises social mobility and the rewards of hard work. It is also easy to see why they might be less strongly drawn to a strand of conservatism which emphasises the importance of traditional institutions such as the Church and the family. At the other end of the population pyramid, disgruntled Eurosceptics who have been thronging to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) since 2010 would find little reason to return to a party better disposed towards immigrants. The Good Right must be careful not to fracture irreversibly a big-tent political family which is already straining to accommodate numerous different, conflicting strands of conservatism, from the economic liberalism of Mr Cameron and the party leadership to the English-nationalist populism rife on the Tory backbenches.
Although The Good Right risks alienating both the liberal and the Eurosceptic factions of the Conservative Party, the compassion with which it seeks to inject party policy would undoubtedly go some way towards solving the Tories’ well-documented image problem. Waging war against the size of the state will not win votes now that the NHS has begun to establish a comfortable lead over the economy and the public finances in surveys asking voters what they see as the most important issue facing the country. In some ways, the Conservatives are victims of their own success: the economic situation is far more benign than it was when they took office. It is unsurprising that voters are focusing on public services now that the immediate danger of the country’s parlous finances has been (for the most part) taken care of. After having proved that it is capable of pulling Britain out of the economic mire, the Conservative Party needs to show that it can govern during times of prosperity. To that end, it needs to clarify that it is not inveterately set on slashing the welfare state and that it is not pathologically opposed to government intervention in the economy when there is a strong case for action. The Good Right, by tentatively proposing measures such as a wide-reaching house-building scheme, higher investment and rises in the minimum wage above the rate of inflation, is belatedly re-opening the debate inside the Conservative Party about what the role of the state should be. The Good Right’s justification for these policies is that they would reduce the likelihood that future intervention would be required. It remains to be seen what Britain’s economic doyens have to say about these proposals – after all, the free-marketeers have a point: state intervention is rarely the panacea its supporters claim, and The Good Right has so far done little to explain how such policies would avoid opening the Pandora’s box of government failure. However, if The Good Right’s more pragmatic approach to state intervention manages to shape future Conservative policy, the Tories would appear less hostile in the eyes of the working and lower-middle classes, whom the current leadership seems to have neglected and on whom the government’s axe has fallen hardest. Hugo Rifkind is one of many who have written about the long-term danger that the “Tory bastard[s]” will face unless they make a concerted effort to revamp their image.
The Good Right’s discussions about the size of the state and about social issues will do much to rejuvenate conservatism as an ideology. One-nation conservatism has been relegated to the wings of the British right since the 1970s. The Good Right aims to bring Benjamin Disraeli’s brainchild back to the fore of conservative discourse. Its emphasis on the family as the most important social unit and its focus on civil society issues evoke the rural traditionalism of the progenitor of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. Its proposed house-building programme hearkens back to the premiership of Harold MacMillan. By tracing an ideological thread through these three seminal figures of conservative thought, The Good Right presents a manifesto for a harmonious party founded on a consistent, coherent, cogent philosophy and set of tenets – a far cry from the individually ideologically diverse but collectively ideologically sterile amalgam of libertarians, social conservatives and one-nation Tories which comprises today’s Conservative Party, and which spends far too much time obnoxiously bickering over divisive and esoteric topics such as the European Union and the British constitution.
What is more, the Scottish independence referendum proved that a discussion around ideology and a vision for the future can engage voters and increases turnout. A party with something substantial to say can fill the intellectual vacuum of British politics and stand out above the chorus of vapid doomsayers with whom the Conservatives are scrambling for votes. The Labour Party has little to offer other than class warfare and an uninspired offer of slightly lighter austerity than the Tories; the Liberal Democrats’ claim to be neither Labour nor the Tories is as insipid as it is blindingly obvious. It is not difficult to see why voters have been turning in droves to the smaller, insurgent parties. Yet these upstarts lack a positive vision for Britain just as the three traditional, governing parties do. UKIP and the Greens take pot-shots from outside the establishment, revelling in the knowledge that they will not be faced with the arduous task of actually implementing any of their risible policies, such as proposed bans on HIV-positive migrants and on pâté – no prizes for guessing which party wants to ban which. The SNP will continue blaming Westminster for all of Scotland’s ills, despite having been in power north of the border for the best part of a decade. Against such a gloomy backdrop, any party which can provide an emotional, positive case rather than a negative one based cold statistics (in the Conservatives’ case) or on scapegoating and identity politics (in the opposition parties’ cases) would stand a real chance of sweeping up votes from those who are rightly put off by today’s dispiriting political climate. Labour continues to retrench and the party’s spirits remain low outside London; the Conservatives face the perennial accusation of pandering to their base in the Home Counties; the Lib Dems have been pinned back to a handful of constituencies in the south-west; the SNP stands for the Scottish, Plaid Cymru for the Welsh, UKIP for the English and the Greens… for Brighton. A powerful, unifying message could also strike a decisive blow for the Union against the petty, internecine regionalism which has characterised the aftermath of the Scottish referendum and of which both sides are guilty.
Ultimately, The Good Right is unlikely to provide the all-encompassing, holistic message of which the Tories are in dire need in order to reunite the Conservative family or to branch out and reclaim the centre ground that they courted in the run-up to the 2010 election. Neither is it certain that their (limited) support for a larger state is underpinned by a solid economic foundation. Messrs Montgomerie and Shakespeare do, however, deserve praise for belatedly raising questions about conservatism as a philosophy. The debate is urgent; the Conservatives may well end up forming the next government, but they would have the unpopularity of Mr Miliband to thank for that, and in 2020, the Tories will almost certainly not have that fortune. Sooner or later, the Conservatives will need to talk.
