Political Ideology: Politics on the Right

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS

IDEAS, STRUCTURES, PEOPLE AND PLACES

No. 6: POLITICAL IDEAOLOGY: POLITICS ON THE RIGHT

Copyright 2016 Dr. Philip Tether

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Political Ideology: Politics on the Right

Dr. Philip Tether

This is No. 6 in a series of introductory texts each addressing an aspect of politics. The current and forthcoming title list is shown below. They are free-standing but link together to present a multi-layered analysis of the ideas, structures, people and processes which go to shape the world of politics.

The author has taught government and politics in various higher education institutions for over thirty years. The focus is largely but not exclusively on the UK. Where appropriate, examples and illustrations are drawn from around the world. The material is designed to be accessible to students at all levels from beginners to university students. ‘Aims,’ ‘Contents’ and ‘Learning Outcomes’ are specified at the start of each text and each concludes with an overview summary and a set of review questions for independent learning.

The current title list includes:

No 1: The Purpose of Politics

No 2: Political Systems

No 3: Popular Democracy

No 4: Liberal Democracy

No 5: Political Ideology and the Liberal Centre

No 6: Political Ideology: Politics on the Right

Forthcoming titles are planned:

No 7: Political Ideology: Politics on the Left

No 8: The European Union (EU)

No 9: Global Governance

POLITICAL IDEOLOGY: POLITICS ON THE RIGHT

Aims of this text

The previous text (No. 5) introduced and discussed the concept of political ideology and traced the origin, content and impact of liberalism - the core ideology of the modern world and the underpinning of developed market economies.

Because of its central importance, we placed liberalism at the centre of the Left-Right political spectrum which is conventionally employed to indicate the range and type of modern political ideologies. This text continues the exploration of the ideological spectrum with a detailed analysis of the right wing of politics. This will involve examining the ideology of the British Conservative Party in some detail, Christian democracy (a type of conservatism found in Western Europe) and finally, ideologies on the radical-right including fascism

Learning outcomes

At the end of this text you will find a selection of review questions to test your understanding of these learning outcomes.

Table of Contents

The Purpose of Politics - this book series

Aims and Learning Outcomes

The Conservative Party: left- and right-wings

Conservatism: basic principles

Christian Democracy

The Radical-Right

Fascism

Politics on the Right: a summary

Review Questions

References

About Dr. Philip Tether

Other books by Dr. Philip Tether

Connect with Dr. Philip Tether

The Conservative Party: some history

In this introductory section we will briefly review the evolution and development of conservative thought in Great Britain and the development of the British Conservative Party. By tracing the party’s evolution through changing times we can begin to identify key themes and issues relating to conservative ideology in the UK (sometimes known as ‘Anglo-Saxon conservatism’ to distinguish it from continental varieties) which we can then attempt to extract, codify and list in the next section. These key themes and issues in the conservative story include inter-alia attitudes to change and reform, flexibility in the face of changing times and situations, the promotion and protection of private property, sponsorship of business interests and sustained attempts to foster working class support.

Running through this history and ideology is a belief in moderation, in balance, both in the constitution and in politics generally. Conservatives stress the need to redress what they see as their socialist opponents’ over-ambitious and dangerously enthusiastic attitude to politics and its possibilities. This need to provide balance and to lean away from the prevailing orthodoxy if that orthodoxy is becoming too dominant leads the party to adopt discarded elements of other ideologies. For instance, when the Liberal Party at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth began to drift away from a defence of free markets and towards comprehensive state intervention, the Conservative Party embraced free market economics which they had previously opposed when it was liberal orthodoxy. This wasn’t a ‘one-off.’ It has been noted that

"Conservatism has always been about synthesis – taking the best bits of other people’s ideas and trying to establish a consensus that can work to the advantage of society. This approach belies the ideological nature of a lot of Right-wing thinking, which dismisses everything that isn’t ‘sound’ on the grounds that Margaret Thatcher might not have done it"

(Stanley 2014).

A grouping or party of the ‘settled order’, the status quo, which was eventually to become recognisably ‘conservative’ emerged in and through the conflicts of the seventeenth century - part political, part religious - between parliament and the Crown (1642 – 1651). The divisions of the civil war hardened into political movements and divisions in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 – 1681 when a protestant faction sought to exclude Charles 11’s brother James, Duke of York from the succession on the grounds of his Catholicism.

The first Tories (the term dates from the Exclusion Crisis) inhabited a pre-industrial, agrarian society. They were the fox-hunting squirearchy of the shires which supported the monarchy, the existing social order and the ‘balanced constitution’ of the King, Lords and Commons (but chiefly the King and the Lords). They were opposed by the Whigs (the term also dates from the Exclusion Crisis) or proto-liberals who talked of ‘democracy’ (although in very limited terms). They sought to curtail the power of the monarchy and promote the power of the Commons which they dominated.

The terms ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ were originally terms of abuse with ‘Tory’ being a corruption of a Gaelic word meaning bandit or brigand whilst the Whiggamores were horse dealers and traders in south-west Scotland, reputed to be thieves and religious zealots. The division between Whig and Tory was the division between parliament and the Crown, roundhead and cavalier, catholic and protestant and it has shaped the political landscape of Britain for centuries.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689 settled the centuries-old conflict over the power of the monarchy and the religion of Great Britain. The Catholic leaning James Duke of York now James 11 of England (and the V11 of Scotland) was deposed. The House of Stuart was replaced with the House of Orange with William and Mary imported from Holland - pliable protestant monarchs both. There were two Jacobite rebellions in support of the Stuarts (‘Jacobite’ as in Jacobus meaning James); one in 1715 in support of the ‘Old Pretender’ (the ex-King James 11) and one in 1745 when his son, Charles Stuart, ‘Bonny Prince Charlie’ or the ‘Young Pretender’ led an invasion force into England and got as far as Derby throwing the Whig establishment in London into a panic before he turned back to Scotland. Throughout these events, the Tories were on the wrong side of history and were crushed in the General Election of 1715 which ushered in a century of Whig dominance.

The party of Church and King, their patron saint Charles, King and Martyr, they managed to lose almost every constitutional argument between the 1680s and the 1790s. The Whigs won, which was just as well, for they guided the evolution of the rule of law, constitutional monarchy and modern parliamentary government. As long as there was a serious Stuart pretender to the Throne, the Tories could be tainted by Jacobitism (Anderson 2015).

However, the Jacobite cause is not completely dead even today. It lingers on in some romantic Tory bosoms. The obituary of Professor Howard Erskine-Hill, noted authority on the eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope records that he was a passionate Jacobite, and collected prints, coins and medals related to the cause. He threw merry suppers where he sang When the King Comes Home in Peace Again, and observed the Feast of Charles, King and Martyr, on January 30. (However) he expressed himself reconciled to the Queen (Daily Telegraph Obituaries 2014). Very English, very Tory.

The French Revolution in 1789 gave the Tories a second chance propelled them onto the nineteenth century political stage. They had been accused of ‘reactionary’ Jacobitism. Now their Whig enemies were charged with being friends of a revolution which had degenerated into terror and persecution and the wholesale destruction of a society’s institutions. Conservative ideology in the sense of a codified set of ideas emerged only now in response to the French Revolution and its claim that society and its institutions could be completely remade to suit the ambitions of men. In his ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’, published in 1790, the British Whig statesman and writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) provided the philosophical underpinning for British conservatism with his critique of the Revolution’s rationalist belief that society could be recast according to abstract egalitarian principles which took no account of history, custom, tradition and the settled order.

Predicting that the Revolution would devour its children, Burke was vindicated by the rise of Napoleon and the subsequent struggle to contain the French Emperor who sought to unify Europe under French hegemony. Napoleon’s reforms both at home and in the conquered territories continued the rationalising agenda of the revolutionaries in that he sought to centralise power, promote uniform legal codes based on Roman law and to eliminate particularism i.e. local loyalties exemplified by the medieval structure of principalities, loose federations and autonomous cities which could still be found across much of ‘old Europe’.

Burke set the tone of subsequent conservative thought in Britain by stressing the value of tradition, difference and diversity and the local loyalties which he saw as important bulwarks of liberty – more on all of this later.

Edmund Burke, the founding father of Anglo-Saxon conservatism is carefully studied in communist China where he is effectively regarded as more relevant than Mao. The Chinese are interested in what Burke has to say about the importance of tradition and how and when to accommodate reform. As a consequence, he is "all the rage in Chinese universities, studied for his critique of violent revolution and esteemed as the prophet of stability through controlled change (Evans-Pritchard 2013).

Thus, the Tories, the party of the countryside, the ‘Old Religion’, the House of Lords and defenders of the Crown’s prerogatives re-emerged as a political force. Their loyalty now was to the post-Glorious Revolution protestant settlement which was seen as the very embodiment of British moderation, political wisdom and gradualism (for Burke, the Glorious Revolution was no revolution at all and bore no similarity whatsoever to the violent upheavals in France).

It is significant that the greatest conservative philosopher was a Whig and that the party of the old status quo was prepared to adapt and change to accommodate a new one. In a troubled and troubling world conservatives are likely to believe that any status quo is better than no status quo. At the heart of the post-Glorious Revolution protestant settlement was the Church of England, a state religion headed by the monarch – a union of Church and State. For