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SPEECH: The Future of Conservatism

Phillip Blonds speech to launch ResPublica

by Phillip Blond 10

What is conservatism? Various derogatory claims are often propagated. Firstly some
claim that it is a mere pragmatism – that it has no ideas, guiding theme or undergirding
foundation, that it is doing what works without direction or belief. Such a vapid
managerialism is indeed ubiquitous but its reach does not extend to modern
conservatism . Others say – the tories are the party of vested interest – they represent the
status quo , they will always defend the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak
and the haves against the have nots. Again this description captures a position but it is not
one occupied by modern conservatism. Others still say that conservatism is best
expressed by a pure libertarianism, that extreme individualism, the glorification of self
interest, and the hatred of society is what best represents tory philosophy– that again
captures much but not modern conservatism.
Indeed if one was being objective – it could be argued that utilitarian managerialism, a
rabid and sordid defence of the status quo and a deep and abiding belief in a corroding
libertarian individualism best characterizes the contemporary left rather than the
emergent right. For modern conservatism despises the destruction by target and audit of
ethos and professionalism, is completely committed to tacking vested interest and
illegitimate hierarchy and views with horror the left libertarian denial of the norms of a
decent civilized life and the codes of an abiding and sustaining community.

What then is modern conservatism – what does it care about, what does it seek to
conserve? Why -nothing less than society itself. The project of radical transformative
conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and
the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign
station.

Conservatism at its best has always been a care for the world and for those who live in it.
Conservatives led the campaign against slavery, conservatives such as Richard Oastler
and Anthony Ashley Cooper the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury led the factory reform movement
which campaigned throughout much of the 19th century (against Guardian reading
Manchester liberals) for a reduction in working hours for women and children, in 1867
the 2nd great reform bill under Disraeli was far more radical than that envisaged by
Gladstone and it increased the franchise by 88%, and in the twentieth century the
conservatives extended pensions under Baldwin, and in the 1920’s Noel Skelton terrified
by collectivisation and influenced by Belloc and Chesterton first spoke of a property
owning democracy, a tenant of fundamental and transformative toryism repeated by Eden
and Churchill and Mrs Thatcher.

The question though is what is the validity and merit of conservatism at this moment in
time – why should its message be heard – what does it have to offer. Well simply put.
under the present leadership it recognizes that the old options are no longer viable – both
state and market have visibly and manifestly failed, and we cannot and must not return to
the bankrupt version of either. If we British are to enjoy a better and more stable future
then we need a new deal and a new settlement.

There are three dimensions to this new order: a civil state, a moralised market and an
associative society.

The Civil State

There is much that is right with the state and there is much that is wrong. What is right is
that the state embodies in structured form a common concern – it represents the coalesced
will of the people that there is a level below which you cannot fall and an undertaking
that we as a body politic have a stake, a care and indeed a provision for you and every
other citizen . In that sense the welfare state really does represent the best of us. In that
sense the great triumph of the left is indeed the 1945 Labour government which laid the
foundation of the modern welfare state. But what the working class thought would save
and secure became something that gradually and over time, eventually helped to
destroyed them. Why? Because the state instead of supporting society - abolished it. The
welfare state nationalised society because it replaced mutual communities with passive
fragmented individuals whose most sustaining relationship was not with his or her
neighbor or his or her community but with a distant and determining centre. Moreover
that state relationship was profoundly individuating - unilateral entitlement individuated
and replaced bilateral relationship.

The working class did not ask for this – they wanted something far more reciprocal, more
mutual and more empowering. All existing working class welfare organisations were
sidelined by a universal entitlement guaranteed by the state based upon centralised
accounts of need. Local requirements, organisation or practices were simply ignored and
thus rendered redundant. Thus the welfare state began the destruction of the independent
life of the British working class. The populace became a supplicant citizenry dependent
upon the state rather than themselves and the socialist state aborted indigenous traditions
of working class self–help, reciprocality and social insurance. Rather than working with
each another in order to alter their situation or change their neighbourhood or city,
relying on the welfare state only to get them through a temporary rough patch, working
class people increasingly became permanent passive recipients of centrally determined
benefits. As such welfare ceased to function as a safety net through which people could
not fall, becoming instead a ceiling through which the supplicant class – cut off from
earlier working class ambition and aspiration – could not break. This ‘benefits culture’
can be tied directly to the thwarting of working class ambition by a middle class elite that
formed the machinery of the welfare state yes to alleviate poverty but also to deprive the
poor of their irritating habit of autonomous organisation.
The new civil state would restore what the welfare state has destroyed – human
association. This new civil state will turn itself over to its citizens – it will foster the
power of association and allow its citizens to take it over rather as it had originally taken
over them. A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they
are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by
sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each
place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be
in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-
emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to
represent those in its area – to take over the budget of that service so that they can deliver
what is required to those that need by those that care. So envisaged this would allow
citizens groups – if they meet appropriate and proper standards of civic representation
and organisational efficacy- to take over the state in their own areas to either be
commissioners of their own services or run them for themselves and each other. They
could do this with welfare so as to tie local need to local provision and so make jobs for
themselves – where none existed before - or indeed they could manage run and own, as
an estate or specifiable area, the services that had previously failed them so they they
would not fail themselves or each other. So conceived the monolithic state could
gradually be broken down into an associative state where citizens took over and ran their
own services so that universality would not be compromised but in fact would be more
achieved as each particular area or need would finally be in a position to meet that need
by delivering via this new power of budgetary challenge the new associative state.
The Moralised Market.

The great paradox of the neo-liberal account of free markets that has dominated
discussion, and determined practice and indeed economic reality for the past thirty years
is that in the name of free markets the neo-liberal approach has presided over an
unprecedented reduction of market diversity and plurality. It has both reduced the type of
provision available and the numbers of providers. In the name of freedom we have
produced economic concentration and in a number of areas monopoly dominance or
indeed something very much like it. A perverse corporatism has produced industries that
are too big to fail and consequently they have been made bigger again.

The most obvious example of this is banking – where we have lost diversity (building
societies) and subsequently plurality (all of the building societies that demutualised have
vanished, collapsed or been absorbed as have many other providers) – where we now
have only four major high street banks and the governments great pro-competition
measure is to turn over just 10% of banking capacity to an as yet unnamed and un-
constituted new entrant. In part this is because UK competition policy has become far too
enthralled with the efficiency doctrine of the Chicago School and has permitted far too
many mergers to go through which has produced significant market concentration that in
turn narrows the supply chain and threatens economic security through eliminating
diversity of supply. Market concentration produces supply risk that because it is done in
the name of market freedom blinds regulators to its true import and systemic danger.

So as a radical pro marker thinker I would like to see genuinely rather than putatively free
markets and systems of economic exchange. But to achieve free markets we must
overcome their neo-liberal construal. Why – because markets conceived on a neo-liberal
model requires the bureaucratic and authoritarian state. Why because if the economic
actor is conceived as purely self –interested as obeying no external codes as living only
by the internal dictate of their will and volition then this actor needs regulation and tight
external control – otherwise they will violate the rights of others who also conceived on a
similar aggressive model will seek to do the same. Something external to this model is
required in order to police this model: something with absolute power and authority: the
state. Thus neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism requires all the bureaucracy and
external management of the state in order to function and trade. Hence there is nothing
efficient about neo-liberal efficiency and nothing free about its freedom.

By way of contrast a capitalism based on trust does not require external regulation or
control. A capitalism based on reciprocity, free open and honest exchange has little
bureaucracy or state power associated with it. A civil economy drives down the cost of
suspicion that self interest creates and crowds in good rather than bad behavior. A culture
of internal ethos rather than external regulation creates a whole new model of social
capitalism that radically reduces the barriers to market entry that suspicion creates and it
prices in the very things that human being most value and like about each other: trust
human affection and open and honest behavior.We can create a civic economy based on
trust, sustainability and reciprocity. Such an economy generate shared ethos and common
goals in the place of zero sum exchange and the bureaucracy of state regulation.
Such a model would produce a much freer economy than the ideology of free markets has
yet produced. With lower regulatory barriers to market entry, smaller and medium sized
businesses would have a real chance to compete, develop and grow. And if it was able to
retreat from micro-management the state could go about creating the infra-structure for
ethical exchange, and so drive down the cost of transactions and drive up the volume and
productivity of the trade and economy conducted within its borders. The aim of this new
market would be to build reciprocal and mutual relations so that more diversity, more
choice and more providers are brought in to ownership, exchange and prosperity.

A re-moralised market would reward responsible long term investment and create the
conditions for mass ownership and entrepreneurship and the real extension of
opportunity. It would be so much better than what we have now.

The Associative Society

To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affection.

Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Both state and market, reconceived and rethought would serve society rather than serve
themselves, they would become centrifugal forces of distribution – they would deliver
power prosperity and democracy to society and to all the groups families and individuals
that constitute it. But what is that society?
It is certainly not the collective uniformity and homogeneity represented by the state. The
state as a mass act of collectivisation cannot represent all the diversity and differentiation
of our culture and our lives. A bleak Maoism where we must all say and do and think the
same is certainly the outcome of a society viewed solely through the state – but this is not
any society that anyone would want to belong to. Similarly and contra an extremist
liberalism, society is not either a collection of self willing individuals, an aggregation of
permanently separate wills that always requires a proxy representation which always by
its own terms must be illegitimate. Such a construal reveals that individualism and
collectivism are too sides of the same debased coinage producing a society that endlessly
oscillates between state authoritarianism and anarchic libertarianism.

The truth is and this is a truth recognised by Burke – is that human beings are individuals
always born into relationships. We are always already (unless we are feral) in society but
not eclipsed or diminished by it. All social contacxt theory is in this sense wrong – we are
born already in ethos and already enmeshed in culture code and practice and we do not
need a state or a contact to tell us where we are. But what is this society? This society is
civil – it is formed by the free association of citizens – and these groups balance and
express both individual freedom and collective formation. Association is outside both
state and market and yet is makes the proper functioning of both possible. Association
express both individuality and community. Association marks the politics of the future it
is the way we will deliver our state and it is the way we will free our market.
These associations themselves are not post-modern verities – they are not arbitrary
collections of whim and sophistry arrayed against the void. They are not oppositional
groups that pit opinion against opinion and so rewrite and replay the conflict expressed at
the individual level. They are groups that take a view on objective value they are
organisations that attempt to discern what is right and what should be done in any given
situation. As essentially conserving and conservative – they must believe in something
worth preserving or else they would be permanent revolutionaries believing that nothing
is inherently valuable or good so that nothing need be preserved. On the contrary because
they believe in something valuable they can offer it to others, because without an account
of value there can be no proper distribution of what is valuable.

The associative society is like this , it is good men and women taking responsibility and
trying to ascertain the common good. And because they acknowledge that there is such a
thing and in contrast to the liberal thesis of liberty arising from permanent conflict, then
they can make common cause with those that differ and create a free and equal society
based on such a debate

And if we are to re-build and heal our broken society, it will be from the bottom up
through civil association. In order to reclaim a civilised society, market and state should
not be regarded as the ultimate goal or expression of humanity. They are the means by
which we achieve our end; they are not the end itself. That end will be decided by free
citizens in association sharing the practice and discernment of the common good.
Contemporary transformative conservatism recognises that the common good is its true
goal and is indeed the basis of the new tory settlement