Kruger and Cates are good, and worth listening to. It's striking that whenever they pop up to say something sensible, it's generally other Tory MPs who queue up to knock them down.
I'm genuinely torn over what I think should happen to the party. I have every sympathy for those who wants to see the Conservatives annihilated in a catastrophic defeat, in the hope that something better will emerge from the ashes. But I'm very worried indeed about what a Labour party would do to the country over five years - I really don't buy the argument that it can't be much worse than we've already had (on cultural issues at least, it can, and it will). I find myself very despondent about all the options ahead, to be honest!
Although I agree the far-left Tories need to be stopped, how is this going to be achieved by replacing them with the far-far-Left Labour, ravenous for power and with an entire cadre of civil servants and quangocrats ready and eager to do its bidding? Taking your specific example of immigration, is there anything about Labour's platform that gives hope for a reduction in numbers? Hardly: they started the country down that destructive path.
I have a lot of sympathy for your view, but I fear your assumption that the usual Newtonian laws continue to apply to British politics is misplaced. The guardrails on which our unwritten constitution depends have been dismantled by Blair's stay-behind army of civil servants and quangocrats.
Thus we have had Home Office civil servants in open defiance of even timid measures to control immigration, but would they prevent the constitutional vandalism of votes at 16? I strongly suspect not. The wasted 13 years is in part due to this; only the firmest Ministerial hands can begin to do something about it. Cameron/May/Johnson/Sunak were, for differing reasons, just not up to it. Others who might have done something were either unsupported (Raab, forced out for "bullying") or summarily despatched (Truss, correct instincts, lacking guile).
A term of Labour will not permit the discontents it ferments to result in the normal political consequence of a change of government and of direction: votes at 16 and for foreigners will pretty much assure that, and in case the unthinkable happened, a raft of sacred "international obligations", which the EU will be happy to be counterparty to, will ensure that the Hard Left settlement that will be the next Labour legacy will be all but impossible to undo: want to repudiate the UK-EU Net Zero Treaty of 2026? Sure, it's your sovereign right, but it will be linked into the post-Brexit treaty, and renouncing one will renounce all, frightening the markets. The same trick can be repeated across many areas of policy. Thus, what are essentially domestic policy choice questions, that ought to be decided by the electorate, will be paralysed by fear of a currency and credit meltdown, a playbook that was already used very successfully against Truss.
I appreciate I'm not offering any solution; it's a desperately sad situation. For now, the least worst option is to try to take back the Conservative Party from the dismal wretches that currently operate as Labour seat-warmers.
Like I said, every sympathy with this view. The Tories deserve to be cast into the outer darkness for their immigration betrayal alone. But Labour in power, unlike the Conservatives, has a very good track record of actually changing the law to bake in progressive policies. Over five years, a Starmer government would not only ramp up legal immigration further, but it would also remove any means *at all* of curbing illegal migration, as well as passing turbo-charged Equity laws and votes for teenagers/EU citizens, etc. After five years of that, backed up by a supportive civil service, media and NGO ecosystem, would an alternative right-wing party, however well-run, even get a look in?
I'm not really disagreeing with you - I suspect you're probably right - but I'm just very glum about any of the potential ways this could fall out, at least for the foreseeable future.
Good article, Ed. Thanks. However, "getting a Tory government" is, in my opinion, the wrong goal. Something that both liberals and socialists understand but the "right" (or, what passes for the right in Britain) seems incapable of grasping is that real power comes from the control of institutions and the culture.
For as long as I can recall, the entire focus of British Conservatives has been on winning elections. It has worked in terms of electoral success (the Conservatives have won more elections that Labour) but look where we are now as a nation. This is because Conservatives believe that all they have to do is get sufficient bums on seats in Westminster. The result is that Conservatives are always in office but never in power. If the sole aim of the New Conservatives is simply to win an election, then they will fall prey to the same dismal, ineffectual outcome.
Real power comes from capturing institutions and changing the culture. Unless the "New Conservatives" are prepared to do these things, then we really might as well yearn for the return of David Cameron.
If I might paraphrase Meyer Rothschild, "Give me control of a nation's institutions and I care not who wins elections."
Astute comment, but it’s worth remembering: cultural & academic institutions, journalists, corporations, etc. in the US only embraced extreme racial identity-politics, ahistorical Manicheanism, the current bizarre rhetoric, a constant culture of victimization & trauma, and all the other tenets of the woke when college-educated women (often but not always young, often but not always single, often but not always white) became the ones who called the shots.
Constant fear of litigation made us Yanks uniquely vulnerable, but this ahistorical ideology is likely going to be as appealing to university-educated young women in the UK as it is here.
In many ways, woke culture isn’t what liberals and leftists in America wanted back in the day. (For starters, they didn’t view sex as inherently “problematic”, nor were they utterly indifferent to the fate of organized labor.) It is what young university-educated women wanted. It then became the left.
Good luck to middle-aged Tories who think they can wrest control of cultural institutions from their friends’ daughters.
Sorry. I mean that this is an appealing ideology for many and abandoning it would require them giving up goodies.
There are real emotional consolations (if a group you identify with is underrepresented in something good it’s because of discrimination, if something in life is unpleasant it’s the fault of “the patriarchy”, etc.) and professional benefits (women and people from “marginalized” groups are given preference in hiring and advancement) that would likely make university-educated young women reluctant to be reconditioned.
You're referring to confronting them with a view to persuading them. That's never that way it works. You build a stronger horse around them and they will come of their volition. It can be done. Indeed, it has been done.
As you say, Ed, it's the how of rebuilding social & cultural stability that's the tricky bit. I work in change management as a day job, and there's a lot I see that's a waste of time or worse: inspirational speeches and comms posters, bureaucratic models & mad theories, attempts to convert and shame subversives, top-down rules and spreadsheet schedules, one-size-fits-none approaches. What does work is a combination of the kind of covenants Kruger talks about - so long as there's long-term commitment, especially from the side with more power - and support for thoughtful local experiments (like Goodwin has been doing with universities), bringing people together to find local solutions and build social bonds together.
Trouble is, all the above doesn't sound glamorous or clever, it can feel frustrating and circular and slow and exhausting, you can't do it without working with other people or thinking hard about boundaries and what we owe each other, and it goes against all the strategic media-friendly planning guff out of touch liberal ideologies have ingrained in us.
But it does build generative stability, and that's something people - conservatives and pretty much everyone else - is crying out for: we all want to believe in something more than ourselves, we all want to belong and have our efforts rewarded, we all want a place that welcomes us home. If we keep shouting slogans at each other, we're never going to get there. If we do the real life/work of setting up covenants and working together at a local level, this could be a movement that draws in lots of people who'd never have thought of themselves as conservative as well as the conference faithful.
Clearly there's a role for institutional and political leaders in encouraging and supporting local experiments, in making sure what is learned from them is shared, and in putting in place the bigger structures to allow them to join up and build on what works...but the real work has to take place at the local, human level - you can't create civilisation from a whiteboard.
I suspect it's ignorance and shame as much as power-grabbing. Few of today's politicians have done much other than political lobbying, so don't know where to start when it comes to working at and with local communities on real stuff, and don't want to be exposed as idiots by trying. I think they - like most of us - are lazy enough that if they could catalyse and benefit from others' efforts they'd leap at the opportunity.
Plausible. It's also interesting to me that the same observations about a lack of organising on the ground - doing the real grunt work - is a theme in Freddie deBoer's writing too, albeit from a Marxist/socialist angle. We seem to be cursed by a political class who see politics as a status game, rather than a mission - whichever side they're on. There are almost no working class Labour MPs now, for example.
For come context, we went through this in America in the 80's. At the time, we had two parties, Democrat, and Democrat-lite, as exemplified by George Will's definition of conservative: "standing athwart history yelling 'stop!' Up until the late 80's, everyone argued in the chambers and on TV, the Republicans patted themselves on the back when they slowed down the liberal advance, and then everyone went out to cocktail parties in Georgetown.
What changed it? Newt Gingrich. He rose to power on a specific set of policy proposals (which were seen by all the establishment at the time as horribly divisive) which he terms the Contract With America. And when he won the House for the first time in 40 years, he put every one of them up to a vote. Not all succeeded, but voters saw the GOP run on a platform and then attempt to implement it.
Perhaps Danny Kruger can be your Newt Gingrich.
I will warn you though, the Democrats didn't lie down and die. They got far more radical, and we elected an establishment President (Bush) in 2000 who refused to push back on the radicalism since he was trying to be a "compassionate conservative". The next guy to try the same trick was named Trump. He ran on an agenda but wasn't competent enough to implement most of it.
Was delighted to see Konstatin Kissin, a very cool guy, show up on that 50 most influential list you mentioned. Really liked the episode of his show you were on, Ed.
Covenants are 'willing embraced', 'tolerant of difference, of unorthodox lifestyles and beliefs' and 'probably make people happier'. All sounds very liberal to me. (The latter, I'm sure, is empirically verifiable.)
There's also no necessary conflict with liberal ideas of the social contract; they can and should co-exist. See 'Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft' by Ferdinand Tönnies.
My own humble suggestion would be that we should re-discover our own British liberalism (Locke, Smith, Mill) and evict the misbegotten American version which currently benights us.
As an expat Australian who has lived in London since 2012 and who watched John Howard come to and maintain power explicitly based on governing for the normative middle-ground economically, morally and socially, it is interesting to watch the Tories reaching similar conclusions 25 years later. Interesting to see whether one will be able to fight as a desperate rear guard action a war more successfully prosecuted from 1996 - 2007 when the forces were more evenly balanced.
Patrick Deneen in his book, The Failure of Liberalism, argues that Locke and Hobbes tried in the 17th c to free a society centred around religious obligation and its consequent rival religious hatreds. So instead, they promoted the idea of a social contract based on the more neutral reality of individual self interest. And it worked: property and political rights led to representative government, the rule of law and religious toleration. But Deneen also points out that these all grew within the framework of classical and Christian ideas of virtue - at least of a robust secularised liberalism - which took, family , country and a culture aspiring to truth, beauty and goodness for granted. With these ideas now gone, Deneen goes on to lament, we are left only with the self interest of the individual, who ceases to be a citizen, is only a consumer and cannot create a real national community - a dead liberalism. So what Danny Kruger is saying in his book, and with the excellent Miriam Cates in their joint New Social Covenant Unit, is worth paying attention to. Covenant, or a sense of social obligation, to family and country and culture is essential but whether it is possible without a religious grounding, and perhaps also a coherent national identity, is doubtful and we may face an increasingly ugly struggle for power.
Thank you and sorry for late reply. Have been at Tory party conference surrounded by people who hate us. Now safely back home in north London (where they also hate us)
I'm sorry and disappointed to hear that there are so many haters at the Tory Party Conference. Should not be like that. As for North London..well, we knew that about North London. But we love you on here, Ed.
"This radicalisation was starkly illustrated by the recent case of a teenage girl who was told by her teacher that her opinion of gender binaries was ‘despicable’. "
It's sex that is the binary because of there are no intermediate gametes, only sperm and egg.
1960s revolution was far more of a break from the past than I previously understood. For example, the idea that couples can marry, have children and then separate merely because it is just not vibing for them is, as a social standard, abhorrent. And beneath that the subversion of the core spiritual idea that the self is the root of all suffering.And not, as we now have it, a source of liberation.
Not too impressed with the idea of 'brotherhood'. Considering Cain & Abel (and even P. vs. C. HItchens) the omens for successful co-operation are not too good. Unfortunately barbarism is always bubbling away beneath the surface, however good the superstructure. We're going through one of those phases at the moment. I probably won't live to see the end of it. Philosophy requires that one be as cold as ice, and frankly with the torrent of 'sentiment' currently, it'll be some time before real thinkers appear again, and possibilities emerge. Part of the problem is that the perception of one's opponents (read Twitter or 'X' for a flavour) has nothing to do with real face-to-face meetings (as in old-style politics), but the deciphering of 'displayed' attitudes (which may be false or hyper-exaggerated) online.
Kruger and Cates are good, and worth listening to. It's striking that whenever they pop up to say something sensible, it's generally other Tory MPs who queue up to knock them down.
I'm genuinely torn over what I think should happen to the party. I have every sympathy for those who wants to see the Conservatives annihilated in a catastrophic defeat, in the hope that something better will emerge from the ashes. But I'm very worried indeed about what a Labour party would do to the country over five years - I really don't buy the argument that it can't be much worse than we've already had (on cultural issues at least, it can, and it will). I find myself very despondent about all the options ahead, to be honest!
Although I agree the far-left Tories need to be stopped, how is this going to be achieved by replacing them with the far-far-Left Labour, ravenous for power and with an entire cadre of civil servants and quangocrats ready and eager to do its bidding? Taking your specific example of immigration, is there anything about Labour's platform that gives hope for a reduction in numbers? Hardly: they started the country down that destructive path.
I have a lot of sympathy for your view, but I fear your assumption that the usual Newtonian laws continue to apply to British politics is misplaced. The guardrails on which our unwritten constitution depends have been dismantled by Blair's stay-behind army of civil servants and quangocrats.
Thus we have had Home Office civil servants in open defiance of even timid measures to control immigration, but would they prevent the constitutional vandalism of votes at 16? I strongly suspect not. The wasted 13 years is in part due to this; only the firmest Ministerial hands can begin to do something about it. Cameron/May/Johnson/Sunak were, for differing reasons, just not up to it. Others who might have done something were either unsupported (Raab, forced out for "bullying") or summarily despatched (Truss, correct instincts, lacking guile).
A term of Labour will not permit the discontents it ferments to result in the normal political consequence of a change of government and of direction: votes at 16 and for foreigners will pretty much assure that, and in case the unthinkable happened, a raft of sacred "international obligations", which the EU will be happy to be counterparty to, will ensure that the Hard Left settlement that will be the next Labour legacy will be all but impossible to undo: want to repudiate the UK-EU Net Zero Treaty of 2026? Sure, it's your sovereign right, but it will be linked into the post-Brexit treaty, and renouncing one will renounce all, frightening the markets. The same trick can be repeated across many areas of policy. Thus, what are essentially domestic policy choice questions, that ought to be decided by the electorate, will be paralysed by fear of a currency and credit meltdown, a playbook that was already used very successfully against Truss.
I appreciate I'm not offering any solution; it's a desperately sad situation. For now, the least worst option is to try to take back the Conservative Party from the dismal wretches that currently operate as Labour seat-warmers.
Like I said, every sympathy with this view. The Tories deserve to be cast into the outer darkness for their immigration betrayal alone. But Labour in power, unlike the Conservatives, has a very good track record of actually changing the law to bake in progressive policies. Over five years, a Starmer government would not only ramp up legal immigration further, but it would also remove any means *at all* of curbing illegal migration, as well as passing turbo-charged Equity laws and votes for teenagers/EU citizens, etc. After five years of that, backed up by a supportive civil service, media and NGO ecosystem, would an alternative right-wing party, however well-run, even get a look in?
I'm not really disagreeing with you - I suspect you're probably right - but I'm just very glum about any of the potential ways this could fall out, at least for the foreseeable future.
Nothing is more Capitalist than sky-high immigration.
It's primarily Business that wants, and is getting, mega immigration. The Tories are the Party of Business, after all.
Business is merely more discreet (thus less irritating) than the usual liberal and left suspects.
Good article, Ed. Thanks. However, "getting a Tory government" is, in my opinion, the wrong goal. Something that both liberals and socialists understand but the "right" (or, what passes for the right in Britain) seems incapable of grasping is that real power comes from the control of institutions and the culture.
For as long as I can recall, the entire focus of British Conservatives has been on winning elections. It has worked in terms of electoral success (the Conservatives have won more elections that Labour) but look where we are now as a nation. This is because Conservatives believe that all they have to do is get sufficient bums on seats in Westminster. The result is that Conservatives are always in office but never in power. If the sole aim of the New Conservatives is simply to win an election, then they will fall prey to the same dismal, ineffectual outcome.
Real power comes from capturing institutions and changing the culture. Unless the "New Conservatives" are prepared to do these things, then we really might as well yearn for the return of David Cameron.
If I might paraphrase Meyer Rothschild, "Give me control of a nation's institutions and I care not who wins elections."
Astute comment, but it’s worth remembering: cultural & academic institutions, journalists, corporations, etc. in the US only embraced extreme racial identity-politics, ahistorical Manicheanism, the current bizarre rhetoric, a constant culture of victimization & trauma, and all the other tenets of the woke when college-educated women (often but not always young, often but not always single, often but not always white) became the ones who called the shots.
Constant fear of litigation made us Yanks uniquely vulnerable, but this ahistorical ideology is likely going to be as appealing to university-educated young women in the UK as it is here.
In many ways, woke culture isn’t what liberals and leftists in America wanted back in the day. (For starters, they didn’t view sex as inherently “problematic”, nor were they utterly indifferent to the fate of organized labor.) It is what young university-educated women wanted. It then became the left.
Good luck to middle-aged Tories who think they can wrest control of cultural institutions from their friends’ daughters.
Also, people who have been successfully conditioned, can be successfully re-conditioned. Always.
Even if it means having less excuses and career opportunities while now being held to a higher standard?
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here.
Sorry. I mean that this is an appealing ideology for many and abandoning it would require them giving up goodies.
There are real emotional consolations (if a group you identify with is underrepresented in something good it’s because of discrimination, if something in life is unpleasant it’s the fault of “the patriarchy”, etc.) and professional benefits (women and people from “marginalized” groups are given preference in hiring and advancement) that would likely make university-educated young women reluctant to be reconditioned.
You're referring to confronting them with a view to persuading them. That's never that way it works. You build a stronger horse around them and they will come of their volition. It can be done. Indeed, it has been done.
The first step is to identify what you want to achieve. Only then can you start discussing how it can be achieved.
As you say, Ed, it's the how of rebuilding social & cultural stability that's the tricky bit. I work in change management as a day job, and there's a lot I see that's a waste of time or worse: inspirational speeches and comms posters, bureaucratic models & mad theories, attempts to convert and shame subversives, top-down rules and spreadsheet schedules, one-size-fits-none approaches. What does work is a combination of the kind of covenants Kruger talks about - so long as there's long-term commitment, especially from the side with more power - and support for thoughtful local experiments (like Goodwin has been doing with universities), bringing people together to find local solutions and build social bonds together.
Trouble is, all the above doesn't sound glamorous or clever, it can feel frustrating and circular and slow and exhausting, you can't do it without working with other people or thinking hard about boundaries and what we owe each other, and it goes against all the strategic media-friendly planning guff out of touch liberal ideologies have ingrained in us.
But it does build generative stability, and that's something people - conservatives and pretty much everyone else - is crying out for: we all want to believe in something more than ourselves, we all want to belong and have our efforts rewarded, we all want a place that welcomes us home. If we keep shouting slogans at each other, we're never going to get there. If we do the real life/work of setting up covenants and working together at a local level, this could be a movement that draws in lots of people who'd never have thought of themselves as conservative as well as the conference faithful.
Would also like to emphasize that cultural conservative visions need to first be realized and implemened on a local level.
Yes! Practice eats theory for High Tea!
Clearly there's a role for institutional and political leaders in encouraging and supporting local experiments, in making sure what is learned from them is shared, and in putting in place the bigger structures to allow them to join up and build on what works...but the real work has to take place at the local, human level - you can't create civilisation from a whiteboard.
Isn't the truth of this why power is kept centralised? By both sides.
I suspect it's ignorance and shame as much as power-grabbing. Few of today's politicians have done much other than political lobbying, so don't know where to start when it comes to working at and with local communities on real stuff, and don't want to be exposed as idiots by trying. I think they - like most of us - are lazy enough that if they could catalyse and benefit from others' efforts they'd leap at the opportunity.
Plausible. It's also interesting to me that the same observations about a lack of organising on the ground - doing the real grunt work - is a theme in Freddie deBoer's writing too, albeit from a Marxist/socialist angle. We seem to be cursed by a political class who see politics as a status game, rather than a mission - whichever side they're on. There are almost no working class Labour MPs now, for example.
Nicely put.
For come context, we went through this in America in the 80's. At the time, we had two parties, Democrat, and Democrat-lite, as exemplified by George Will's definition of conservative: "standing athwart history yelling 'stop!' Up until the late 80's, everyone argued in the chambers and on TV, the Republicans patted themselves on the back when they slowed down the liberal advance, and then everyone went out to cocktail parties in Georgetown.
What changed it? Newt Gingrich. He rose to power on a specific set of policy proposals (which were seen by all the establishment at the time as horribly divisive) which he terms the Contract With America. And when he won the House for the first time in 40 years, he put every one of them up to a vote. Not all succeeded, but voters saw the GOP run on a platform and then attempt to implement it.
Perhaps Danny Kruger can be your Newt Gingrich.
I will warn you though, the Democrats didn't lie down and die. They got far more radical, and we elected an establishment President (Bush) in 2000 who refused to push back on the radicalism since he was trying to be a "compassionate conservative". The next guy to try the same trick was named Trump. He ran on an agenda but wasn't competent enough to implement most of it.
Was delighted to see Konstatin Kissin, a very cool guy, show up on that 50 most influential list you mentioned. Really liked the episode of his show you were on, Ed.
Covenants are 'willing embraced', 'tolerant of difference, of unorthodox lifestyles and beliefs' and 'probably make people happier'. All sounds very liberal to me. (The latter, I'm sure, is empirically verifiable.)
There's also no necessary conflict with liberal ideas of the social contract; they can and should co-exist. See 'Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft' by Ferdinand Tönnies.
My own humble suggestion would be that we should re-discover our own British liberalism (Locke, Smith, Mill) and evict the misbegotten American version which currently benights us.
As an expat Australian who has lived in London since 2012 and who watched John Howard come to and maintain power explicitly based on governing for the normative middle-ground economically, morally and socially, it is interesting to watch the Tories reaching similar conclusions 25 years later. Interesting to see whether one will be able to fight as a desperate rear guard action a war more successfully prosecuted from 1996 - 2007 when the forces were more evenly balanced.
And for me and many Americans, "the easy narrative of progress and liberalism" is our heritage to be tampered with at our peril.
Another good article Ed, thank you.
Patrick Deneen in his book, The Failure of Liberalism, argues that Locke and Hobbes tried in the 17th c to free a society centred around religious obligation and its consequent rival religious hatreds. So instead, they promoted the idea of a social contract based on the more neutral reality of individual self interest. And it worked: property and political rights led to representative government, the rule of law and religious toleration. But Deneen also points out that these all grew within the framework of classical and Christian ideas of virtue - at least of a robust secularised liberalism - which took, family , country and a culture aspiring to truth, beauty and goodness for granted. With these ideas now gone, Deneen goes on to lament, we are left only with the self interest of the individual, who ceases to be a citizen, is only a consumer and cannot create a real national community - a dead liberalism. So what Danny Kruger is saying in his book, and with the excellent Miriam Cates in their joint New Social Covenant Unit, is worth paying attention to. Covenant, or a sense of social obligation, to family and country and culture is essential but whether it is possible without a religious grounding, and perhaps also a coherent national identity, is doubtful and we may face an increasingly ugly struggle for power.
Superb article which puts the Tory post-2010 abject failure into a nutshell.
Thank you and sorry for late reply. Have been at Tory party conference surrounded by people who hate us. Now safely back home in north London (where they also hate us)
I'm sorry and disappointed to hear that there are so many haters at the Tory Party Conference. Should not be like that. As for North London..well, we knew that about North London. But we love you on here, Ed.
:)
"This radicalisation was starkly illustrated by the recent case of a teenage girl who was told by her teacher that her opinion of gender binaries was ‘despicable’. "
It's sex that is the binary because of there are no intermediate gametes, only sperm and egg.
Conservatives on hind legs, I approve of this evolution
Superb.
1960s revolution was far more of a break from the past than I previously understood. For example, the idea that couples can marry, have children and then separate merely because it is just not vibing for them is, as a social standard, abhorrent. And beneath that the subversion of the core spiritual idea that the self is the root of all suffering.And not, as we now have it, a source of liberation.
Not too impressed with the idea of 'brotherhood'. Considering Cain & Abel (and even P. vs. C. HItchens) the omens for successful co-operation are not too good. Unfortunately barbarism is always bubbling away beneath the surface, however good the superstructure. We're going through one of those phases at the moment. I probably won't live to see the end of it. Philosophy requires that one be as cold as ice, and frankly with the torrent of 'sentiment' currently, it'll be some time before real thinkers appear again, and possibilities emerge. Part of the problem is that the perception of one's opponents (read Twitter or 'X' for a flavour) has nothing to do with real face-to-face meetings (as in old-style politics), but the deciphering of 'displayed' attitudes (which may be false or hyper-exaggerated) online.
There is cooperative, Christian individualism.
And there is selfish, Capitalist individualism.
Just using that word in that way does us all a disservice.
Which word, in which way ?