It’s time for Tory socialism

The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a low-tax auction, which is not a good thing. The implication is that the Conservatives think government should be minuscule at the very moment when private enterprise is letting us down – the energy companies are raking in cash and spending it on stock buybacks – and the state seems to be on its knees.

We live in a country where it’s become widely accepted that if you call an ambulance, it won’t show up for several hours; the borders are wide open; social care is under-funded; and the police have ceased investigating certain crimes. If anything, this is a moment to rediscover an older Tory tradition of state-building.

Call it One Nation, paternalism or, if you’re feeling cheeky, Tory socialism – a philosophy, not a doctrine, because it begins by rejecting economic dogma, even materialism on the basis that man does not live by bread alone. Its genius is that it makes culture the engine of policy. Liberal conservatives start by saying ‘how do we grow the economy?’ – to make us rich and give us freedom. Tory socialists begin with ‘what kind of society do we want?’ – and then choose the economic strategy to produce that aim. Personally, I’d like strong families, the chance to exercise my talents, a thriving civil society and a vibrant sphere of leisure and art.

Now, it’s conceivable that the way to get this involves free markets and tax cuts, but sometimes the state can be a helpful actor. Take agriculture. I want a countryside populated with family farms, because they provide my food, manage my ecology and keep us all grounded in the soil. For this, they need markets, low tax, low regulation etc. But given how low returns can be, they might also need subsidies – and to protect them from foreign competition, they might require an aggressive tariff.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Tories were the party of protectionism, just as they were of social reform. In 1926, Stanley Baldwin responded to the energy crisis of the time by improving the laissez-faire market with a National Grid, connecting 122 power stations with 4,000 miles of line and cable (to reduce popular resistance, the pylons were given a majestic appearance intended to evoke ancient Egypt).

Today’s constant search for the new Mrs Thatcher is irritating because it jettisons the decades of history that came before her, which teach us that the Conservative party has survived by identifying what the voters want and giving it to them – regardless of method – and that its genius is to adjust and modernise the country while giving the impression that nothing has changed at all. To quote Michael Gove, himself paraphrasing Charles de Gaulle, Conservatives identify ‘a certain idea of Britain’, and then embody it.

By Tory socialism, I mean an approach to politics that puts the spiritual before the economic, and which situates the human being within a community that is shaped by tradition and custom. What this brand of socialism has always rejected is social conflict, be it the class war of Marxism or the race/sexual battles of identity politics. It is also anti-puritan (fox hunters have no time for face masks or cigarette bans) and anti-egalitarian, because Tories favour hierarchies (God save the Queen!) and they revel in excellence (Britain should have the best racing drivers, ballerinas and horses, and we should spend a sizable amount of the budget trying to win as many Guinness world records as possible).

At the heart of the pursuit of excellence is beauty. We would swallow new towns being built if they resembled Bath or Rye, and I might even tolerate HS2 if it were designed to look like a British steam train, not a Soviet monorail, with a decent restaurant serving good wine. All this stuff might seem small but it is hugely important: Tory socialists are elitist populists in the sense that they want the people to have the very best. And that includes the best state: probably doing a little bit less, but much better.

A big problem with the Conservative party is that since Maggie it has been infected with the idea that the state is always bad and the private sector always better, and while this is often true – we distrust Whitehall for good reason – it has also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have run down parts of our state apparatus financially and reputationally, such that the finest people no longer choose to work in medicine, social work, teaching or the civil service.

This is reflected in politics, where much of my generation has chosen to stay away. Previous Conservative cabinets contained men mentioned in despatches. That experience of war was not merely character-building: Harold Macmillan learnt the techniques of administration from serving in the Ministry of Supply, covering industrial planning and the management of raw materials, skills that were no doubt later applied to his house-building bonanza. Labour and Tory ministers helped rebuild the UK after the second world war because they knew how to get things done, expertise that was slowly lost, delegated or privatised.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are office-holders of distinction and either would be a good PM, but they are also the last shout of a cohort, steeped in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that assumes their overall task is to get out of the way.

Of course, critics of my argument will argue that the Conservatives have pulled off some big social reforms in the past 12 years, particularly Universal Credit and academies, and that Sunak oversaw one of the largest welfare programmes in history, aka furlough. Boris Johnson won a landslide in 2019 with a pitch that was a mix of jam-for-everyone levelling-up and cultural conservatism, and the present tax burden is sky-high in a bid to bankroll the NHS. It is telling that the party’s elite have only gone hell-for-leather Thatcherite when trying to court the vote of their members, but I suspect it doesn’t appeal to all the members and, more importantly, it is a misunderstanding of what conservatism is at root.

Either way, whoever wins, the next few years will be marked by economic collapse and environmental change – so the Conservatives are going to have to become a party of intervention and infrastructure, to build up what the academics call ‘state capacity’. In that case, they would do well to research their own history and turn disaster into opportunity by using it in the service of a traditionalist cultural vision.

I am honest about what I want. Pretty town centres where there are butchers and bakers. Churches christening a baby boom. Rewilded land and profitable herds. Safe streets, cradle-to-grave care, neighbours who check in on each other, docks building ships, and kindness, liberality, virtue. Use the state and market to such ends and Conservatives will be unbeatable.