Conservatism is in crisis because the Tories no longer have a faith to live by

 Defeat isn’t inevitable, if only they realised there’s no shortage of causes the Right could champion

Source - Daily Telegraph - 26/10/23

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This weekend, 100 speakers and 1,000 delegates from 72 countries will convene in London for perhaps the largest gathering of the global centre-Right in recent British history. The star attraction is Jordan Peterson, an academic who is later speaking to a £60-a-head audience at the O2 Arena. Jacinta Price, the Aboriginal Australian and referendum winner I wrote about last week, will be in attendance. Kemi Badenoch and Michael Gove have slots, as does Kevin McCarthy, the recently ousted speaker of the US House of Representatives. It could be a festival of conservatism but for one thing: no one is really using the c-word.

It’s hard, now, to speak of conservatism in terms of a set of ideas. Rishi Sunak is now defining himself against a “30-year status quo” which, by definition, lumps together Labour with the Tories. He’s quick to imply that his party copied its enemy’s mistakes and, ergo, has been part of the problem. Gordon Brown’s spending plans? Tick. Net zero? Theresa May was the original cheerleader. Gender self-ID? The Tories were for it, before being against. Identity politics? Even now, the Tories seem unclear.

If conservatism is what a Conservative government does, then it has ended up in quite a muddle. The 1980s were a success from which the party never quite recovered, and it spent too long trying to steer the conversation back to the need for lower tax and spending. Which, in office, it spectacularly failed to deliver. The other great Tory purpose – keeping the other guys out – worked when there was fear of Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. But people find it harder to get terrified by Sir Keir Starmer.

Several new dividing lines have come up in recent years, giving the Tories the chance to apply their values and refresh their relevance in the eyes of a new audience. But each time they fluffed the chance. They should have instinctively opposed gender self-ID, saying women’s rights need to be defended and should not be given to any man who seeks to claim them. It’s also about free speech and the right to debate this without being accused of a hate crime. It should have been a cause that conservatives adopted without hesitation.

Net zero was their chance to talk about the environment in a calm way, discussing trade-offs. Perhaps choosing a “bright green” focus on tech and environmental progress, while rejecting the “dark green” jeremiads and hysteria. Sunak has chosen the right side now, but belatedly. It’s not just the relay-race of leaders, but the rival positions Tories have taken and their inability to agree on the very basics. Voters could be forgiven for wondering what, if they give the Tories a fifth term, the party will stand for three years on.

Looking abroad, it’s not much better. The crisis of American conservatism can be seen in Donald Trump’s status as the overwhelming favourite to challenge Joe Biden. The Republican debates have shown the chaos over the agenda, let alone the candidate. Across Europe, the success of populists has been made possible in large part due to conservative reluctance to engage in questions raised by demographic change.

And while Australia’s conservatives are celebrating a referendum success, they remain out of power in every mainland state. “Modern history is full of examples of great movements that disappeared because they had ceased to have any genuine reason for existence,” Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, once observed. “The important thing is to have a faith to live by.”

So where is that faith? This is Sunak’s problem: his style is more managerial. His position is that people have heard enough Tory bluster and now want to see hard results. His video this week listed various achievements, of which cutting small-boat arrivals by a third is perhaps the most impressive. But the rest are fairly small beer and his “five pledges” remain problematic. Debt isn’t falling. The economy is barely growing. Inflation is decreasing everywhere, and he can’t really claim credit for that. If you dislike smoking and XL Bully dogs, you may approve of his bans. But if you see politics as a battle of values, it’s hard to work out which ones the Tories champion.

Could it be that, after 13 years and five prime ministers, the Right is just out of ideas? It sounds plausible, but the Right has no shortage of causes. This coming conference has plenty of them. The financier Helena Morrissey will address how the creed of ESG (“environmental, social, and corporate governance”) led to the politicisation of the corporate world. The author Marian Tupy will be discussing his “superabundance” thesis, showing how capitalism and innovation have led to huge (and under-discussed) social and economic improvements. The power of free markets is not just a good story, but a better one than ever.

Sunak is a believer in all of these things, but he keeps it quiet. His bet is that the public has heard enough Tory bluster and just wants results. (It won’t help that another one of his MPs has been arrested on rape charges.) His point in his Artificial Intelligence speech on Thursday was that there are post-Brexit dividends to be had in being less fearful about innovation and not regulating AI to death like the European Union intends to. He’s probably right, but it’s a difficult message to rally voters around.

The “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” conference is being backed by Sir Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the duo behind GB News. My hunch is that its unspoken subtext is that the Tories are doomed and that it’s time to debate what comes next. There’s plenty such debate about. Liz Truss’s book, due next April, has been described to me as a “pre-mortem, rather than a post-mortem”, taking Sunak’s defeat as a given and looking at how to repair. Its title: Ten Years to Save The West. 

The Tories barely have 10 months, but it’s not as if they are facing a Labour Party with an undefeatably coherent agenda. Starmer barely has any ideas and Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor, has just been accused of copying-and-pasting chunks of her new book from Wikipedia and the Tony Blair Institute’s website. The Right still has many strong ideas left to adopt, many causes left to champion. Defeat is not inevitable. But it will be, if the Tories talk and act as if they have given up already.