John Hayes MP: Being Conservative

The second Cornerstone publication – ‘Reviving Tory Britain’ – contains many good thoughts although I can’t agree with all of them.  I am sceptical, for example, about the essay on NHS reform and the case for a flat tax, passionately made by Edward Leigh MP.  John Hayes MP’s introductory essay, ‘Being Conservative’, stands out as the pamphlet’s most impressive contribution.

I admit to being a close friend and admirer of John and his essay kindly pays a small acknowledgment to me.  I disclose this because this post does not come from an unbiased perspective.

Running through John’s essay is his passion for social justice and an umbilical recognition of the importance of community ties:

“Poverty in Britain was once a matter of the absence of material wellbeing. Deprivation was closely linked to the risk of disease and the certainty of hardship. But strong families and communities helped people to cope with shortages of income. The higher standards of living of recent decades have been accompanied by declining public order and decaying family and community life. The new poverty is the poverty of manners and morals; the new disease is hopelessness.  All are touched by social and cultural decay, but the vulnerable – those who live on the front line – suffer most.”

John does not believe that the great challenges are any longer economic – “if they ever were” – but that they are social and cultural.  Contemporary liberalism, he states, has little to say about “the collapse of civil society”.  John Hayes makes an old-fashioned romantic plea for a conservatism that preserves the institutions and traditions that care for people and give their lives meaning.  He stands with a growing number of thoughtful conservatives, like America’s Rick Santorum, who believe that the family and relations between men are much more important than a focus on the ‘economic man’ who only inhabits textbooks.  New York Times columnist David Brooks recently acknowledged this sociological trend in conservatism (within an essay that also paid tribute to David Willetts’ communitarian thinking):

“Conservative writers are now spending a lot more time trying to understand the substratum of human behavior. Rather than treating human beings as economic actors and lauding the entrepreneur as conservatism's paragon, they are discussing the values, assumptions, and mental landscapes that are passed down unconsciously from generation to generation. Why do some groups succeed and others fail? Why are some people raised in environments that transmit one set of values while others are raised in environments that transmit another set of values?”

For John Hayes a individualistically-libertarian future for Conservatism would be as politically foolish as it would be irrelevant to the nation’s insecurities:

“Sadly, some in our party have come to believe that by aping Blair, rather than studying Burke; by adopting the assumptions of the liberal elite, rather than recalling our Conservative roots; we might become as popular as our opponents. This route is likely to prove as disastrous electorally as it is unauthentic. Why on earth would voters support imitation liberals when they can have the real thing?”

Comments

[Bob B]

Commentary in both the FT and The Economist has rung warnings about a flat tax. Basically, the middle classes would lose out unless the tax flat rate was set so low that the government ran an enormous deficit budget in the hope that tax reciepts would eventually rise sufficiently to recover the fiscal gap. In all, hardly encouraging.

[James Hellyer]

Why on earth would voters support imitation liberals when they can have the real thing?

We'd better not let Team Cameron see this!

[David Sergeant]

"Why on earth would voters support imitation liberals when they can have the real thing?" Because they have demonstrated they will vote for imitation Conservatives!

Labour's liberalism is presently founded on tax and debt. Soon voters will want proper financial management.

[Selsdon Man]

I will repeat the post of the "wisdom" from Santorum on Katrina.

"I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."

That means fining or jailing those who did not have the means to escape or were afraid that their homes and businesses could be looted.

That is not social justice or compassionate conservative. It is madness - it belongs in the sanitorium.

John Hayes is collectivist conservative - he supports protectionism and is an extreme nationalist. That is not a future I or any conservative who wants to free would support.

[R-J Tasker]

''The higher standards of living of recent decades have been accompanied by declining public order and decaying family and community life.''

I think John hits the nail firmly on the head here. No more of a classic example of the above than modern day Britain.

[Rick]

"''The higher standards of living of recent decades have been accompanied by declining public order and decaying family and community life.''

One man's spending cut is another man's lost job. These "higher standards of living" are evident in one geography and visibly absent in another. Maybe if PR types moved out of Soho and into Doncaster or Nottingham and ask taxi drivers or minimum wage shop security guards what they did BEFORE.....the answers are illuminating.

Roman Abramovitch is a symbol of how 70 years of Soviet Communism produces a plethora of billionaires, but it says nothing about the lives of ordinary Russians.