Could Red Toryism insert a dose of conservatism back into the Conservative Party?

Michael Merrick is studying for a PhD in the School of Divinity at St. Andrews University.

There appears to be a hardening consensus behind the opinion that David Cameron, conscious of his electability in the key marginal seats that will decide the election, is seeking to present a Tory party sterilised of the toxicity that has plagued the Tory brand since the downfall of Thatcherism.  In the economic sphere this quest for de-toxification has yielded positive results, for with it has come a limited realisation that the Thatcherite acceptance of neo-liberal economic policy was, in a sense, not really conservative at all, since it failed to protect against the excesses of blind markets and monopolising oligarchies precisely those things that conservatives are purported to cherish: the individual, the family, the community.  This is a genuine development, and allows reclamation of a conservative thinking that is champion of the people, and protector of the civic realm.

However the development seems to have become stunted, for the Conservative Party seems to have become enchanted with talk of ‘progressiveness’ and the benign persona it bestows, an allure that has proved irresistible even whilst its possession requires the acceptance of the left-liberal worldview that underlies it.  This capitulation speaks of a lack of confidence of the merits of genuinely conservative thought; Mr. Cameron has focused instead, to use the words of Tim Montgomerie, on ‘proving progressive credentials to the Left’.  Quite why the Conservative Party should feel the need to do this is the point at issue; the answer, one suspects, is because it has accepted the left’s account of what ‘progressive’ thinking looks like.  In accepting the terms that frame the debate, the right really has yielded its ideological foundations, and ceded to the interests of the status-quo.

Whilst this might all seem a little cerebral, the point is an important one, because at stake is a genuinely conservative appraisal of the problems that face contemporary society.  As the Red Tory project started by Phillip Blond has convincingly argued, the homogenisation currently afflicting the political parties consists chiefly in the continuing adherence to a ‘post-1945 embrace of the state and the post-1968 embrace of the individual’. The argument is convincing, for the evidence is there for all to see. Conservative thinking has accepted an authoritarian statism that proceeds under the presumption that the state holds a monopoly on power and is therefore the only legitimate generator, dispenser and guarantor of it (note here how all three parties currently talk of pushing power ‘outwards and downwards’). 

Michael Merrick is studying for a PhD in the School of Divinity at St. Andrews University.

Michael Merrick: The contemporary obsession with ‘progressive’ politics nullifies political identity and fuels personality politics

Michael Merrick is about to start a PhD in the School of Divinity, St. Andrews University.  Here he argues that the contemporary obsession with ‘progressive’ politics nullifies political identity and fuels personality politics.

On numerous occasions over the past few months Mr. Cameron has enunciated the rough outlines of a blossoming trend within the Conservative Party known as ‘progressive’ or ‘compassionate’ conservatism.  In his speech to the opening of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos a few months ago, Mr. Cameron gave a concrete indication of what he saw as the core values of this Progressive Conservatism; fairness, equality of opportunity, green thinking and individual and collective security.  Thus, if the exhortations of market institutions of a few months ago were fuelled by the belief that markets had started to transgress the ‘equality of opportunity’ mantra, then it is the ‘fairness’ principle that now encourages the Conservative leadership to side with the public over the politicians, and rightly so, when it comes to the broad denunciation of the expenses system. 

For the time being, however, it is these core values that I wish to explore, rather than the temporal events they have been applied to.  Now, Mr. Cameron has acknowledged in the past that the substance of these values, and the ideal society they speak of, are essentially the same as those held by the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats.  Which leads to the question, if all parties essentially agree on their vision of the ideal ends for society, then what makes the Conservative Party so different ?

Michael Merrick: A public voice for religion?

Michael Merrick argues that denying religion a public voice can be unhealthy for politics and disastrous for an increasingly isolated social-underclass.

The creedal exegetes of secular Britain tend to cling devoutly to the belief that religion and politics should not mix.  Indeed, when any wayward politician is so naïve as to publicly associate the guiding influence of religion and the political decision-making process great furores of protest rumble through the messageboards and forums of cyberspace.  With an armoury of selective historical prejudice and sheer impolite diatribe, the angry mob slays the religious beast before it can even raise an argument in protest.

This really is quite curious.  For when delicate issues arise, the British public quite rightly expect that the role of individual conscience will be protected against the political machine. The neutrality of conscience clearly agitates far less than the religion that may, or may not, inform it. Politicians, chasing away unhealthy headlines, implicitly participate in the ruse.  Invariably the result is a limitation on the application of morality to those debates commonly accepted to lie outside the concrete constituencies of political persuasion.  Morality, if only subliminally, is depicted as an extraordinary candidate, somehow alien to the mundane mechanisms of the everyday political process. When the political cedes the public space, however grudgingly, conscience is then, and only then, freed to the light of day.