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Michael Bentley: The market cannot provide the cultural values we need to flourish

Michael Bentley is an historian of British politics and thought. His latest book, a biography of Sir Herbert Butterfield, appeared in 2011.

Conservatives often join forces with libertarians.  Some, indeed, would be happy to apply both labels to themselves.  But conservatism and libertarianism represent different ways of thinking about the world and the border between them is also a boundary.  Proponents of the free market want many of the things that Conservatives also want: a slimmed state, low taxation, maximum choice, individual responsibility.  They also prefer, however, to reduce political discussion to a single economic formula, which is not a Conservative way of proceeding.  The marketeers are perfectly aware that the prescriptions of the free market do not find a fit with the real world.  They encourage us to see the market as a form of Ideal Type, to use Weber’s expression: an intellectual construction against which to measure the messy deviations of reality.  The difficulty lies in what we are supposed to do once this exercise in subtraction has taken place.  And that is where the marketeers’ equations no longer balance, because policy in the real world can begin neither from an abstraction cultivated in the present nor from assumptions that deny the reality of a Conservative past.  More than any other formation of people, we Conservatives are what we have been. 

Little thought about our current realities is needed in any case to see that the market can decide some things and not others.  There exists an argument – a strong one – for extending market decisions; it could well be that an internal market within some present state monopolies  (education and health come to mind, but there are others) would enhance Conservative objectives rather than conflict with them.  Yet one objective trumps all others.  It is the point of a Conservative politics to promote a Conservative culture and that cultural requirement runs far beyond the boundaries of libertarian thinking.  Once we recognise this we must accept also that there are social goods and cultural benefits that only the state can nurture. Conservatives have understood this point for a hundred and fifty years.  Their problem and opportunity is, or ought to be, to identify those goods and the most congruent mode of furthering them.  To pretend that those goods do not exist courts not only moral repugnance, since certain fractions of our society require our collective protection and help, but also political illiteracy.  Marketeers seem to believe that, once their Enlightenment vision has been presented clearly to the masses, the electors will hurtle towards the Tory party like migrating wildebeest.  This is fantasy.  The best way to lose every election for the next century is to proclaim ‘Let the Market Decide’.  Instead, we, the thinking Conservatives, have ourselves to decide and to stop imagining that we can shuffle off the responsibility for our national culture and shared values onto an impersonal mechanism that operates without reference to any such things.

There are deep-structural difficulties in the way.  Time was when one could say that, whatever party held power, the country remained conservative in the sense of accepting what Oakeshott used to call ‘intimations’: unspoken values, unquestioned customs and subliminal expectations that defined a shared culture.  We are in a different place today: charitable giving at an all time low, the Church is falling into irrelevance; ‘society’ and ‘community’ merely sentimental labels for those fragments that have not yet been reduced to a state of nature.  The way back will be hard, but we won’t get there merely by burning bridles.  Freedom for everyone: certainly. Free for all: not on our watch.

Anthony O'Hear: The Riddle of the Voucher, Part Two

By Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, and editor of Philosophy journal.

Back in 1986, Arthur Seldon published an essay entitled ‘The Riddle of the Voucher’. The riddle was to explain why educational vouchers, having seen off all the intellectual and bureaucratic arguments against them the early 1980s, then disappeared from political view. Those who can think back that far will recall that the moral argument in favour of vouchers was that it put control of children’s education where it should belong, in the hands of their parents. They would then be able fulfil their proper role in relation to the up-bringing of their children, a source of both duty and happiness.

This is the situation of parents who send their children to independent schools (and who often make considerable sacrifices to do so), but it is not the case with the 93% of pupils in the state sector, many of whose parents simply could not contemplate independent education. For all the governmental rhetoric of choice, the 93% simply have to go where the state and its bureaucrats see fit, according to its crazily restrictive admissions codes, a situation actually high-lighted by the introduction of ‘free’ schools. For once these are over-subscribed, the rest are left only the option of the very schools the free schools were introduced to avoid.

An independent school which fails to satisfy its customers will close in short order. This is not the case with state schools, whose clientele are not customers so much as suppliants, who have to be grateful for what they get (which, to compound the insult, is actually paid for out of their taxes). Hardly surprising then, that being denied even minimum influence over their children’s education, many parents simply opt out of any interest or responsibility. Hardly surprising that too many state schools, not subject to minimal economic discipline, coast along in complacent mediocrity or worse, the damage compounded by the attempts of successive governments to regulate standards by otiose regulation and ideologically driven inspection.

Gay Marriage and Real Conservatism

Mark Dooley is an Irish philosopher and journalist.

Dominating political and cultural debate in 2013 will be the contentious issue of gay marriage.  On the one side, you have a self-confident liberal lobby supported, ironically, by the Conservatives.  Opposing them is the silent majority supported by real conservatives, including certain members of the Christian clergy.

Lest we forget, the whole point of conservatism is to conserve.  This does not mean that customs, traditions and institutions cannot be reformed.  But it does mean that reform must always be carried out, to cite Edmund Burke, ‘as if in the presence of canonized forefathers’.  For what we have received from our forebears is not ours to do with as we please, but is a sacred bequest.

It seems to me that many within the British Conservative Party have forgotten this basic principle of conservatism.  In so doing, have they not forfeited their right to call themselves 'conservatives'?

Real conservatives oppose liberals, not out of prejudice, intolerance or bigotry, but out of a concern for absent generations – both for those who went before us, and for those who are yet to come. They follow Burke in believing that ‘a spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper’, and that ‘people will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors’.