By Roger Scruton
During 13 years of opposition the Tory Party had the opportunity to think. Issues that were of ever increasing prominence in the minds and the feelings of the electorate were ignored or fudged by the Party hierarchy. There was a need to re-examine the core beliefs and assumptions of Tory politics, and to reconnect with the instincts and values on which the Tories had in the past depended for their support. But the Party entered into coalition government with virtually no intellectual contribution of its own, and with a rooted desire to avoid the places where thought was needed. It was as though the entire period out of office had been spent sipping cocktails in the Bahamas, watching the antics of the Labour Government on television with quiet murmurs of dismay. Issues where the Party should be taking the lead – the environment, marriage and the family, the place of religion in the public square, press freedom, policing, the armed forces – have all been addressed as though the Labour Party were still in office, and as though there were no need to change one iota of the left-liberal agenda. True, in the matter of Europe the Party has made moves to protect national sovereignty, though largely because UKIP has forced the Tories to recognise that, by not doing so, they have jeopardised their core support. Perhaps it is only in the fields of education and welfare that we see the evidence of serious thinking, with Michael Gove and Iain Duncan-Smith making a courageous attempt to unravel fifty years of egalitarian claptrap.
There is a certain kind of Tory who will say that this is altogether inevitable and right. Conservatism, such a person will say, is not about ideas but about instincts, and the main business of conservative government is not to rock the boat but to keep it afloat in troubled waters. Ideas are not the solution but the problem, and if only we could dispense with them we could return to the kind of politics that the British people prefer, and which leaves them to get on with life according to their own peaceful ambitions. It seems to me that there is no longer room for that complacent attitude. Our country has undergone radical changes that must be discussed and addressed if politics is again to make sense to the people, and not to seem like the pastime of a self-perpetuating political class.Here are some of the matters where thought is needed:
There are many more issues that will occur to the reader, of course: foreign policy, military readiness, the Union and the North-South divide. My point is simply to remind the reader that, without thinking we shall not know what we stand for, and we will go into an election with an indistinct agenda and no readiness to fight for it. But there is hope. Young people in the Windsor Conservative Association have begun a movement for Conservative Renewal, with the intention of assembling thinkers and opinion formers who will concentrate the minds of ordinary voters, and influence the Party not only to define its position on the issues of the day but also to look for the arguments that would persuade others to agree with it.
Conservative Renewal is organising their second day-long conference, which will be held in Windsor on Saturday the 14th of September. Book now for a place, and join in the conversation.
By Roger Scruton
Human beings make rational choices, and choices are rational only if they seek out the truth. But the truth may be uncomfortable, so that we have a motive to avoid it. Or it may be unacceptable to those on whom we wish to impose our decisions, in which case we have a motive to conceal it. Perhaps the deep truth about our condition is so uncomfortable that we stand in need of some collective delusion that will make us governable – so Plato thought, and advocated the ‘Noble Lie’ as a means of crowd-control. The totalitarian systems of the 20th century took this seriously, and rewrote the human condition in terms of mythical ‘struggles’ between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the master race and the human vermin. In due course the totalitarian project advanced in the way foretold by George Orwell, inventing a language and a doctrine that would make the truth inexpressible, so that people would have to ‘live within the lie’, as Havel put it.
However, while human beings can be for a long time browbeaten into accepting lies and myths, the instinct for the truth lies deeper in their psyche than the willingness to be deceived, and will eventually erupt in protest. Two great lies have dominated British politics since the 1960s, and it has now become impossible to repeat them. The first lie – propagated by the Labour Party – is that mass immigration is a positive benefit, and that anyone who resists it is a racist, a fascist, a Little Englander or worse. The second lie – propagated by the old guard of the Tory Party – is that the European Union is a free-trade agreement whose economic benefits far outweigh any minor social costs. These lies have been maintained in being by intimidation of a kind that has rarely been seen in British politics. To speak out publicly against mass immigration, even to advocate, like Ray Honeyford, an active policy of assimilation and integration, was to be condemned as a racist, not only by the activists but by the hierarchy of the Labour Party. Your career was immediately at risk, and if you were a politician or a teacher you could no longer hope for promotion.Likewise, attempts to point out that the EU is not a free-trade agreement but a conspiracy to confiscate national sovereignty have been vilified not only by progressives committed to trans-national government but also by prominent Tories, who have devoted their energies over a lifetime to reinforcing the lies told by Edward Heath and have no intention of changing now. The absurd insults hurled at UKIP and its supporters have at last done their work, and the Conservative Party has been forced to wake up to the fact that you can no longer conceal the truth from the people. Membership of the EU brings benefits. But it also means that our borders are now infinitely porous, that our national assets (the welfare system included) are no longer ours, and that our government is powerless to pursue the national interest. It is not as though this is true only now: it has been true since the ‘Single European Act’ forced through Parliament for no clear reason by Margaret Thatcher. Indeed it was true from the beginning and is the reason why Jean Monnet insisted that the European project should advance behind a sequence of disguises, beginning with the ‘Coal and Steel Community’ of 1951. But efforts to conceal the truth have at last broken down, and these lies woven by our parents and grandparents can be repeated only in an ironical tone of voice.
So two great lies have lost their dominion, and truth stands bare and shocking in their place. The question is: what are our politicians going to do about it? And the answer is that they haven’t a clue. If the Conservative Party had based itself in a conservative philosophy, with national sovereignty and social continuity as its cornerstones, it would have known what to say and what to do a long while back. If the Labour Party had remained true to its core constituents among the English and Welsh working class, it would have been able to confess to what is happening to those constituents’ towns and schools. But in both cases the comfortable lie has displaced the uncomfortable truth. And all that is left, now that the lie can no longer be repeated, is bluster and incrimination.
Matthew Sinclair is Director of The TaxPayers' Alliance.
I think Roger Scruton is absolutely right both in his book – Green Philosophy – and his article for this website about the motive that can cause people to protect their environment: it is oikophilia; love of the common home that we share with those dead and those who have yet to be born. You can see that motive at work when beautiful creatures, landscapes and buildings are threatened. No commandment from a politician or bureaucrat is needed to encourage people to rally to their defence.
Unfortunately, oikophilia has its limits. It works well when the environmental good at stake is something you can see, hear, taste or touch. It motivates what Peter Huber called – in his book Hard Green – hard greens, not soft greens who are more concerned about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and similarly intangible problems. No one feels in their bones that an extra tonne of carbon dioxide in the air is an attack on the integrity of their home. They need to be told that it is even there.
Whatever the latest laughable analysis from the Department of Energy and Climate Change says, cutting greenhouse gas emissions is expensive. Economic growth has been associated with increasing carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution. The 19th Century French economist Emile Levasseur wrote about how, if one steam horsepower was taken as equivalent to twenty-one men, in 1840 French industry had a million new workers as a result of steam power. By 1885–87 that number had risen to 98 million, or “deux esclaves et demi par habitant de la France” (two and a half “slaves” for each inhabitant of France).Our final energy consumption in 2009 was equivalent to the labour of 97 men working tirelessly to serve each Briton. If we use more expensive sources of energy in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that means paying them more. The Japanese economist Yoichi Kaya described the result in what is now known as the Kaya Identity: Emissions = Population x Income per capita x Energy intensity of income x Carbon intensity of energy.
Free market economies tend to use and generate energy more efficiently over time but, short of a technological revolution, the draconian limits on emissions that politicians have enshrined in law can only be met with a substantial contraction in national income. The public don’t want to pay that price, which is why climate policy has tended to proceed by the least democratic route possible.
And they are right. William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, is probably the closest anyone comes to the centre of the climate policy debate. Using the 2007 version of his model he estimated that the course of action recommended in the Stern Review would reduce climate harms by $14 trillion but at a cost of nearly $28 trillion. The kind of radical action that politicians have committed us to here doesn’t pass the cost-benefit test.
Nordhaus has found that the “optimal” path – a mild and escalating carbon tax – leaves us 0.35 per cent better off than in a base case where no climate change policies are adopted, using the more recent 2010 version of his model. But economists can always find marginal gains like that on a blackboard. It assumes a truly heroic global agreement, with every country selflessly and efficiently doing their bit. That is not happening.
We are instead pressing ahead unilaterally with terrible policies: draining the budgets of families and businesses with excessive green taxes; picking losers by giving the most generous subsidies to the most expensive sources of low carbon energy; and recreating the volatility of the housing market with an emissions trading scheme where the supply of allowances is fixed, so fluctuations in demand lead to wild swings in the price.
On top of all that we now have the carbon floor price, which is nothing more than an act of industrial masochism. It hurts British industry and, by depressing market demand for emissions allowances and thereby reducing prices in other countries, helps its competitors in other European countries.
Some think that the answer is to replace all that with a nice, neat carbon tax. Pigovian taxation looks great on the economist’s blackboard but will never survive contact with reality. Politicians don’t have the information or the incentives to set the right taxes for negative externalities and subsidies for positive externalities. It quickly degenerates into just another excuse to feed the habits of countless subsidy junkies and impose higher taxes on the rest of us.
British climate policy has, for far too long, been based on trying to answer the question “if a global government set climate policy, what would it tell us to do?”
We are investing enormous resources in cutting what amounts to well under two per cent of global emissions. And higher energy prices here are as likely to export emissions as to eliminate them. If we instead ask “how can Britain, a country producing modest emissions itself but with considerable financial and technical resources, make it easier to cut global emissions?”
I think the answer is then obvious. Staking enormous resources on installing phenomenal amounts of offshore wind capacity in the hope that will drive down costs to an economic level is madness. Instead of investing hundreds of billions to meet environmental targets with the technology available today, we should invest hundreds of millions in putting British scientists and engineers to work developing better alternatives. Prizes are the best way of deploying the money and have been used to steer technological development in useful directions since the Industrial Revolution.
Good climate policy has three elements: resilience, as free and prosperous societies will cope best with whatever the natural world throws at them; adaptation, as climate will always change and we will need to roll with the punches; and promoting research and development which can lower the price of cutting emissions.
All that fits within the established role of government. It does not require a utopian faith in supranational institutions. It will survive a lot of mistakes as each grant or prize doesn’t need to be worth billions so the stakes are relatively low on each roll of the dice. I would submit that it is both the right climate policy and definitely the right climate policy for an oikophile conservative.
By Roger Scruton
There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home. Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the Conservative Party has not seized hold of that cause as its own.
The problem arises because the agenda has been set by the globalisers. Global problems, we are told, require global solutions, and global solutions are trans-national solutions, involving the loss of sovereignty and the surrender to treaties that tie our hands. There may be reason to fear what is happening. But much more important for the activists is the political use to which that fear can be put – which is to destroy national sovereignty and to exert a top-down control by the self-appointed experts over the ordinary activities of mankind.
Moreover, by concentrating on climate change the activists have managed to distract attention from the many other environmental problems that could be, and often have been, solved by people acting in the conservative spirit. Environmental problems arise when homeostatic systems break down – in other words, when the feedback loop that establishes equilibrium is, for whatever reason, destroyed. The homeostatic system that has been most studied is the free market, which returns to equilibrium in changing conditions, provided the participants bear the costs of their actions. Left-wing thinkers refuse to accept this, and constantly invent bogeymen – ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘corporate greed’, ‘market failure’ – in order to justify the intervention of the state, and therefore control by socialists. But intervention by the state is the major cause of disequilibrium, and the environmental consequences can be seen all across the former communist world – in the Soviet case in the form of total devastation. The market ceases to deliver solutions to environmental problems when participants can externalise their costs – in other words, when they can escape the internal rules of the system. It is this that gives rise to ‘the tragedy of the commons’.
The solution is not automatically to call on the state to intervene but first to look for the social mechanisms that cause people to bear the costs of what they do. That is what the common law of tort has done in our country, acting often in conjunction with the law of trusts. It is what oikophilia naturally prompts us to do, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we are permitted to regard ‘common pool resources’ as shared by a defined and localised community. It is what the conservative instinct for trusteeship spontaneously urges upon us.
If we look at the history of the environmental movement in Britain we see those conservative principles working successfully, not through the state, but through the civil initiatives that challenge the state, beginning with the protests on behalf of the forests in the 17th century, initiated by John Evelyn's Silva, and leading to the creation of the National Trust at the end of the 19th century.
Vital to this conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of ‘social capital’. Beauty, they have recognised, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers.
But the environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority – for the science, such as it was, has been exploded – but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism – the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment – irrelevant.
Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore. Conservative-minded architects like Leon Krier at Poundbury and John Simpson at Swindon have shown that this need not be so, that we can learn from our traditional architecture how to build in ways that enhance the neighbourhood, and in ways that produce affordable housing too. People protest at the faceless estates that destroy the view from their window. But no-one protests at Poundbury except the modernist architects who sense the threat that it poses to their monopoly game.
The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?
By Roger Scruton.
Our society has not come to terms with the sexual revolution, and one proof of this is the extent to which people seem now free to accuse each other of sexual misdemeanours and ‘inappropriate’ advances, without knowing or caring whether these constitute a crime. This matter is of great concern to conservatives who, for all their reticence in the matter, are well aware that sexual life ought not to be a free for all, and that conventions, manners and a certain distance between the sexes are fundamental to both individual happiness and social peace. Like other modern people, however, they stumble through this dangerous territory without the light of religious principle to guide them, and leaning, when it is necessary to lean, on an entirely makeshift philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that the absence of a robust view of sex is one reason for the ideological weakness of the Conservative Party. The hesitation over family values, the sudden and unexplained enthusiasm for gay marriage, the easy toleration of ‘non-discrimination’ laws that marginalise the old morality – all these are ways of papering over an enormous hole in the conservative vision, and one that simply did not exist when the founding fathers of conservatism wrote in the 18th century.
Of course, we are all chuffed when the Liberal Democrats are compelled to step down from their high horse and admit that they may be composed of the same material as the rest of us. But this should not distract us from the fact that the accusations against Lord Rennard are gossip, that he is not yet standing trial for a crime in law, and that the whole matter has become public because people no longer know what to make of the fact that men (most men) desire women, including those men who, being as hideous as Lord Rennard, don’t stand a chance. It is quite possible that he misbehaved; without repeating the accusations against him I leave open the possibility that he has transgressed all those conventions and moral strictures that have in better times governed human sexual conduct. He may even have committed a crime. But I am strongly reminded of Jesus’s witty and definitive response to those who had assembled to stone a woman to death for what was then the crime of adultery: ‘let he who is without fault cast the first stone’. I look back on my youth, and all those ‘inappropriate’ advances some of which were lucky enough to find their target, and recognise that we are dealing with a matter which is, and ought to be, governed by manners and not by law. OK, we don’t stone people to death in this country. But we do the next worst thing, which is to bludgeon to death their characters and their prospects, on the strength of gossip which accuses those who retail it as much as the person who is targeted.Even worse, it seems to me, is the case of Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who is accused of entirely unspecific acts that occurred during his younger days. None of his accusers suggests that anything the Cardinal did amounts to a crime in law. Perhaps they are such virtuous people that they have never got drunk and attempted to kiss the attractive person sitting next to them. Indeed, one hopes that, being priests, they have behaved in the exemplary way that Cardinal O’Brien may not have been able always to live up to. But what a fuss, and with what consequences, not only for the Cardinal himself, but for the Church to which the primary loyalty of his accusers is owed!
In most other areas of human life we are well aware of the distinction between crimes and misdemeanours. And, before the days of sexual liberation, we equipped our children with those habits of modesty, reticence and respect that prevented the worst abuses and gave them the means to protect themselves against them. Now, lacking any real understanding of what sex means, we have also lost all sense of proportion. Every offence is at once construed as a crime, with devastating consequences for those who are accused of it. And the worst of it is that conservatives, who should know better, are as confused as everybody else.
By Roger Scruton
The Conservative Party has rightly emphasized that it is civil society, not the state, that is the source of our shared values and our public spirit. Each function that is taken over by the state ends up in the hands of the bureaucrats. And the bigger the bureaucracy the more prone it is to invasion by special interests. That, in brief, is why the private schools in this country are succeeding in their education task, while the state schools are failing. To return our institutions to civil society, to encourage the emergence of a new generation of volunteers, to liberate the charitable impulse – these are the paradigm conservative causes, and the long-term goal of all the initiatives we might take to ‘get the state off our backs’. It is not that we want the state to be weak, but that we want civil society to be strong.
There are many obstacles to this cause, including the vast number of state-dependent clients, who lobby in the name of ‘compassion’. New Labour greatly increased the number of these people, recognising that their vote would always tend in a socialist direction. But there is a more insidious obstacle, and one that is not often noticed because it seems so paradoxical to be opposed to it. The name of this obstacle is ‘health and safety’.
Civil society exists only where individuals have the courage and initiative to get things started. Sports teams, festivals, fairs and markets; shelters, dance-clubs and equestrian events; schools, colleges, scout troops and children’s outings – all these things, which are the stuff of civil society, are now tied in regulatory knots. Activities involving children have been effectively removed from the competence of ordinary unqualified people; playgrounds have been closed for fear of improbable accidents; premises where the Women’s Institute might have run a cake stall, or where teenagers could have got together for a dance, have been condemned by the health inspectors, and scarcely an activity now occurs in the countryside which does not have to be carried out in some clandestine version, for fear of the bureaucrats whose job it is to snoop on us.
The extent of health and safety regulations is now staggering. It is not the cost of them alone which should trouble us. It is their effect in confiscating one of the most important of human virtues, and one on which civil society ultimately depends – which is the virtue of risk-taking. Without this virtue there are few if any social initiatives that will be of lasting benefit. Moreover it is possible to teach enterprise to the young only through activities that also teach them to take the risk of it. By means of health and safety regulations the state gradually colonises all social activities and makes them dependent upon its permission – a permission that is less and less granted, as the bureaucrats discover new ways of amplifying their powers.The matter is of great importance. Looking back to the England of my childhood I remember a world of hospitals that were partly run by volunteers, of home carers whom nobody paid and who had no dealings with the state, of scout troops and guides that took us on adventures from which it was not always certain that we would return. I remember volunteer groups that cleaned the verges, tidied the town hall and visited old people at Christmas. Our school was a state school, but also home to voluntary clubs and societies that met on their own terms and invited whom they chose. That world was one in which accidents occurred, and in which we often had to resolve difficult conflicts. But it was one in which we seldom had to ask permission for what we were doing, and in which charitable people did what they did because it was the right thing to do, whether it was running the cadets or the choir.
It is surely time for conservatives to wake up to the fundamental truth, that risk is a good thing, an immovable part of freedom, and also the stuff from which civil society grows. And this risk, confiscated by the state in the name of health and safety, must be returned to us, whose property it is.
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.
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.
Seldon’s riddle notwithstanding, things actually got worse after 1986. In 1989 the Conservative (!) government nationalised the curriculum and exams. Twenty three years later, Michael Gove is trying to repair the damage which has resulted from this, but his commendable efforts will last only as long as his government lasts. In any case reform in these areas begs the fundamental question, which is whether the state should dictate educational practice, enforcing its whims on the whole population. Collectivists, maddened by illusions of a general will to which they alone are privy, or intoxicated by their own desire to control, say that it should; but anyone of a conservative disposition, who believes in limited government, in freedom of thought and association, and in Burkean autonomous institutions should shudder at the very idea (let alone at the dismal reality).Free schools represent a small, but significant step in infiltrating some real parental influence within the state sector. Despite vicious campaigning against them from the collectivist educational establishment, who see what they imply, they are proving unexpectedly popular, even (or perhaps especially) in areas of high deprivation. Emboldened by the chink of light free schools offer, it is time for the Conservative party to re-consider vouchers for its 2015 manifesto – or if that word is politically outlawed, some analogous mechanism which grants to all parents real choice over their children’s education. Put in the proper way, once parents understand how it would benefit them and their children, it ought to be a vote-winner.
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’.
Hence, to put it simply, conservatives believe that the wisdom of the past is our best guide to a successful future. They believe that such wisdom is embodied in and sustained by institutions, and that this is sufficient to justify their preservation. Hence, a true conservative would never seek to ‘modernize’ time-honoured institutions like the law, the monarchy, the Church or the family.Now, you might expect to find true conservatives in the ranks of the Christian clergy. Even there, however, the 'spirit of innovation' has taken hold. While this is obvious in the liberal wing of the Anglican Communion, it is also a significant feature of contemporary Catholicism. Fear of the liberal lobby has resulted in many Catholic clerics adopting a craven silence in respect of moral matters that are of the deepest concern to their congregations. Instead of robustly defending their values, and the institutions that surround them, they seek to be inclusive and empathetic. This, they mistakenly believe, will earn them respect from their cultural enemies.
Pope Benedict XVI is not one of those intimidated clerics. During a recent address at the Vatican, the Pope took aim at the postmodern notion that identity is not given but constructed. Yesterday, he argued, people ‘deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves’. And by denying our nature, he implied, we lose all capacity to choose what is best for us.
The Pope is the archetypal conservative because he has a profound appreciation for our cultural and moral patrimony. He is not opposed to gay marriage because he is ‘homophobic’ – an insult issued by those who wish to shut down debate. He is opposed to it because he understands that, like all institutions that have passed the test of time, marriage contains an internal logic that resists innovation.
Still, the Pope is also correct when he argues that in a moral wasteland so sceptical of Christian teaching, Catholic clerics cannot solely rely on the Catechism. They must deploy a ‘reasoned defence of marriage as a natural institution’. This demands that they supplement their own theological instruction with powerful conservative arguments from the likes of Edmund Burke. It is the internal logic of marriage that needs to be considered if the debates over gay marriage are to be anything better than a caricature of reasoning.
By Roger Scruton.
Nobody knows what a cultural policy should aim at, what means it should use, or how it could lead to legislation or other political initiatives. Hence, in Conservative Party thinking, considerations of culture remain on the margins. Worse, as in so many areas of political life, the Conservatives seem to have abandoned this fertile territory to the Left. Here is an instance of which I have some knowledge: the Arts Council has refused to provide funding to the English Music Festival, an initiative devoted to one of the greatest and least explored legacies of our national culture. The Council objects to the word ‘English’, and to all that it means by way of settled loyalties, old-fashioned decencies, and the love of our country and its past. For the arts establishment culture should be anti-national, disruptive, part of the ‘labour of the negative’ that I described in a previous contribution to this blog. My attempts to get conservative politicians, including the Minister for Culture and the Chairman of the House of Commons Cultural Committee, to take up this cause have been greeted with silence. Who cares about Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax or Ivor Gurney, and what have they got to do with GDP, RPI, VAT, or any other collection of letters that the government cites in the place of a philosophy?
This neglect of culture is a mistake, and here are three reasons why:
Alas, however: what Oakeshott called ‘the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’ is rarely heard by those whom we elect to Parliament. And we surely cannot blame this entirely on Nick Clegg.