Paul Goodman published an interesting piece on Con Home on Monday about,as he puts it, the ‘left’ of the Tory party. Although Con Home is increasingly the internet based ‘house journal’ for the right of the party (and some elements of the right that are sceptical of the coalition), it is always interesting to see the view of the left of the Party from the outside looking in.
I would suggest that ‘progressive’ is a better description than ‘Tory left’. That tradition is far broader and more open than some elements of the Tory right – which often seems to adopt a 1975 ‘year zero’ approach. Progressive Tories look to Disraeli’s social reforms as a first attempt to marry a market economy with social justice (with an inbuilt recognition that the market economy is not perfect). It looks to Joseph Chamberlain’s radical social reform and Lord Randolph Churchill’s ‘Tory Democracy’. It looks to the Macmillan Government, which delivered one nation policies and economic success unparalleled by any other post war administration, with low unemployment, high productivity and high growth. Progressive elements of Conservatism also look to the positive liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th Century (freedom to, rather than simply freedom from).
Above all, the progressive tradition in the Tory Party doesn’t believe that there is just one way of doing things. It questions blind dogma and puts a pragmatic ‘what works’ consideration at its core. Progressives in the Tory party have a belief in the market economy, but also an understanding that market failures can and do occur and, if this happens, Government has a duty to step in. Individuals, government, community, the free market and intermediate institutions all have a role to play.
I would contend that the Con Home article misses a number of key points and merits a response.
The Myth Of The 2010 Election
The right of the party is building up some dubious mythology about the election based on what I would call “right wing Bennism”. Tony Benn described the 1975 election defeat for the ‘No’ campaign (that was comprehensively ignored by most of the Tory Party) as a remarkable achievement and the 1983 election result as a good result for Labour. Just as Benn believed that more left wing policies would give Labour victory, so some on the right seem to believe that more right wing policies – a variant on the theme of 2001 and 2005 – would have delivered an outright majority.
What is clear is that the Conservatives didn’t win the election because they had not persuaded sufficient voters that they had modernised enough. Voters looked for reassurance and, in some cases, didn’t feel reassured enough. That is why the Conservatives struggled in places such as London and Scotland – not two places that would normally be associated with a desire for more right wing Thatcherism.
The Coalition Has Been Largely Progressive
Paul Goodman makes much of the membership of internal party committees in his piece. Confusingly, he seems to ignore what the Government has actually done since being elected. This is a slightly bizarre distortion of priorities. The Government is governing in a progressive way and the progressive wing of the Conservative Party is playing a central role in the Government.
Of course, just as sites like Platform 10 were in favour of a progressive coalition as soon as the results were known, so the likes of Con Home were unstintingly opposed to the idea of coalition (ignoring the economic and political uncertainty that results from minority Governments).
The ‘Programme For Government’ or coalition agreement is, in many ways, pleasingly progressive. Constitutional reform put off for too long (in some cases, since 1911 or even, some might argue, 1649) is happening at last. Ken Clarke’s intelligent reforms to the penal system represent evidence based policy making against the shrill opposition of right wing blogs and the right wing press. The coalition has committed itself to tackling poverty and inequality and promoting fairness.
Thinktanks and Groups on the ‘Tory Left’ Have Been The Most Dynamic and Agenda Setting
In the article, Mr Goodman was careful about the think tanks and organisations he chose to discuss the Tory left. In fact, there are a myriad of think tanks in the progressive centre of politics. In so many ways, they have been setting the agenda in a way that think tanks of the ‘so called’ right have not. Respublica’s media imprint has been massive – as has their argument that Toryism needs to move on from Thatcherism and accept that the social consequences of the 1980s were mixed. Policy Exchange have been hugely influential on the Government. The TRG have become revitalised recently – particularly on environmental policy. ‘Bright Blue’ are the latest addition to a crowded field in the progressive centre.
Cross fertilisation of ideas that crosses party lines has become common in the progressive centre. Demos have been pumping out ideas as part of their ‘Progressive Conservatism’ project and Richard Reeves contribution to the debate, through the idea of the ‘liberal republic’ was exceptional before he moved on to be the Deputy Prime Minister’s Special Adviser. Many ideas that I support, such as the Living Wage, are supported by a coalition of progressives across the party spectrum.
Some of the old groups of the ‘Tory right’ seem overly concerned with looking backwards rather than forwards. There is often a ‘Thatcher worship’ that borders on the hagiographic. All too often, the bolder forward thinking ideas are coming from the progressive Tory left.
Contrary to the Conservative Home article, the progressive element of the Tory Party is in a confident mood. Paul Goodman misses the fact that Tory progressives are already, in his words, “out, loud and proud.” It is, in most cases making the running, setting the agenda and keeping the game in the centre ground.
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Still running on empty, Dave? Looks like it if you think Harold MacMillan was a success. He was the architect of many of the deep-seated economic problems which were left to fester by both parties until they had got much worse and Thatcher came along. Cameron will be just the same. Treating these problems was never going to be easy and it’s easy to snipe from your armchair when you are a talker not a doer. By the way, just how are you going to revive the North given your plans to saddle industry with huge energy costs and your failure to get to grips with Labour’s policy of unrestricted immingration which simply drives down wages for less-skilled and unskilled workers? For someone who claims to be progressive, you seem surprisingly short on answers. At least there was mining and metal bashing in MacMillan’s day, even if in decline.
Progressive is a good word, David! I agree – why should the Left have it all to themselves?
Good article here – and I continue to fly the flag for One Nation Conservatism over on Conservative Home which sadly becomes ever more like a foreign land! Perhaps I am a masochist and enjoy banging my head against brick walls…Who knows? However, it is apparent there are many from our wing of the Party who do read CH regularly but never post – It is for them that I and others continue to fight our corner and we will continue to do so.
What’s the difference between the manifesto of 2001 and 2010? Nothing much. Stay in the EU, keep the pound, and reduce the level of immigration. Who wrote the 2005 manifesto? David Cameron. Who was William Hague’s chief policy adviser before the 2001 election? Daniel Finkelstein. These past manifestoes are defined by their vacuousness rather than their right wing-ness. Both the 2001 and 2005 manifestoes are available to read online. Please tell me when in the last 20 years the Conservative Party has offered to leave the EU, restore real grammar schools, protect real marriage, and throw the book at criminal thugs? 2010 was plainly a continuation of 2001 and 2005, the main difference was in marketing rather than policy.
I haven’t voted Conservative at a general election before. My parents voted for Tony Blair in 1997 like everyone else did. I was too young to vote but I would have voted for him too at the time. Your progressive modernisation strategy means absolutely nothing to me. I wouldn’t vote for the Conservative Party because it refuses to stop the EU taking over Britain, it refuses to restore our once great education system, it refuses to restore marriage to its past status, and it refuses real justice in favour of the fradulent social justice and climate change. It wouldn’t cost any extra money to do any of these things.
Thatcher did little to restore marriage, education, real justice, and soveriegnty. Please delete this straw man argument from your mind and never use it again.
We’re told by Charles Moore that the electorate were desperate for the Grammar Schools to be destroyed. Pull the other one. Shirley Williams was chucked out at the 1979 election after pursuing three years of educational vandalism. And you progressives want to continue with these rejected policies?
The public want politicians to stop stealing their money. They want better men, ones who follow some sort of refined moral code and have thrown away their youthful bad habits. Nobody asked for constitutional vandalism. Just stop stealing our money and ripping us off please.
Evidence based lies more like. Politics is a vocation not a science. In politics it’s perfectly fine for one man to say “I want my country to be this way based on my own personal taste” and to defend his case with reasons. What progressives like Ken Clarke want is to take authority away from the electorate and place it in the grubby hands of sociologist charlatans. I want the thugs who harass my innocent sister to be treated with serious contempt by the authorities, and I don’t need any sociological evidence to want the police to do that.
In plain English, the coalition will take money from the British population and waste it on high paid taxpayer funded jobs for middle class people. Little of this money will filter through to the poor, will it?
Fairness, equality, and tackling poverty. What do these terms have in common? Well, modern politicians are in politics for the wrong reasons. They want too much admiration. Therefore they will cling to buzzwords that they can say to earn the admiration that they crave. The intellectual content of these terms do not matter. And the real life effects of this lefty philosophy don’t matter either.
The poor are screwed for as long as the progressives remain in power, because the progressive philosophy has little to do with actual real life poor people. And that’s why I hope that you progressives chuck the right-wing out of your tired old party as soon as possible, so we can engage you in a straight fight and defeat you.
Very interesting to read David Galea’s shrewd dissection of the sham of progressive Conservatism and its fairy stories about the 2001 and 2005 elections. Not least David does us all a service by giving the lie to the nonsense that the young are queueing up to vote for David Cameron.
Don’t worry Sally, I’m also there too, flying the flag so to speak.
And I do believe there are plenty more. I was impressed by some recent threads. We had, for example, an overwhelming level of support for Cameron’s criticism of Israel, good defence against the myth Tim is peddling about the awful election performance, and an absolute slaughtering of melancthon’s idea that Tory mp’s should vote down the AV bill.
I really like Conhome and I respect Tim’s point of view. But I do believe that the vast majority of party membership and supporters are much more pro-coalition, or at least willing to give it a good chance than the official line at conhome has been tending to recently.
As for the above posters. It is certainly not as simple to say that the more “right” we got the more we lost and the more “left” we go the more we’ll win. There are more complicated questions about credibility, presentation, looking like you’re taking tough decisions for the right reasons rather than for political gain etc. Thatcher was pretty rightwing but she got elected again and again because people knew that when she said something she meant it and would work like the devil to carry it out. And what she said and supported she did from a real belief that it was a hard decision that was best for britain, not a posture adopted for political convenience.
In some areas we should have been clearer about our proper right wing policies but in most others Cameron’s detox work was right and got a hearing for ideas that are really (in the main) no less right-wing than in ’01 or ’05. Both a simplistic right-wing myth (more on immigration and europe) and a simple leftwing myth (we were still to right-wing) miss the more complicated underlying causes of our problems. it is easy to tack to simple solutions, but it doesn’t answer the real questions.
Advice to David Skelton – why not give Paul Goodman a call? Instead of attempting to patronise and ‘correct’ him, you might learn something about the Tory Left? He used to be one of its rising stars (who can forget his speeches at Party conference as leader of the Conservative students?) but was intellectually honest enough to admit he’d been wrong to oppose Mrs Thatcher and patriotic enough to be repelled by the Tory Left’s obsession with trying to scrap the pound and join the euro (another great idea!).
The squalid truth about the Tory Left is that it is the pale blue Amen Corner of the Guardian-reading establishment, always taking its cue from whatever idea is fashionable in leftist circles.
6. Sam – I’m a huge fan of Paul Goodman’s writing but the blogosphere is about exchanging ideas and thinking online. Hence this piece – a response to an article about the Tory left. For your information, I actually agree with Paul Goodman about the Euro and think that we should be governed by people we elect and can remove. The reason that I have always opposed to the Euro is that I don’t believe in what Tony Benn described as an “act of economic and political disarmament”, throwing away the rights we have won through the centuries.
5. I agree, winning elections and winning hearts and minds is a complex business. I actually think that we need to be considering how all of the political parties failed to consider the social psychology of how people make decisions and how they vote. The British Election Study and other such studies will be fascinating as we attempt to piece together why the result of this year’s election was as it was.
3. Some interesting comments here. I will give a response to them. Firstly, in 2001 and 2005, the public perceived the Conservative Party to be far to the right of where they viewed themselves. That is not a position from which to win elections.
it refuses to stop the EU taking over Britain, it refuses to restore our once great education system, it refuses to restore marriage to its past status, and it refuses real justice in favour of the fradulent social justice and climate change
Although I agree with you on Europe far more than you would suspect, please remember that people put the EU way down their list of priorities. It didn’t rank in the top 8 for the British Election Study. What do you mean by “restore our once great education system”? Is this another plea to decide life chances at 11? “it refuses real justice in favour of the fradulent social justice and climate change” Nice rhetoric but I’m not sure what you really mean by this.
Regarding constitutional reform, I would like to see all decision makers as accountable to the people as possible. That means more transparency, more open primaries, use of recall and less power going to unaccountable bodies.
It is also nice of you to believe that you ‘speak for England’ (to paraphrase Amery on Henderson) as you seem to think you do. But I’m not particularly sure about what you are proposing – other than harking back to some kind of imagined golden age. Are you suggesting that the state shouldn’t help tackle poverty, or create conditions where every human being can fulfil their potential?
2. Sally – thanks for the comments.
1. Michael – always nice to hear from you. There are many ways to, hopefully, revitalise the North East, which does have the advantage of some of the best natural resources in Europe. Plenty of these sensible solutions are market based. Please feel free to send us a blog suggesting your vision for the future of the country.
The background to your post is a very pale pink. How appropriate.
Dave, if you actually want to reduce the legions of economically inactive people in this country, then you have some tough choices to make. You can go for protectionism, tariff walls, etc which is incompatible with our international commitments and probably disastrous anyway because it would invite retaliation and capital flight. Or you can accept that in order to compete with other manufacturing centres, the current burden of taxation and regulation simply doesn’t work; and the current level of skills is far far too low because we spend a fortune on a very poor education system which India, China and Eastern Europe would not tolerate for five minutes. As long as we stick with the status quo, capital and jobs will head to the developing world, which is exactly what has been happening for the past three to four decades. That process got worse not better under Labour. At the moment, I see nothing in the Coalition’s plans which will significantly change this and invoking MacMillan and Heath is simply putting one’s head in the sand. Both were bad stewards of the eceonomy and in any case did not have to deal with globalisation.
You deride the education system of the past but however imperfectly, it broke the glass ceiling….which is why the Tory patricians destroyed the grammar school system because it threatened their vested interests. No way did they want their children’s Oxbridge places and City jobs threatened by the children of miners and railway workers. What you are offering runs the risk of providing mediocrity and stunted life chances for all. I don’t think one can simply revert to the old grammar system but so long as there is no selection by ability, we will be stuck with Edwardian levels of social mobility.
What natural resources does the North East have other than some largely worn-out coal reserves and, possibly, a bit of wind power? All no doubt useful but hardly game changers….or else the game would have changed.
Thomas Sowell, the black American Republican would have described the tosh that you have read above submitted by Mr Skelton, as “Self Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by the Self Anointed”.
David Galea brilliantly eviscerates the piffle on offer, together with Michael McGowan’s ccomments
Progressive? Really! Progressively giving away our sovereignty and independence, progressively turn Britain into a parish council of the EU, progressively admitting alien cultures, progressively turning Britain into one of the most overcrowded country in the world, progressively raising green taxes and impoverishing Britain in response to a sham science; progressively undermining police, progressively ensuring that we are governed by the looney Left and the likes of Clegg; progressively leaving us defenceless
Progressive in Tory terms is completely demoralising and sick. Progressive my posterior. The only thing progressing is the self delusion and spin alienating the electorate.