Indeed, if one was being objective, it could be argued that utilitarian managerialism, a rabid and sordid defence of the status quo, and a deep and abiding belief in a corroding libertarian individualism best characterizes the contemporary left rather than the emergent right. For modern conservatism despises the destruction by target and audit of ethos and professionalism, is completely committed to tackling vested interest and illegitimate hierarchy, and views with horror the left libertarian denial of the norms of a decent civilized life and the codes of an abiding and sustaining community.
What then is modern conservatism – what does it care about, what does it seek to conserve? Why nothing less than society itself. The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.
Conservatism at its best has always been a care for the world and for those who live in it. Conservatives led the campaign against slavery. Conservatives such as Richard Oastler and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, led the factory reform movement which campaigned throughout much of the 19th century for a reduction in working hours for women and children; in 1867 the second great reform bill under Disraeli was far more radical than that envisaged by Gladstone and it increased the franchise by 88%; and in the twentieth century the conservatives extended pensions under Baldwin, in the 1920’s Noel Skelton – terrified by collectivisation and influenced by Belloc and Chesterton – first spoke of a property-owning democracy, a tenant of fundamental and transformative Toryism repeated by Eden and Churchill and Mrs Thatcher.
The question though is what is the validity and merit of conservatism at this moment in time? Why should its message be heard? What does it have to offer? Well, simply put, under the present leadership it recognizes that the old options are no longer viable – both state and market have visibly and manifestly failed, and we cannot and must not return to the bankrupt version of either. If we British are to enjoy a better and more stable future, then we need a new deal and a new settlement.
There are three dimensions to this new order: a civil state, a moralised market and an associative society.
The Civil State
There is much that is right with the state and there is much that is wrong. What is right is that the state embodies in structured form a common concern – it represents the coalesced will of the people that there is a level below which you cannot fall and an undertaking that we as a body politic have a stake, a care and indeed a provision for you and every other citizen. In that sense, the welfare state really does represent the best of us. In that sense, the great triumph of the left is indeed the 1945 Labour government which laid the foundation of the modern welfare state. But what the working class thought would save and secure became something that gradually and over time eventually helped to destroy them. Why? Because the state, instead of supporting society, abolished it. The welfare state nationalised society because it replaced mutual communities with passive fragmented individuals whose most sustaining relationship was not with his or her neighbour or his or her community but with a distant and determining centre. Moreover, that state relationship was profoundly individuating – unilateral entitlement individuated and replaced bilateral relationship.
The
working class did not ask for this.
They wanted something far more
reciprocal, more mutual and more
empowering. All existing working
class welfare organisations were
sidelined by a universal entitlement
guaranteed by the state based upon
centralised accounts of need. Local
requirements, organisation or
practices were simply ignored and
thus rendered redundant. Thus, the
welfare state began the destruction
of the independent life of the
British working class. The populace
became a supplicant citizenry
dependent upon the state rather than
themselves, and the socialist state
aborted indigenous traditions of
working class self–help, reciprocity
and social insurance. Rather than
working with each another in order
to alter their situation or change
their neighbourhood or city, relying
on the welfare state only to get
them through a temporary rough
patch, working class people
increasingly became permanent
passive recipients of centrally
determined benefits. As such,
welfare ceased to function as a
safety net through which people
could not fall, becoming instead a
ceiling through which the supplicant
class – cut off from earlier working
class ambition and aspiration –
could not break. This ‘benefits
culture’ can be tied directly to the
thwarting of working class ambition
by a middle class elite that formed
the machinery of the welfare state,
yes to alleviate poverty, but also
to deprive the poor of their
irritating habit of autonomous
organisation.
The new civil state would restore
what the welfare state has destroyed
– human association. This new civil
state will turn itself over to its
citizens; it will foster the power
of association and allow its
citizens to take it over rather as
it had originally taken over them. A
new power of association could be
delivered to all citizens so that if
they are indeed in an area that
receives public services in a form
that can be identified both by
sector and by type; and if
area-specific budgetary transparency
is delivered such that each place
knows what is being spent on it;
then if those services are less than
they should be in terms of quality,
design or applicability; then there
should be a new civil power of
pre-emptory budgetary challenge that
is given to any associative group
that claims to represent those in
its area – to take over the budget
of that service so that they can
deliver what is required to those
who need by those who care. So
envisaged this would allow citizen
groups – if they meet appropriate
and proper standards of civic
representation and organisational
efficacy – to take over the state in
their own areas to either be
commissioners of their own services
or run them for themselves and each
other. They could do this with
welfare so as to tie local need to
local provision and so make jobs for
themselves – where none existed
before – or indeed they could
manage, run and own, as an estate or
specifiable area, the services that
had previously failed them so they
would not fail themselves or each
other. So conceived the monolithic
state could gradually be broken down
into an associative state where
citizens took over and ran their own
services so that universality would
not be compromised but in fact would
be more achieved, as each particular
area or need would finally be in a
position to meet that need by
delivering, via this new power of
budgetary challenge, the services by
and to the new associative state.
The Moralised Market
The great paradox of the neo-liberal account of free markets that has dominated discussion, and determined practice and indeed economic reality for the past thirty years, is that in the name of free markets the neo-liberal approach has presided over an unprecedented reduction of market diversity and plurality. It has both reduced the type of provision available and the number of providers. In the name of freedom we have produced economic concentration and in a number of areas monopoly dominance or indeed something very much like it. A perverse corporatism has produced industries that are too big to fail, and consequently they have been made bigger again.
The most obvious example of this is banking – where we have lost diversity (building societies) and subsequently plurality (all of the building societies that demutualised have vanished, collapsed or been absorbed, as have many other providers) – where we now have only four major high street banks, and the government’s great pro-competition measure is to turn over just 10% of banking capacity to an as yet unnamed and un-constituted new entrant. In part this is because UK competition policy has become far too enthralled with the efficiency doctrine of the Chicago School and has permitted far too many mergers to go through, which has produced significant market concentration that in turn narrows the supply chain and threatens economic security through eliminating diversity of supply. Market concentration produces supply risk that, because it is done in the name of market freedom, blinds regulators to its true import and systemic danger.
So, as a radical pro-market thinker, I would like to see genuinely rather than putatively free markets and systems of economic exchange. But to achieve free markets we must overcome their neo-liberal construal. Why? Because markets conceived on a neo-liberal model require the bureaucratic and authoritarian state. Why? Because if the economic actor is conceived as purely self-interested, as obeying no external codes, as living only by the internal dictate of his/her will and volition, then this actor needs regulation and tight external control. Otherwise, they will violate the rights of others who, also conceived on a similar aggressive model, will seek to do the same. Something external to this model is required in order to police this model, something with absolute power and authority: the state. Thus, neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism requires all the bureaucracy and external management of the state in order to function and trade. Hence there is nothing efficient about neo-liberal efficiency and nothing free about its freedom.
By way of contrast, a capitalism based on trust does not require external regulation or control. A capitalism based on reciprocity – free, open and honest exchange – has little bureaucracy or state power associated with it. A civil economy drives down the cost of suspicion that self-interest creates and crowds in good rather than bad behaviour. A culture of internal ethos rather than external regulation creates a whole new model of social capitalism that radically reduces the barriers to market entry that suspicion creates, and it prices in the very things that human beings most value and like about each other: trust, human affection, and open and honest behaviour. We can create a civic economy based on trust, sustainability and reciprocity. Such an economy generates shared ethos and common goals in the place of zero sum exchange and the bureaucracy of state regulation.
Such a model would produce a much freer economy than the ideology of free markets has yet produced. With lower regulatory barriers to market entry, smaller and medium-sized businesses would have a real chance to compete, develop and grow. And if it was able to retreat from micro-management, the state could go about creating the infrastructure for ethical exchange, and so drive down the cost of transactions and drive up the volume and productivity of the trade and economy conducted within its borders. The aim of this new market would be to build reciprocal and mutual relations so that more diversity, more choice and more providers are brought in to ownership, exchange and prosperity.
A re-moralised market would reward responsible long-term investment and create the conditions for mass ownership and entrepreneurship and the real extension of opportunity. It would be so much better than what we have now.
The Associative Society
To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affection.
Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in
France 1790
Both state and market, reconcieved and rethought, would serve society rather than serve themselves. They would become centrifugal forces of distribution; they would deliver power, prosperity and democracy to society and to all the groups families and individuals that constitute it. But what is that society?
It is certainly not the collective uniformity and homogeneity represented by the state. The state as a mass act of collectivisation cannot represent all the diversity and differentiation of our culture and our lives. A bleak Maoism where we must all say and do and think the same is certainly the outcome of a society viewed solely through the state – but this is not any society that anyone would want to belong to. Similarly and contra an extremist liberalism, society is neither a collection of self-willing individuals, nor an aggregation of permanently separate wills that always requires a proxy representation which always by its own terms must be illegitimate. Such a construal reveals that individualism and collectivism are two sides of the same debased coinage producing a society that endlessly oscillates between state authoritarianism and anarchic libertarianism.
The truth is – and this is a truth recognised by Burke – is that human beings are individuals always born into relationships. We are always-already (unless we are feral) in society but not eclipsed or diminished by it. All social contract theory is in this sense wrong – we are born already in ethos and already enmeshed in culture code and practice, and we do not need a state or a contact to tell us where we are. But what is this society? This society is civil – it is formed by the free association of citizens – and these groups balance and express both individual freedom and collective formation. Association is outside both state and market, and yet it makes the proper functioning of both possible. Association expresses both individuality and community. Association marks the politics of the future: it is the way we will deliver our state, and it is the way we will free our market.
These associations themselves are not post-modern verities. They are not arbitrary collections of whim and sophistry arrayed against the void. They are not oppositional groups that pit opinion against opinion and so rewrite and replay the conflict expressed at the individual level. They are groups that take a view on objective value. They are organisations that attempt to discern what is right and what should be done in any given situation. As essentially conserving and conservative, they must believe in something worth preserving or else they would be permanent revolutionaries believing that nothing is inherently valuable or good so that nothing need be preserved. On the contrary, because they believe in something valuable, they can offer it to others, because without an account of value there can be no proper distribution of what is valuable.
The associative society is like this: it is good men and women taking responsibility and trying to ascertain the common good. And because they acknowledge that there is such a thing then, in contrast to the liberal thesis of liberty arising from permanent conflict, they can make common cause with those that differ and create a free and equal society based on such a debate.
And if we are to re-build and heal our broken society, it will be from the bottom up through civil association. In order to reclaim a civilised society, market and state should not be regarded as the ultimate goal or expression of humanity. They are the means by which we achieve our end; they are not the end itself. That end will be decided by free citizens in association sharing the practice and discernment of the common good. Contemporary transformative conservatism recognises that the common good is its true goal and is indeed the basis of the new Tory settlement."