Tories must break out of their comfort zone or risk failing Britain
The Prime Minister likes to use her walking holidays as a time to think things through. When she returned from Wales, in April, she rang me to say she had decided to hold the general election. By the time she returns from Switzerland, next week, she will be ready to deal with its aftermath.
As she and most Tory MPS know, the party needs to unite around a purpose rather than squabble over the ambitions of individual ministers. That purpose ought to be obvious, for both the EU referendum and the election were mass votes of dissatisfaction, and votes for change.
The evidence justifies the dissatisfaction. In real terms average wages are lower than they were 10 years ago. Even before the financial crash, the chances of owning one’s own home had started to fall, and now young people find themselves not only heavily indebted after university but also trapped for years in rented accommodation. Incredibly, more people in England now own their home outright than pay a mortgage, demonstrating not just the difficulties faced by the hard-pressed and the young, but the consolidation of wealth by the affluent and the elderly.
Meanwhile, as the country has grown weary of the sacrifices required by years of austerity, people have witnessed a return – if in some cases it ever went away – of largesse and irresponsibility among the powerful. They see bosses exploiting their staff, big businesses ripping off their customers and directors taking risks with the company pension. International corporations seem to see paying the smallest sums of tax as generous acts of charity.
While pay for the many has been frozen, for the few it has rocketed: in 1998 CEOS were paid on average 47 times what their employees earned; now that ratio has reached 128. Over the same period, the value of the firms they run has hardly increased at all.
As Theresa May has observed, modern Britain is simply not a country that works for everyone. But to get that diagnosis right is not enough. We need solutions, and to find the right solutions we need a deep and coherent understanding of the problems.
For the Conservatives, that requires going back to the party’s philosophical roots. Economic liberals may find capitalism’s “creative winds of destruction” exhilarating, but conservatives worry about the effects on families and communities. Libertarians may say they have no responsibility to others, but conservatives know that society functions only if we respect our obligations to one another. Internationalist liberals may consider the nation state an anachronism, but conservatives understand how the cultures, traditions and institutions of a country help to bring about the trust, reciprocity and stability that make a society worth living in and an economy capable of growing.
As the great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke said, more than two centuries ago, society is indeed a contract. It is a contract between those who govern and those who are governed, between the classes, the generations and citizens across the whole country.
Today, many of the problems facing Britain arise because we have forgotten the terms of that contract. An older generation is more prosperous than any before it, while younger people face the prospect of a life less comfortable than that of their parents. Opportunities abound in London and the South East of England, but incomes are lower and jobs more scarce further north and west. According to the government’s own independent commission, social mobility is in reverse.
Few of the challenges we face will be overcome through yet more of the social and economic liberalism we have seen for the past 30 years. No market, for example, has emerged to provide the social care needs of an ageing society. Few competitors have entered the broken markets that allow companies to over-charge their customers. Little progress has been made in rebalancing Britain’s economy – neither geographically nor by finally overcoming our over-reliance on financial services – that has not been stimulated by the state.
The election result suggests that the public agree that it is time for a break from the liberal consensus. A full 82.4 per cent of the country voted for the two main political parties, the highest combined vote share since 1970. They were not voting for an ever-smaller state and free market fundamentalism, but for a return to pre-liberal socialism, with Jeremy Corbyn, or the beginnings of a post-liberal conservatism, offered by Mrs May.
The country is at least safe from Mr Corbyn’s back-to-the-future socialism for another five years. But if the Conservatives respond to the election result by seeking a return to their comfort zone of liberal orthodoxy, not only will they fail to address the big social and economic challenges Britain faces, they will risk the election of dangerous socialists in 2022. As we look ahead to a long, five-year parliament, the need for a reformed, post-liberal conservatism is more urgent than ever.