Free-market Conservatives must find new language to sell their ideas

The Marxists have been routed, socialism defeated, hopefully, for another generation. Brexit is now a racing certainty, bringing with it the possibility of a great liberation of the economy from the monstrous ambitions of the euro-bureaucracy. The Government is stuffed with true believers, neo-Thatcherites who until recently had been ploughing a lonely furrow on the fringes of politics. And most of us trust the libertarian instincts of Boris Johnson himself.

The shift Left in our politics is, however, undeniable. To win the ex-Labour voters who have just humiliated Jeremy Corbyn, the new Government has jettisoned key Thatcherite principles, promising to invest, subsidise and spend in a manner that would once have been deplored as statist. On issues like the NHS and infrastructure, the Tories will act out of electoral necessity to shore up their newly dominant position.

There is, therefore, a problem. Every time a choice must be made, the Government will be tempted to stray from Conservative principles of fiscal prudence, liberal economics and individual responsibility to embrace Labour principles of generous spending, collectivist economics and statism. And free marketeers are ill-prepared to win this struggle. It is not just that there has been little effort to buttress free-market ideas among the public, there has been next to zero attempt to rethink how those ideas should be applied within a Tory party that is more working class and less London-centric.

How, for example, can unrestrained free trade be reconciled with a desire among many voters to prioritise buying British? What can be done to address the anger at the behaviour of multinationals, particularly tech firms, without destroying the environment that has made the UK such a conducive place for them to base themselves? What do you do about a health service that there is currently no appetite to reform? What will be the Right to Buy of the 2020s?

The only people, at present, attempting to answer these questions are that small band of Red Tory thinkers who clustered around Theresa May. They, however, never accepted Thatcherism to begin with, and explicitly set their faces against the tiny libertarian faction of the Tory party. Some free marketeers have tended to deny that these questions need to be answered at all, retreating into decadent obsessions with apps and metropolitan techno-capitalism.

I do not believe the next five years must inevitably be a succession of capitulations to the Left. The capitalist project is a blue-collar one, in that it is about spreading wealth and opportunity to every individual, no matter their background. There is also a latent dislike of the state among the working-class voters who have flocked to the Tories; it is, in part, why they rejected Mr Corbyn. But free marketeers have for too long been playing a defensive game – seeking to protect the inheritance of Mrs Thatcher, using language that hasn’t resonated since the early Nineties. There is now a new battle to be fought, within the Conservative Party itself.

There has been next to zero attempt to rethink how libertarian principles should be applied within a Tory party that is more working class and less Londoncentric