The Conservative Party and the nation

Union, England and Europe

Arthur Aughey

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526101372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526101402
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book re-examines the claim of the Conservative Party to be the 'national party' and in its politics to express the enduring 'national interest'. It explores the historical character of the Conservative Party, in particular the significance of the nation in its self-understanding. It addresses the political culture of the modern party, one which proclaims a Unionist vocation but rests mainly on English support, and considers how the Englishness of the party is reconciled with the politics of British statecraft. It considers the constitutional challenges which the Conservative Party faces in managing a changing Union, in negotiating a changing Europe and in defining a changing national interest. The book is essential reading not only for students and scholars of the Conservative Party but also for those who want to make sense of the transformations taking place in modern British politics.

1
Conservatism and the party

When he reflected on the rights of men, Edmund Burke (1969: 153) observed that they are in a sort of middle ground, ‘incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned’. Something similar can be said about the word ‘Conservative’. That judgement does not invest the Conservative Party with a mystical character; it is merely to observe that any simplistic formulation of its politics or of its identity would not do justice to its institutional and historical complexity. The word Conservative contains wide varieties of expression and mood, used by a range of people, from philosophers and historians to politicians and publicists. Moreover, a problem which often confuses students (but not only students) is this: though it is possible to speak intelligibly about ‘conservatism’ and about the ‘Conservative Party’, the relation of the first to the second is far from clear. Reflection on the first may lead one to believe that political principles are fixed and settled, a conclusion which fits very uneasily with the experience of the second in all its historical modifications of policy. Nonetheless, it is possible to argue that the Conservative Party's political culture – for want of a better term – is distinctive and that, for example, the party's annual conference has a very different quality to that of the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats. It is also possible to ‘discern’ the meaning of ‘Conservative’ – as a relationship between ideas, institution and purpose in the history of British politics – according to another of Burke's expressions: that a party is best understood ‘in balances between differences’ and in the compromises attending any political enterprise. According to one Conservative politician (Norman 2013: 222–5) who has reconsidered Burke's contribution to understanding political behaviour, feeling and emotion inform any public reasoning and what binds a party together – but which can also divide it – is affection, identity and interest.

While critics often credit the party's distinctiveness to a ruthless quest for power (Davies 1995), Conservatives have traditionally argued that the party's character can be attributed to a very different principle: patriotism. Engagement with that patriotic self-understanding – one necessarily linked to the quest for office – is the subject of this chapter. The first part reflects on the relationship between conservatism as a term historically associated with the nation and with Conservative as a political practice (for these are not necessarily joined). The second considers the identity or culture of the party as a representative institution. The third examines the purpose of Conservative politics according to Burke's ‘balances between differences’ – in this case between ideas and practice. The conclusion draws out more explicitly the idea of the nation in the history of the party in anticipation of a more thorough examination in the following chapter.

What's in a name?

It is tempting to assume that the durability of the Conservative Party is related to a correspondence between the conservative character of the nation and the institution of the party. There is no necessary relationship. ‘Party names are more often hypnotic than illuminating,’ wrote the Conservative MP Kenneth Pickthorn (1951: 49–50). ‘They implant an excess of assumptions, often unconscious and still more unexamined, about the virtues of the parties most agreeably labelled and, by contrast, and often even more effectively, about the vices of their opposites’. If politics were a sweepstake, he thought, to draw the name ‘Conservative’ would not on the face of it strike you as being a winning ticket.

That reflection on the electoral utility of the party's name has its historical precedents. In 1912, at the height of the Irish Home Rule crisis, the leadership wanted to drop the word Conservative altogether and rebrand the party exclusively as Unionist (which had been in common usage since the first Irish Home Rule crisis in 1886) not only to demonstrate the party's constitutional and patriotic purpose but also to integrate the associated Liberal Unionist Party. In the 1930s, the heir to the latter and later Conservative prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, wanted a ‘National Party’ in order to ditch what he thought to be the ‘odious title of Conservative which has kept so many from joining us in the past’ (Lexden 2012: 48). And following the landslide victory of Attlee's Labour Party in 1945, Harold Macmillan proposed that the Conservatives should change their name to the ‘New Democratic Party’ to be aligned better with the post-war mood. There have been subsequent suggestions. One of David Cameron's former speech writers (Birrell 2016) proposed the ‘One Nation Party’, and the reason appeared as self-evident to him as it had done to Chamberlain: ‘Few people really see themselves as conservative, trapped by tradition and averse to change. The word implies fearful resistance to innovation and modernity’. Former deputy chairman, Robert Halfon, suggested the ‘Workers’ Party’, the spirit of which, if not necessarily the title, appealed to Theresa May (2016a), who has spoken of her commitment to achieve ‘a truly meritocratic Britain that puts the interests of ordinary, working class people first’.

Clearly, the relationship between the ideological category ‘conservative’ and the institution of the Conservative Party is not a necessary but a contingent one. The reason for the periodic return to the matter of name has to do with one key concern: the concern that the party has lost touch with the nation. Then there is the other side of Pickthorn's reflection. ‘Conservative’ can implant an excess of assumptions, often unconscious and still more unexamined, about the party. Unfortunately, those assumptions may not be agreeable, can accentuate, by contrast, the virtue of the party's opponents and focus all attention upon Conservative vices. The ‘toxic’ image of the party after 1997 is a case in point, where it risked becoming identified as anti-national. As Pickthorn admitted, at such times it is far from self-evident that the word Conservative conveys an appropriate patriotic image of the party.

That there should be some relationship, given the historical lineage, between being ‘conservative’, or what is often called ‘small c’ conservatism, and the party organisation, or what is often called ‘large C’ Conservatism, is something we assume must be true. As Pickthorn (1951) conceded in a judicious expression, conservative does ‘not unfairly’ indicate the historical identity of the party even if it conveys only a ‘hypnotic rather than illuminating’ association with its practice. There are two alternative readings which follow from this. The first is that when we talk of ‘conservatism’ as a set of ideas we are talking of the purposes of the Conservative Party as an institution, such that its meaning at any one time is given by the interests of the party. This involves a creative act of politics which brings into being a broad constituency of support – at least if it appears that the national interest and the party interest coincide. Elie Kedourie (1984: 38), for example, thought that conservatism ‘is the outcome of activity in normal circumstances and over a long period of the Conservative Party, an abridgement, and so to speak a codification of this activity’. The meaning of conservatism followed – it did not precede – the activity of the party and was thus ‘a natural attempt by a body with a long continuous existence to articulate and make intelligible to itself its own character’. The real measure of conservatism – rather, Conservatism – is its practice, not its philosophy, a proposition which almost matches Herbert Morrison's view that socialism is what Labour governments do. In this case, the national interest is what Conservative governments do.

The second reading is to consider the party as merely the vehicle for the achievement of conservative principles which exist independently of it. It is these principles which call into being the institution of the party, and the politics of the party express, or should express, pre-political sentiments of the nation. Unfortunately, the Conservative Party has been too often tempted, as T.E. Utley thought (Moore and Heffer 1989: 73–4), by ‘a kind of sophisticated timidity’ whereby politicians preside elegantly over the destruction of those same principles, making the process as painless as possible, saving only what they can from the wreckage. Negatively the recurring criticism has been that for all its presumed identity with the nation – possibly because of it – the Conservative Party can confuse its own self-interests with the interests of the nation and ‘put party before country’.

If the first of these readings can tend towards the cynical and the second towards the disillusioned, both of them find their place in Conservative Party politics. Lord Salisbury, who was both cynical and disillusioned, warned that ‘the dangerous temptation of the hour is that we should consider rhapsody an adequate compensation for calculation’ (cited in Roberts 1999: 2). Rhapsodic principles (in patriotic voice) and the calculating requirements of party advantage (what do we need to say to get elected?) are two sides of the Conservative Party and the reckoning of their claims has never been straightforward. Even Kedourie (1984: 46) was conscious of the problem: defining conservatism as merely what the party says it is means that what Conservatives will come to understand by its principles was far from clear. Though it is of advantage to politicians pressed, as they always are, to make compromises, this approach may strike some supporters as betrayal of both party and the country (as some thought of Edward Heath's commitment to Europe).

For example, Maurice Cowling's influential work (1971) interpreted such principled rhapsody that is found in political speeches and programmes by Conservatives (or indeed, by any politician) to be mainly strategic manoeuvres, within and between parties, in the search for position and precedence. Patriotic rhapsody is useful but the important thing is calculation, for it is that very practical political intelligence which is required for success. In other words, Conservatives should be cautious about confusing rhapsody with calculation. To formulate ideas and proposals in such a manner as to be both persuasive (rhapsodic) and ambiguous (calculating) is profoundly challenging, albeit part and parcel of the political craft. Not to acknowledge their necessity and therefore fail to become proficient in both rhapsody and calculation is, in terms of Cowling's political realism, to lack seriousness as a politician. Vagueness, elusiveness and allusiveness are necessary not only to attain self-interested ends but also to avoid potentially destructive – or self-destructive – political failure. The Conservative Party has experience of both self-interest and self-destruction in its history. This implies, nevertheless, a real and not imaginary relationship between party and principle, if only because it is a question which also keeps recurring. For example, Benjamin Disraeli's novel Coningsby presents its hero searching to find an answer to the questions: what are Conservative principles and what do they aim to conserve? A century and a quarter later, Andrew Cooper (2005: 38) asked similar questions: ‘What does the Conservative Party stand for? What is its vision?’ And though Disraeli was concerned to recover traditional Tory values and Cooper to modernise the Tory message, they both touch on a contentious issue: the relationship between conservatism – an attitude to life – and Conservatism – the purposes of the party (O'Hara 2005: 27–31) and the party's ability to convince a democracy that both are ‘national’.

One philosopher who engaged with the conundrums these questions raise and whose contribution helps to clarify the issues involved was Michael Oakeshott. Although he has been revered in the abstract as ‘Mr Tory Philosopher’ (see Casey 2007), the truth is that he was, and remains, a little too unworldly (or rhapsodic) for most Conservative politicians. Nevertheless, Conservatives seeking an intelligent defence against socialism often look to Oakeshott for support and find much of value. His celebrated essay ‘On being Conservative’, for example, is frequently read as a concise statement of the conservative ‘disposition’, one which informs the fundamental sensibility of Conservative politics. Commentators have been seduced by his poetic depiction of conservatism as a preference for the familiar to the unknown, ‘the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss’ (Oakeshott 1991: 408–9). Sometimes there is a failure to look beyond that descriptive rhapsody or to note this was only the first part of the essay and not the most significant. Even those tasked with promoting the party's electoral interests often explore no further, albeit conceding, as any sensible politician must, that Conservatives cannot be only traditionalists in that manner (Herbert 2014: 30). Indeed, Oakeshott went on to argue that this disposition – which Herbert celebrated mainly because it infuriated opponents – is actually inappropriate ‘in respect of human conduct in general’.

Conservatism, he thought, does remain appropriate in one respect of activity – government – and this is all the more necessary in a society that puts much store by its individualism, its dynamism and its many enterprises. Government ought to be a specific and limited activity and the main qualification for office was ‘coming to be at home in this commonplace world’ of practical activity, something for which a person of conservative disposition was, so Oakeshott believed, well suited (1991: 196). In other words, the political world is the practical world and that ought to favour those most in tune with its realities and most sympathetic to its inherited character – those in tune with the nation, in other words. It is a claim Conservatives like to make, of course, expressed as their being the ‘natural party of government’. One could even argue that the title of Andrew Gamble's description of ‘Thatcherism’ as The Free Economy and the Strong State (1988) – if not necessarily its practice – is intimated in Oakeshott's essay. What is involved is a distinctive understanding of the relationship between historical identity and political change, one which at first glance seems very un-conservative or which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Prelude: Conservatives and Conservatism
• 1 Conservatism and the party
• 2 Conservatism and the nation
• 3 Conservative nation revisited
• 4 Conservatism: class and nation
• 5 Conservatives and the British Question
• 6 Conservatives and the English Question
• 7 Conservatives and the European Question
• Postscript: Conservatism confounded
• References
• Index