Nick Timothy offers an answer to a question the government has fumbled: what is it for?

Mar 12th 2020

BRITISH CONSERVATISM is in an odd state: politically triumphant but intellectually dazed. A hundred days after the election the Conservative Party is still far ahead of Labour in the polls. But it has not provided a clear sense of what it stands for. Going back to the good old days of blue passports and royal yachts? Perpetual war on the liberal elite? Cutting red tape and unleashing business?

Such confusion is understandable. The Brexit explosion blew apart David Camerons post-Thatcherite synthesis of free markets with progressive values. But having been in power since 2010 the party hasnt had time for a rethink. The default contender to fill the vacuum is the populism that drove the Brexit revolution. Alas, such populism is an unstable mixture of emotions not a coherent philosophy, consisting in part of rage at the liberal elites, in part celebration of the noble savage in the form of the northern working class and in part nostalgia for national greatness. The party has failed to take on the biggest issue it faces: can it cleave to free-market orthodoxy (as it did when allowing the Flybe regional airline to go bust), while still catering to its new voters in the north?

Here Nick Timothy has an advantage. He was at the heart of government for over a decade, first as Theresa Mays adviser at the Home Office and then as her co-chief of staff in Downing Street. He was hurled into the wilderness after the election debacle in 2017 and given plenty of time to think, not least about his own mistakes. These were numerous. He alienated many colleagues with his abrasive management style and he was the principal author of the partys disastrous manifesto. Yet his northern strategy of winning Brexit-inclined Labour voters bore fruit in 2019, suggesting that the problem lay in its execution not its design. His conduct in Downing Street was a model of restraint compared with that of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnsons chief adviser. And unlike Mr Cummings, Mr Timothy is a conservative with both a small and a large c. His new book, Remaking One Nation: Conservatism in an Age of Crisis, provides something that the Johnson government conspicuously lacks: an answer to the question of what conservatism is now for and a blueprint for translating philosophical principles into detailed policy.

Mr Timothy argues that, since the French revolution, the role of conservatism has been to act as a corrective to the extremes of liberalism. Today those extremes come in two forms: neo-liberalism, which sees markets as the solution to all problems, and woke liberalism, which sees the world through the prism of minority rights and all-pervasive oppression. Many see these two liberalisms as polar opposites. But for Mr Timothy they are both degenerate versions of classical liberalism. The first undermines markets by failing to see that they require popular legitimacy and the second sacrifices what is best in liberalism (pluralism, scepticism, individualism) on the altar of group rights.

Mr Timothy presents a dismal picture of the consequences. Bosses have seen their compensation more than quadruple while the value of their companies has hardly risen at all. The largest demographic groupthe white working classhas seen incomes stagnate for over a decade. Britain has the highest level of regional inequality in Europe. It also has one of the worst systems of vocational education, with 80 undergraduate degrees awarded for every post-secondary technical qualification. Woke liberals are increasingly willing to no-platform or shout down opponents because they see their objectives as quasi-sacred and their critics not just as wrong-headed folk needing to be reasoned with but as evil-minded enemies who must be destroyed.

Rather than using its power to mitigate inequality the government has directed resources at the countrys most prosperous region. Transport subsidies are twice as high per person in London as elsewhere. London and Oxbridge get almost half of national R&D spending. Far from reviving vocational education, the government has poured money into universities which, as well as failing to defend free speech, load up students with debt at the same time as too often failing to provide them with any significant return on their investment.

Mr Timothy presents an ideologically eclectic list of solutions to Britains problems. They are reminiscent of John Ruskins description of himself as both a violent Tory of the old school and the reddest also of the red. But two ideas give his arguments organising force: the nation-state and civic capitalism. A long-standing Brexiteer, Mr Timothy argues that the nation-state has been uniquely successful in holding global elites accountable to voters while also giving citizens a sense of common purpose. He points out that the welfare state was constructed after the second world war, when the sense of common purpose was at its height. A proud citizen of Birmingham, he champions the sort of civic capitalism practised by Joseph Chamberlain, a local businessman who looked after his workers and went on to be a reforming mayor.

There are problems with Mr Timothys argument. He sees the upside of nationalism without the downside, such as the beggar-thy-neighbour policies of the 1930s. He sees the downside of lifestyle liberalism without the upside: two decades ago advocates of gay marriage were self-righteous extremists. But his book should be a jolt of electricity to a moribund debate in the Conservative Party. He makes a powerful case against the libertarian right, which sees Brexit as an excuse to shrink the state and liberalise further. And he presents a blueprint very different from the one that has ruled the right since the 1970s. This is a conservatism which celebrates the power of the state to achieve collective ends by dealing with regional and inter-generational inequalities; which challenges the self-dealing of business elites by rewiring the rules of corporate governance; and which puts a premium on rebuilding local communities and reigniting civic capitalism.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "The meaning of conservatism"

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The meaning of conservatism - The Economist