(Allen Lane, £20)
The Strange Death of Liberal England was the title of George Dangerfield's book on the collapse of the Liberal party after the first world war. Now, after three heavy defeats in a row, it is no surprise that Geoffrey Wheatcroft has nabbed the title for his book on the state of the Tories. On the surface, a lot of it reads like the political gossip of the day preserved between hard covers. But beneath it there is a sustained argument that gets to the heart of the crisis facing Conservatism.
The book's central thesis is that Thatcherism, using free market economics to wage war on Britain's established institutions, has made Conservatism of the sort we have known for 150 years unsustainable. Now Conservatives have to settle for a thin language of freedom without obligation, and to talk to voters only as consumers, not citizens. Wheatcroft manifestly prefers traditional Tory squires to left-wing academics, but ironically his book is a most accessible and readable version of a thesis that has been put forward by a variety of thinkers from the left, such as Anthony Giddens, John Gray and David Selbourne. They too are transfixed by the phenomenon of Thatcherism and see it as having destroyed the very institutions needed to sustain the Conservative party and a Conservative way of thinking. They argue that, like some strange insect from one of David Attenborough's nature films, the Conservative party destroyed itself in the very act of creating today's Britain.
Historically, Conservatism has combined two great principles. First, personal freedom, rooted in our historical liberties and protected by the common law. Nowadays this is what generates the excitement of mobility and opportunity. But at the same time there is always something else for British Conservatism—let us call it public service. The language in which those obligations were once expressed would now seem extraordinarily dated. In fact, much of this Conservatism wasn't really talked about; it was just embodied in the great institutions with which the Conservative party was closely linked. It was the values of the officers in the armed forces, the great professions, the Church of England and the obligations that went with ownership of land. It is easy to lapse into a mixture of nostalgia and snobbery when one contemplates such a list, but it is only now, as these things disappear from the mental framework of most Conservatives, that we realise quite what we have lost.
It is easy to blame Margaret Thatcher for the troubles of the Conservative party but it is also unfair. For a start, it would be to ignore the enormity of the economic crisis we faced 25 years ago. Blaming Thatcher for shifting the Conservative party towards economic liberalism in those circumstances would be like blaming Churchill for pushing the Conservative party towards a preoccupation with national defence. It was what the nation needed. But after that we needed to rediscover some Tory understanding of community. Margaret Thatcher herself, who had a rather richer understanding of Conservatism than some of the caricatures of Thatcherism would have you believe, was deeply aware of these problems. Indeed, I would say it increasingly preoccupied her during her last years in office. Her address to the assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988 was her most significant attempt to address the problem. Her solution, however, was an appeal to religious obligation. She saw capitalism as the parable of the talents writ large, and explained our obligation to others through the parable of the good Samaritan. The trouble is that this just doesn't work as a basis for 21st-century Conservatism in an increasingly secular society. It has much greater resonance in America, where Christianity is so much more vigorous. It is one of the reasons why compassionate conservatism worked for Bush and the Republicans but proved much harder for Iain Duncan Smith.
One of the contradictions of New Labour in power is the way in which it understands the increasing diversity of society yet at the same time appears to think it can operate largely by means of centralised targets. Conservatives see the business of government as more like tending a woodland than sitting at the control panel of a power station. There is a powerful Tory theme here—hands off, give us a break, leave us alone.
The trouble is that this won't quite do on its own. For a start it focuses very much on cutting back the supply of government. That may be looking at the problem from the wrong end. The real issue is surely the demand for government. In a society with fractured families and weaker civil society, people turn to government more. So even a government that wants to do less needs a strong commitment to social reform.
Moreover, we cannot just be sceptics about everything all the time. As David Hume famously showed, you have to leave your study and act. Government can't just be passive when there is manifestly so much to do.
There is a way out of these dilemmas. It is a Conservatism which once more shows it understands community and public service as well as freedom and a market economy. We would have to recognise that some of the particular institutions that we have been associated with no longer play such a crucial role in our national life. But there is still a human urge to belong. And we now understand more than ever the importance of civil society and social capital. They thrive best in rather special conditions. Government needs to be active and efficient but it should be limited. Intrusive target-setting government is itself a threat to autonomy. Conservatives can be and should be the party which best understands how to create the conditions in which a civil society and strong institutions thrive.
We are all familiar with the prisoner's dilemma. If you can't trust your fellow prisoner not to betray you, then you betray him first. It gets to the heart of the problems of trust in modern society. There is a solution, and it is described in Robert Axelrod's great book The Evolution of Co-operation. If this is not a one-off dilemma and you play the game over and over again, the rational strategy is to be trusting until you are betrayed. Suddenly the Tory faith in institutions seems not mere nostalgia for the past but an agenda for the future. Places where people interact again and again create an environment where trust and co-operation can flourish. Governments can destroy these precious arrangements by destabilising them or failing to respect, for example, the ethos of the professions. We don't just have to look back to the communities and the institutions of the past: we can help nurture them in the future.
