Lord Frost is a former British diplomat, civil servant and now a Conservative peer. He served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office and was Chief Negotiator with the EU over Brexit Jan 2020 – Dec 2021.
It is with trepidation that I disagree with my Lords colleague David Willetts.
He has after all been a member of the Conservative Party much longer than I have.
He may not remember it, but he almost persuaded me to quit the Foreign Office to take a job in William Hague’s CCHQ (I turned it down, probably wisely for all concerned). He is a thoughtful contributor to public debate. But I can’t agree with him when he argues we should not stigmatise parts of the “rich and diverse” Conservative tradition as “left wing”.
Let me explain why.
It is certainly true that the Conservative Party has a long tradition of accommodating itself, sometimes painfully, to contemporary political and social realities.
It wouldn’t be here if it didn’t.
The danger of this chameleon-like capacity is that it can be blind to when those realities need to change, and instead be too willing to live with a political environment shaped by others and to base its appeal on managerialism and supposed “competence” instead. Yes, you can claim this approach is conservative because it has been done by Conservatives. But in fact it is “not really Conservative”, as David puts it, because the Party ceases to operate in line with generally understood principles of conservatism.
The task of the Party’s leadership is to identify when accommodation is needed and when change is needed.
It’s the tragedy of David Cameron and those associated with him that they fixed on an accommodationist approach in the last years of Blair, because the country seemed to be prospering, and then never adjusted it when things blew up after 2008. That’s not to say that everything that was done was bad – but it is to say that they didn’t resist the flow, didn’t challenge the fundamental intellectual climate, and didn’t have the tools to resist the initial flurries of the storm that now risks overwhelming the Party.
Unfortunately, the Conservative Party always risks failing to spot the need for changes because its support has traditionally rested upon those who are doing well in life out of the current arrangements. So it can easily become complacent and appear entitled – as perhaps now, as the party of wealthy property-owners in the affluent bits of southern England. Unfortunately there aren’t enough such people to win an election with.
That’s why it’s so important, when the Party is debating policy, to resist the accommodationist tendency apparent in David’s piece. The world has changed. We are at a time when the Party needs to change to respond and when accommodation to contemporary reality is a serious error.
That’s because contemporary political reality is dominated by statist ideology in its many forms.
The belief that government, national or supranational, can solve every problem. That society can be remodelled in line with government grand plans. That all the money and property in the country is really the government’s and can be allocated in accordance with government aspirations. And that there is no real private sphere, even in the family or the Church, in which individuals need not pay heed to state priorities.
This approach has been driven by “progressive” politics, but in many ways the Party has been captured by it. It has to root it out. That will be painful but it is necessary. Otherwise, the Conservative Party is just a variant of every other party and becomes vulnerable to one that articulates the genuinely conservative positions instead.
Take David’s examples.
He correctly identifies Brexit as the one radical change that actually happened.
He accepts the will of the people, but thinks that it was the wrong result, and that Remainers can still have a respectable place for their opinion within the Conservative Party. Yet what that actually means is to say that he, and those who think like him, think it is better that this country is governed by a supranational organisation in which we have a small minority stake, and want to carry on saying so.
I just can’t see that as a meaningfully conservative position, and I also can’t see how that builds a coherent Party platform. We saw the consequences recently in the Lords, admittedly a world of its own, when Tory backbenchers speaking on Starmer’s EU deal were split 50/50 for and against.
Of course, if the 2016 vote had gone the other way, then Conservatives could have argued that we should try for the best EU we could get, that decision having been taken. But now we are out, it can’t be Conservative to want to go back, in whole or in part. That really must be an absolute organising principle for the future.
Or take taxation.
The big state requires high taxation, and David doesn’t seem to mind the big state.
He defends the state adding to its portfolio the responsibility of running social care in addition to the dreadful NHS. He actively approves of state-backed loans, many never repaid, and a graduate tax to fund a creaking university sector which, despite his protestations, is far from being a real market with normal incentives and delivers a lot of worthless education to boot.
And he seems fine with the grand project of net zero, its spiralling energy costs, and its expansion of the state’s role into areas it has not gone into before – telling people what technology they can use to heat their homes, what cars they can use, or what food they should expect to eat.
This direction of thought is what has produced the highest tax burden ever, one for which Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility. Yes, Conservatives must support fiscal soundness. But this should mean keeping spending in line with gradually falling tax rates, not the other way round. It means shrinking the state, not making it take on every possible task. It seems to have become conventional wisdom in much of the Party that an aging population and its health and social care needs will inevitably push up taxes.
Yes, they will have more needs. No, those needs don’t always have to be met by public provision. The era of accommodating to the big state must end and a new path set.
Accommodationist conservatism has taken the country and the Party to where we now are. When we are in a country with a bloated state, vast swathes of wasteful spending, prey to all sorts of crank projects of the modern technocracy like lockdown mania or the value of “diversity”, and vulnerable to an establishment that thinks the country is beaten and just wants to shuffle off the task of governing to elsewhere – well, we can’t afford that sort of conservatism.
In present conditions, it amounts to abandoning the field.
So if you’re the kind of conservative who is fine with high taxes, is happy with supranational government and the international technocracy, loves getting and spending to solve every conceivable social problem, and won’t tell hard truths about how we get out of this mess – and, to be clear, I’m not suggesting David Willetts is such a person, but I know many who are – I’m afraid it’s not the kind of conservatism we want or need.
Go and join the Lib Dems. You’ll be happier, and so will the rest of us.
