On the right lines The next centre-right in the British Isles Perri 6 Open access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright, which remains with the copyright holder. Users are welcome to download, save, perform or distribute this work electronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translation without written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos open access licence which you can read here. Please read and consider the full licence. The following are some of the conditions imposed by the licence: · Demos and the author(s) are credited; · The Demos website address (www.demos.co.uk) is published together with a copy of this policy statement in a prominent position; · The text is not altered and is used in full (the use of extracts under existing fair usage rights is not affected by this condition); · The work is not resold; · A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to the address below for our archive. By downloading publications, you are confirming that you have read and accepted the terms of the Demos open access licence. Copyright Department Demos Elizabeth House 39 York Road London SE1 7NQ United Kingdom [email protected] You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other than those covered by the Demos open access licence. Demos gratefully acknowledges the work of Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons which inspired our approach to copyright. The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non-commercial’ version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 The current crisis of the centre-right: risks and opportunities 14 Political culture and settlements 19 The resources available 24 The neo-conservative inheritance 29 The challenge for authority 35 The seductions of Edmund Burke 38 The ambivalence of national sentiment 42 The Cheshire Cat of libertarianism 49 Neo-liberalism looking for the right partner 54 Dangers of pessimism, currents of modernisation 59 The international traditions 63 The inheritance and the challenge 65 Authority and risk: from settlement to policy 69 Conclusion 78 Notes 80 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess Acknowledgements I am gratef ul to the many people for discussions over some months and years that have worked their way into this text, and to several people in particular for their comments on an early draft of this book: Tim B o s well, Ian Chri stie, Michael Gove, John Gray, Tim Hames, Ian Hargreaves, Danny Kruger, Roger Scruton, and Bob Tyrrell. It should not be imagined that any of them necessarily agrees with my argu- ment, nor are they responsible for any errors in this text. Demos 7 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess Introduction When – and I mean ‘when’, not ‘if’ – the centre-right returns to be a major force in British culture, life and government, it is quite possible that it will not be conservative. Indeed, conservatism is a very particu- lar kind of centre-right culture, tradition and movement, not found everywhere in the world, and for all its longevity in Britain, not neces- sarily even appropriate for all time in Britain for the centre-right. In any viable society the r e spr ings up some kind of ce n t re-r ight polit- ical pract i ce. Whatever your personal politi cs, it matte r s very much just wh a t kind of ce n t re-r ight we might have in the twen t y- fi rst century. For, like the centre-l e f t, the centre-r ight artic u l a tes certain abiding im pulses without which culture, economy and society become unbal- an ced and run danger s of s ev e ral kinds of tyra n n y. Any deeply roo te d po l it i cal culture has seve r al deeply roo t ed commitments Ð if the y had but one each, the y would be single issue campaigns, not cultures at all. In e vita b l y, these commitments come into tension with one anothe r . In ea c h gen e r ation, the re f ore, these tensions have to be res o l ved in a way tha t balances the riv al needs of de s i r e for coheren ce of po l i cy with the imp o rta n ce of assembling broad coalitions of su p p o rt. In the case of the centre-right, those abiding commitments are for social order, private property, both authority and liberty, both indi- vidualism and c o m m u n ity, modern i s ation and c o n t i n u ity.1 For th e centre-left, we might point to basic commitments of equality, social j u st ice, public accountability: for the ra d ical centre, merito c ra cy, l i b e rty and c u l t u ral commitment, tra n sp a re ncy, comp e t ition and modernisation Ð perhaps even for their own sakes Ð but alsofor social grounding. Demos 9 This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess On the right lines In addition to basic commitments, political currents also possess certain distinctive skills and capacities. The centre-right has an ability to engage in a certain messy, untidy style of institutional creativity that often proves more robust than the too tidy-minded institutional structures of the centre-left. The challenge for the centre-right today is to develop a new settle- ment between its abiding commitments and to nurtu re afresh its skills and capacities in ways that will prepare it once again to offer a credi- ble political direction. After the electoral defeat of the Conservative Party in Britain in 1997, the centre-right is engaged in rethinking its role, aims, means and res o u r ces. A policy revie w has been announced. But what the party Ð and indeed the wider currents of centre-right political thought and practice in Britain and the rest of the developed world Ð needs first is a review of its fundamental philosophy. Until it becomes clear what the centre-right is basically for, clarity about particular policies will have neither relevance nor electoral appeal. Unfortunately, in recent years, the centre-right in the Conservative Party in Britain has been much clearer about what it stands against than what it stands for. And this is true beyond Britain. Just as the British public has heard from Conservatives that they are against a federal European state, so for many years the Republican Party in the US appeared mainly to be against communism and big government. Fr ench Gaullists and German Christian Democrats face different but surprisingly analogous situations. Indeed, British Conservatives will undertake this rethinking not in national isolation but along side and together with the centre-right in the US, France and even Germany, where the centre-left appears for the moment to be in the ascendant. The centre-right in the rest of the world is not in quite the same parlous state. In western Europe, centre-right parties hold power in Spain and in Norway. Ireland has two centre-right parties and one is in po wer at the moment. In Israel and in parts of Latin America, the cent re-right is reasonably healthy. In the Czech Republic, for the first time since the fall of communism the centre-right lost overall control. Mo reover, recently, the centre-right won power again in Hungary. The centre-right traditions in these countries are genuinely very different indeed Ð in France and Germany, the centre-right has only spasmodi- 10 Demos This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved. Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess Introduction cally been conservative in the anglophone sense of the word, since the Second World War. Christian Democracy and Gaullist republicanism draw on at least some different roots from those on which English and many recent Scots conservatives draw.2 Yet, despite the divergence of their roots, the centre-right in the co u n t ries where it is in trouble faces crises tha t are rem a r ka b l y similar. There are some global and secular forces that have brought difficulties for some traditional centre-right commitments, just as in the 1970s and 1980s there were global and secular forces that rendered much of the tradition of the centre-left irrelevant and impotent. Mo reov e r , some of the ris k s tha t the centre-r ight faces in Europe and North America are alarmi n g l y similar. Where the centre-r ight has been weak, divided or failed to modernise itself, there has grown up once a gain in Europe and in some parts of the USA a new xen op ho bi c, rac i st and embitte r ed populist far right.