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David Cameron Breathes Life Into Britain's Conservatives

by Christopher Chantrill
December 11, 2005 at 7:05 pm

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ON TUESDAY December 6, David Cameron was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. He’s the fourth leader since 1997 when John Major was defeated by Tony Blair and his New Labour Party. Can he breathe life into the party, unlike his predecessors, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard?

Perhaps he can, because it is beginning to look as though the Labour Party is going the way of all British Labour governments. Sooner or later they all run out of money, according to Tory stalwart Ken Clarke.

Back in 1997 it looked as though New Labour had learned from the mistakes of Third Way compadre, Bill Clinton. When Clinton came up to bat as president he promptly hit into a double play, enacting a big tax increase and pushing a huge government takeover of health care that prompted the American people to elect a Republican Congress in 1994. Tony Blair learned from Clinton’s mistake. He promised not to increase income tax rates and not to increase spending—at least, not for a while. So the British economic boom that had started in 1992 continued, and Blair established a reputation for economic competence that led to reelection in 2001 and 2005. But the British people, encouraged by the chattering classes, wanted the government to improve “public services,” and so Blair promised to invest in the creaking centralized welfare state of government education, government health care, and government transport systems and deliver the world class public services that Britain deserved.

Since 1997, Tony Blair’s government has “invested” billions into health and education, ballooning British government spending from 38 percent of GDP to an expected 44 percent this year or next. The government has added some 800,000 workers to bolster education and health care, but the productivity of the government sector has gone down, dragging the rest of the economy with it. And now Labour is running out of money.

Back in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher got into a heap of trouble by saying “there is no such thing as the state.” What she actually said in her interview with Women’s Own magazine in 1987 was:

[T]oo many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it... They’re casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there are many people on the left (try this on one of them) that cannot grasp the difference between “society” and “government.” When they say that society should so something, they cannot imagine anything but a new government program. But the essence of the conservative vision since Edmund Burke is to insist that there is a middle ground between government and the individual, the Burkean “little platoons” and the “mediating structures” of Berger and Neuhaus in Empowering People. In this middle ground are the other ingredients that go into the social pie: families, churches, associations, charities, foundations, mutual-aid societies, and labor unions.

Now comes David Cameron, and he is saying, again and again, in speech after speech:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

You can see what that is all about. It is a cunning “third way,” or at least it wants to be, between the “no such thing as society” of Thatcher and the mindless conflation of society and state that derails the left-wing vision into universal compulsion, the inability to imagine a world that is deeper, richer, more civilized than the modernist windswept plaza across which individual and government confront each other without shelter from the mediating institutions that break up the cruel winds of power.

Some commentators worry that David Cameron is young and untested, a pretty face with a single speech. But at 39, he has been in politics most of his adult life, doing research at Conservative Party headquarters and staffing for John Major and others in the last Conservative government. Above all, he is experienced in the skills and the techniques of presenting a political party through the modern media.

With Cameron’s election to Tory Party leader it is clear that Anglo-Saxon conservatism, while differing in presentation and style from one side of the Atlantic to the other, is united in a grand vision of society. Its central themes, east and west of the pond, are the separation of powers, the differentiation of society into Michael Novak’s political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors, and a thriving civil society of families, churches, associations, and clubs.

There is a difference between society and state.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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