What is National Conservatism?

Unless you're a company operating a network of car parks, putting 'National' before anything automatically makes anything sound more sinister. Consider the new kid on the Tory ideas block, National Conservatism. Doesn't sound like a wrong 'un at all. And then look who is promoting the new creed: Jacob Rees-Mogg and Brexit nincompoop, David Frost. This new idea, which as we'll see isn't very new at all, has been cooked up in anticipation of the National Conservative conference slated later on this month. Among the luminaries addressing those coughing up the £115 entrance fee are Michael Gove, Suella Braverman, Douglas Murray, Daniel Hannan, Melanie Phillips, Toby Young, Matthew Goodwin, and a horror scape of lesser known rent-a-gobs, racists, and terminally uninteresting ideologues.

In their piece, Rees-Mogg and Frost set out the NatCon stall. Under the very Tory heading of 'Time Britain returned to its traditional roots', they spin us a fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm. Sans the entertainment and morality lessons. It starts off fairly innocently: "At its heart, it is a belief in the nation state and the principle of national independence ... confidence that the self-governing, democratic nation is the best way that peoples have found to manage their affairs, preserve their traditions and culture, settle their differences, trade and prosper." If you want to be a bit naughty, written like that I'd doubt Tony Benn or the Communist Party of Great Britain would have found that too objectionable. Frost and Rees-Mogg go on to say that the aspiration for self-government is what drove the Brexit vote. Perhaps, but would it have got over the line without Vote Leave's anti-immigration scaremongering? Doubt it.

There's more. National Conservatism is, apparently, a movement of renewal. Taking aim at decline of the West narratives, they argue the doom need not be upon us. All it takes is "economic freedom", freedom of speech and, somewhat at odds, "anti-woke policies". For an idea what this means, Kemi Badenoch's endorsement of book-banning Florida governor Ron DeSantis gives us a fairly good idea. Summing up their creed, they acknowledge that it draws deep on really-existing Toryism:

... the British conservative tradition is characterised by love of freedom: of free markets, free trade and free individuals and families, with the inherent rights and sanctity of the human person enshrined by our common law and constitutional tradition. These principles have made Britain what it is – a country that defends human freedom, honour and dignity, at home and around the world.

How anyone could look not just at 13 years of this government, but at the 18 years of its predecessor and conclude these principles reflect decades of Tory statecraft are ignorant, stupid, or dishonest. Frost and Rees-Mogg compound the bad faith further by railing against the state for having an industrial policy, suggesting that the fraying social cohesion we have now, combined with stagnant economics is because Whitehall is beholden to some kind of Croslandite collectivism. When government in the real world is heading in the opposite direction, you could only make this claim safe in the knowledge that no one will ever ask you to show your workings.

There are a couple of things worth bearing in mind when dealing with conservative principles and philosophy. No matter how articulate or softly spoken advocates are for these ideas, their adherents only wear them lightly. When even Boris Johnson cited the tenets of One Nation Conservatism for his own purposes and basically no one in his party batted an eyelid, not even the more "intellectual" Tories. This is because the only real principle conservatism observes, at least in the context of the British Conservative Party, is power. Everything else is window dressing, or the mangled expression of the class interests their party simultaneously articulates and serves.

Let's consider some of these. Small statism, ritualistically name checked by Frost and Rees-Mogg here, has always expressed the Tory dream of a straightforward bourgeois state. One whose business is to defend property and capitalist relations of production, but not have much interest in anything else. Hand in hand with this is the low tax fantasy. I.e. Capital has no obligation except to accumulate more capital. It and its beneficiaries certainly should not be weighed down by responsibilities (via taxation) to those maimed and who suffer thanks to their social system. It represents the wealthy dream of a consequence-free life. And there is the sovereignty fetish, that in the age of Brexit we never stop hearing about and was used to justify the whole shoddy enterprise in the first place. But this "sovereignty", defined as freedom from supranational organisations and overseas courts (and, in recent years, the unilateral opting out of international treaties), is nothing more than the authoritarian impulse to unconstrained government, where the Tories, their state, and their class are limited only by the laws they legislate for. What goes on in Britain's borders and, crucially, how it exploits its workforce with the most restrictive labour laws in the Western world apart from the United States is its business and its business only.

There are other aspects conservative philosophy emphasises, such as senses of duty, the importance of covenants, voluntary association, the received wisdom of tradition, conservation, the cohesive role of faith, and above all a sense of obligation, but none of these have been taken remotely seriously by Tory politicians since Macmillan's generation. And it's important to note National Conservatism continues the Tory run of setting them aside. What Frost and Rees-Mogg are offering are gentle words for a power politics that stand for crack downs on social dissent and difference, and arbitrary government unconstrained in meeting the vagaries and challenges of managing bourgeois class rule. Meet National Conservatism, just like the old Conservatism.

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