The Economist November 6th 2021 Britain 53BlueLeviathan
T
he conservativeshave undergone many transformations in
their time: from the party of the landed squirearchy to that of
the industrial bourgeoisie; from the postwar consensus to free
market radicalism. Now they are undergoing another. For 40
years, from the choice of Margaret Thatcher as its leader in 1975 to
David Cameron stepping down as prime minister in 2016, Tories
stood for small government. Today they are the party of biggov
ernment conservatism.
The budget provided a vivid illustration. By the mid2020s
public spending will be the highest, as a share of gdp, since the
mid1970s. By the same measure, taxation will be its highest since
the early 1950s. But there is more to biggovernment conservatism
than the size of the state. There is the philosophy of the state as
well. And under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have set them
selves aims they think can be achieved only by bigstate activism.
The most obvious is “levelling up”. The division between
prosperous south and deprived north goes back centuries: read
Elizabeth Gaskell’s “North and South”, published in 1854. And Lon
don’s economic preeminence is the result of natural agglomera
tion. Successful banks attract others, which attract accountants
and lawyers, which attract restaurants and art galleries, and so on.
Increasingly, the government seems to feel this cannot be coun
tered without it intervening muscularly, for example by splashing
out on infrastructure and backing economic clusters.
Levelling up also involves reining in the overmighty “liberal
elite”, from the bbc and academia to the legal system and civil ser
vice. Tories like to refer to this elite as the “blob” because its mem
bers all live in the same sorts of places (Islingtonia) and believe the
same sorts of things (“diversity”, meaning varied ethnicities rather
than viewpoints). The government thinks Brexit exposed a dan
gerous gulf between liberal elites and the masses who pay their
salaries. And it worries that a “woke ratchet” is making that gulf
wider, as members of the elite try to impress each other by em
bracing trans rights, critical race theory and cancel culture.
The result is a flurry of state activism, including an academic
freedom bill that is designed to prevent the noplatforming of
speakers; a housing bill that gives locals a say over the appearance
of new buildings; a judicial review and courts bill that it says will
increasedemocraticoversight; amore confrontational stance to
wards the bbc and legal profession, and a policy of moving civil
servants out of London and into the provinces.
Some of this is political hardball. The Conservative Party cap
tured huge swathes of northern England in 2019, and is pouring re
sources into these new territories. It is increasingly the party of
the working class and the elderly, so picking a fight with young
and middleaged trendies makes sense. But the embrace of state
activism also means an evolution in conservative thinking—or
perhaps, more accurately, a growing recognition of the difference
between conservatism and classical liberalism.
Legend has it that Mrs Thatcher used to pull Friedrich Hayek’s
“The Constitution of Liberty” from her handbag and declare: “This
is what we believe.” Yet the book’s postscript is called “Why I am
not a conservative”. Tories are returning to explicitly conservative
thinkers such as Edmund Burke, who said government was a “con
trivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have
a right that these wants be provided for by this wisdom.” They are
concluding not only that marketfirst policies do not always pro
duce conservative solutions, but that unleashing market forces in
academia and the legal profession coincided with a leftward move
in both, as universities embraced critical theory in various guises
and lawyers struck gold in humanrights law. Indeed, market forc
es can undermine a conservative society’s foundations. Big gov
ernment is then not an aberration, as Thatcherites contend, but a
tool to achieve conservative ends.
In a democracy, conservatism relies on equality of opportunity.
The race of life, in which only some get prizes, is seen as illegiti
mate unless everybody gets a fair start. But in the past four de
cades the starting line has become more uneven, as the successful
have hoarded resources for their children, and wealth has become
more regionally concentrated. Seen in this light, conservatives are
dutybound to embrace vigorous state action in order to restore
faith in the system.
Conservatism also depends on healthy communities, includ
ing the nation state. In her glory days, Thatcher saw no tension be
tween market and nation. The orgy of patriotism that followed the
Falklands war coincided with an orgy of moneymaking in the Ci
ty. But the tensions have increased as Chinese competition has de
stroyed manufacturing jobs and Amazon has laid waste to bricks
andmortar retailers. In 2019 the Conservatives’ election manifes
to promised government action to spruce up town centres and im
prove bus services. Mr Johnson has presented labour shortages
caused by tighter immigration rules since Britain left the Euro
pean Union as a chance to increase wages and productivity. Super-size me
Biggovernment conservatism is rife with problems and potential
problems. The government may pursue narrow party advantage
rather than tackle them: the choice of Nadine Dorries, a combat
ively philistine mp, as culture secretary is hardly encouraging. It
may also override the few checks that restrain Britain’s over
mighty executive. The idea that “outoftouch” lawyers need to be
subject to democratic control would be more convincing if the
government didn’t treat Parliament with such contempt. And
Thatcher’s warning that socialist governments “always run out of
other people’s money” applies equally to biggovernment conser
vatism. But whatever squallsorshipwrecks lie ahead, Mr John
son’s Conservative Party is theparty of government activism, rath
er than government restraint.nBagehot
The Conservatives are building a bigger, busier state, from raising taxes to stoking culture wars