Justin Reynolds is a member of Norwich Conservatives. @_justinwriter
Last month I was pushing Labour leaflets through doors – with something of a troubled mind. Last week I left and joined the Conservative Party.
The reasons are particular – and no doubt rather peculiar – to me. They are unlikely to offer clues to winning back other voters. But they may be of some interest to those, like me, inclined to political philosophy.
I was just an ordinary Labour voter. I’ve never sought elected office, and my membership has wavered. But I have backed the party for nearly 30 years. I’ve canvassed, helped with communications, and written articles for various left-leaning publications.
In brief, I was Labour because I recognised the party’s commitment to the dignity of all, to ensuring everyone has access to the material conditions that make the exercise of real freedom possible: education, housing, health care, workplace rights, social insurance, and fair pay.
I admire, and always will, the dedication of so many Labour members, the party’s restless intellectual energy, and its pragmatism: a (sometimes fitful) willingness to temper its innate idealism for the sake of winning power in what has long been a conservative country.
But that commitment to liberty has long compelled a question to which I’m not sure the party has an answer. Quite simply, what is freedom for?
I have never quite given up on the essential insight of classical political philosophy that true liberty consists not simply in the exercise of the individual will, but the orientation of that will to the common good. Living in community both sets us free, and makes demands of us. We learn how to discipline the freedom our shared life opens for us for the sake of nurturing the conditions that make that freedom possible. Through this education of desire, we acquire wisdom and virtue.
That all sounds rather abstract, but if our liberty is not exercised concerning the common good the foundations of liberal society weaken. When we lose our sense of shared purpose the institutions and customs through which we learn to live well with others break down.
Today our social fabric is tattered, and beginning to tear. Many neighbourhoods are atomised, or scattered into enclaves; the family, the nucleus of society, is under pressure, as marriages collapse and we have fewer children; more of us are isolated; and, as we seek ever more exotic amusements, our coarsened culture is losing sight of its inheritance. This summer’s riots are only a particularly visceral manifestation of that decay.
Labour is right to highlight material factors: strains on public services, lack of housing, and generational inequalities. But as a (now) thoroughly progressive party, it is uncomfortable talking about values and culture. In his outstanding intellectual history A Century of Labour, Jon Cruddas identifies two dominant Labour traditions that account for this awkwardness.
One is Fabianism, a left utilitarianism focused on the use of the state to redistribute wealth and power. The other is left-liberalism, the use of rights legislation to enhance individual freedom, manifested in the social reforms of the 1960s and New Labour’s Human Rights and Equality Acts.
Anthony Crosland’s 1956 essay The Future of Socialism remains the classic statement of Labour’s mainstream philosophy, envisaging a liberal society in which the legal and material conditions necessary for freedom are secured by the state. Citizenship requires little more than respect for J S Mill’s harm principle, ensuring our freedom does not compromise that of others.
I no longer believe that is enough. We need more than the agency and sanction of the state to live together well. We need culture. We need intermediating institutions and traditions through which society’s accumulated wisdom is passed on: families, neighbourhoods, schools, universities, the arts, and religious faith. And we need to see ourselves as a collective, a nation participating in a common culture.
By testing and tempering our will against that inheritance we move towards true liberty: freedom from internal as well as external compulsions. The conservative tradition, with its concern for the web of relationships that lie between the individual and state, still offers a language for talking about the cultivation of citizenship.
In thinking through these matters I’ve been helped not only by the words of many fine conservative thinkers, but regular walks through my hometown of Norwich, to which I returned a few months ago. The old city’s landscape bears scars of its own, but its ancient streets, riverside walks, cloisters, monuments, and multitude of towers and steeples still point to a transcendent order beyond the everyday.
All that said, I do not wish to deny Labour has its ethical tradition. As Cruddas notes, the old Independent Labour Party was inspired by religious faith and writers such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Thomas Carlyle who defended dignity and beauty against the depredations of industrialisation. Though subordinate to the party’s prevailing liberalism it persists in the cooperative movement, Christian Socialism, and Blue Labour, which seeks to articulate a socialism rooted in family, faith, vocation, and nation.
And, from my perspective, modern conservatism has its tendency to technocratic libertarianism, a temptation to define freedom as little more than the capacity to compete in the market, to cast us as consumers rather than citizens. In a good society economics is contained by politics, not vice versa. Again, I think of Norwich, with its ancient marketplace embedded within the city, encompassed by the town hall, churches, the library, and the castle.
There are of course very great difficulties in maintaining a shared culture nurtured by common values in our secular and globalised world. But today’s most interesting conservatives are taking on the challenge. Forums like the National Conservatives, the New Conservatives, and ResPublica, and publications such as UnHerd and Compact Magazine are seeking to define a ‘post-liberalism’ capable of recovering civil society, and the classical language of truth, goodness and beauty.
Unfortunately, with some honourable exceptions, in my experience the left’s engagement with this discussion has been rather shallow and dismissive. I want to be where the conversation is happening, and I fear that can no longer be inside the Labour Party. So I took the plunge.
Leaving after so many years has been hard. Though I realise I have been a silent conservative for some time, formally changing allegiance takes getting used to. But though I am struggling to articulate it, I feel a sense of homecoming. And it seems to me that a willingness to follow the heart rather than intellect is another strength of the conservative tradition.
As one of its most eloquent advocates put it, the conservative intellectual, perhaps, is one content “to articulate the real reasons for not having reasons – just feeling and doing what is right.”
