A statement of conservatism

Reihan Salam sees 'Liberaltarians' - a mix of American liberalism and libertarianism as an interesting counterbalance to European social democracy.  David Brooks got there first apparently:

"These voters don’t believe government can lift their standard of living or lead a moral revival. They want a federal government that will focus on a few macro threats — terrorism, health care costs, energy, entitlement debt and immigration — and stay out of the intimate realms of life. They want a night watchman government that patrols the neighborhood without entering their homes. This is not liberalism, which inserts itself into the crannies of life. It’s not conservatism, suspicious of federal power. It’s a gimlet-eyed federalism — strong government with sharply defined tasks."

The components drafted so far:

• Free enterprise and big business are not the same (3/2/09)
• Government failure tends to be greater than market failure (2/2/09)
• Government should be as small as possible but as large as necessary (2/2/09)

On this page - with readers' help - I'm drafting A Statement of Conservatism that attempts to capture the breadth of the conservative coalition.  A very first draft of the statement appeared at the end of December.

In his closing speech as Tory leader Michael Howard revisited a theme that he had also used at the start of his short time as leader:

"No one should be over-powerful - not ministers, not trade unions, not corporations, not the European Union. Wherever we see bullying by the over-mighty, we must stand up to it."

David Cameron picked up the theme too.  In one of his early efforts to decontaminate the Tory brand he promised to stand up to big business.

It was an important thing to do.  The interests of big business are not always the same as smaller businesses or of consumers (as Douglas Carswell MP has blogged). Big business can, for example, often afford to absorb the cost of government regulations and it will accept them - up to a point - if those regulations are prohibitively burdensome for smaller businesses that might otherwise challenge their market position. Big business uses regulation as, to use the jargon of economists, a 'barrier to entry'. Big businesses are therefore more tolerant of weak competition policies or regulations that young, hungrier enterprises cannot afford.

Conservatism is at its worst when it becomes too close to big business, big media and big charities.  Conservatism is usually at its best when it recognises that small is beautiful.  Conservatives must be on the side of competition and diversity - and not just when it comes to business and government, but also in media and the voluntary sector:

• George Osborne has rightly worried about the impact on start up media organisations of constant BBC expansionism.  Conservatives must work hard to protect the freedoms of new media against attempts to over-regulate them..
• There is also a problem with 'Big charities'.  Big charities often think like big government. This 'same thinking' (or groupthink) problem occurs for two main reasons. First, there is a recycling of employees between charities, quangos and local and national government. It also occurs because the establishment voluntary sector gets an increasing proportion of its funding from the state. With this recycling of personnel and funding bind there comes a similarity of thinking.  Charities imitate the state's approach to social problems - adopting, for example, harm reduction approaches to drug addiction and an unwillingness to back marriage as an important route out of poverty.  A truly conservative approach to the voluntary sector will see more funding reach smaller, community-based charities - so that a diversity of approaches can emerge.  We can then see, for example, compare the performance of pro-marriage and marriage-neutral not-for-profits.

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The Krieg Barrie drawing below - commissioned for ConservativeHome - captures our own concern to stand up for the little guy against the 'over-mighty':

When ConservativeHome was first launched - on Easter Day in 2005 - I commissioned two drawings from the artist Krieg Barrie.  The first portrayed the narrow Conservatism that then dominated the Tory message.  The party struggled to speak about more than four issues: Crime, Europe, Immigration and Tax.  Krieg drew a man stuck in a dark room, lacking even the tools to address other issues:

Krieg also drew the shields that have crowned the ConservativeHome website ever since:

They were ConservativeHome's vision.  I hoped that conservatism would be as broad in its interests as the eleven shields.  Each shield represents a concern of the various social, economic and national identity conservatives that are all important parts of 'our coalition'.  From left to right: home, property and family; creation of wealth; law and order; the worth of every human life; religious freedom; conservation; culture and heritage; patriotism; internationalism; and, finally, political engagement.

 Tim Montgomerie

This is a particularly important belief for conservatives to remember at a time when capitalism is under such strong attack.

Markets do, of course, fail and sometimes spectacularly.  They need regulation - particularly to stop monopolistic behaviours.

But conservatives also know that states fail catastrophically, too.  Failures of regulation and monetary policy - as well as greed - help explain today's banking boom and bust.  Dennis Sewell wrote an important piece for The Spectator in which he documented how politically-motivated mortgages for high-risk groups stoked the current difficulties.

One particular reason why state failure is greater than market failure is the absence of 'the loss factor'.  Although the profit motive is vital to capitalism, Milton Friedman regularly reminded his pupils that the loss motive is just as important.  When a business loses money on a product it either abandons the product and does something else or overhauls its marketing/ manufacturing strategy.  In contrast if a politician finds that one of his programmes is failing he faces very different incentives.  Afraid to admit that the scheme hasn't worked he doesn't abandon it but sinks even more money and resources into rescuing it.  Gordon Brown's management of IT projects and of the working tax credits system are good illustrations of this.  Failure also tends to be greater in the public sector because of a different attitude to money.  People are likely to spend money best when they are spending their own money on themselves - they've worked hard for it and they know what they need.  Governments are spending other people's money on other people.  They have not sweated to get the money and they may lack the information to spend it wisely.

Tim Montgomerie

Conservatives worry about large government for many reasons.  They worry about the morality of heavy taxation as well as the consequences for incentives to work and innovate.  They worry that large government crowds out other institutions, and usurps important functions that rightly belong to free citizens.  The welfare state, for example, has greatly undermined the family and private charity.  Conservatives also know that state failure tends to be greater than market failure.

But conservatives aren't anti-government.  This is how David Cameron put it in October 2008:

"We are not an anti-state party. In the twentieth century, state-run social programmes had real success in fighting poverty and making our society stronger. Pensions, sickness benefits, state education: I honour those men and women of all parties and none who created these safety nets and springboards. But today, the returns from endless big state intervention are not just diminishing, they are disappearing.  That’s because too often, state intervention deals with the symptoms of the problem. I want us to be different: to deal with the long-term causes."

National defence, a safety net for the poor, competition policy and lender of last resort functions are just some of the legitimate functions for the state.  We can also recognise that the state is capable of getting some big things right: preparing the old nationalised industries for privatisation in the 1980s; US welfare reform after 1994; zero tolerance policing in 1990s New York; the Iraq troops surge in 2007 and 2008.

Tim Montgomerie

This drafting process began with this post on CentreRight.com:

"A little while ago Iain Murray emailed me this 1960 statement from some American young conservatives.

It got me to thinking that it would be an interesting project to draw up my own statement of conservatism.  I plan to do that during January/ February.  It doesn't pretend to be The statement, just A statement.  I've drafted a few components (below) - they sometimes use others' language/ they are in no particular order at this stage - and I plan to enlarge upon them most days for the next few weeks and then put them together - all online...

1. No insignificant person has ever been born.
2. Economic liberalism needs social conservatism (and, 5pm addition, Iain Murray emails me to say and vice versa)
3. The presumption should always be in favour of life
4. Government should be as small as possible but as large as necessary
5. Multilateral organisations transfer power from people to politicians
6. Private choices have public consequences/ Policymakers have an interest in 'private choices', at least so long as they have consequences for taxpayers
7. Conservatism is a creative coalition between security, economic and cultural conservatives
8. A welfare state that feeds-and-forgets isn't compassionate
9. Politics is less important than ideas, culture and religion
10. Free enterprise and big business are not the same
11. Taxation has dynamic effects
12. Pre-emption is the best response to many of today's security threats
13. There is such thing as society, it's just not the state
14. Man is a fallen creature
15. Decision-making powers should be as close as possible to those affected by those decisions
16. Private ownership is nearly always preferable to common ownership
17. A strong society is built upon the vigorous virtues of courage, ambition, creativity, self-sufficiency and enterprise.
18. Love of country is fundamental to all conservatism.
19. Social liberalism can be destructive of social justice.
20. Conservative reform is usually preferable to radical revolution. Conservatism must deal with its own enemies within.

They are far from finished at this stage. They need to be much better expressed but grateful for any initial thoughts.

PS Matthew Taylor is also having a stab at redefining progressivism."

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