The strange death of Tory England

...In addition to squandering a large part of Britain's heritage of civilized institutions, this project of refashioning social life on a primitive model of market exchange has speeded the delegitimation of the monarchy and the Church of England...

...As of May 1995 the Tories did not control a single metropolitan town council and only one county council...

...Further, by stripping democratic local government in Britain of most of its powers and building up the unaccountable institutions of the Quango state— the apparatus of "quasi-governmental" committees appointed by central government to oversee the operation of the newly marketized public services—the Conservatives have marginalized their own local party organizations and thereby contributed to the steep and swift decline of the Conservative party itself...

...This kinship was strengthened by the opposition of most on the neoliberal right in Britain to European federalism...

...It contained a diversity of intellectual trends, of which Chicago economics, Virginia Public Choice theory, and elements of Austrian economics derived from the work of Hayek were the most prominent...

...The self-undermining effect of neoliberal policy in Britain has been even more cruelly ironic than this brief narrative reveals...

...It is useful to recall that the British New Right achieved its ephemeral hegemony in public discourse during the cold war, had its political expression in the most unequivocally (and uncritically) pro-American prime minister of the postwar period, and coincided with the combination in Reaganite America of a strongly anticommunist foreign policy with an intensely market-oriented domestic policy...

...but Tory England, which it existed to conserve, is already little more than a memory...

...Analogously, Roger Scruton's Salisbury Review adopted a stance of Jacobitic or quixotic resistance to the spirit of the age, which sometimes encompassed opposition to aspects of economic liberalism...

...The explanation is then sought in relativistic doctrines supposedly propagated in schools and universities, in the legacy of sixties libertarianism, in media bias or similarly absurd conjectures...

...The first is that the pretensions of the New Right to an intellectual hegemony in political discourse were always spurious...

...A policy of cultural fundamentalism has attractions for some British conservative thinkers, nonetheless, because it enables them to avoid confronting the central contradiction in their thought and policy—the contradiction between endorsing the permanent revolution of the global market and the preser450 • DISSENT Politics Abroad vation of stable forms of family and community life...

...In this Thatcher not only misread Britain's strategic situation, which is that of a European power, but misjudged British public culture, which differs from that of the United States in all the most crucially important respects...

...The deregulation of financial institutions that in the late eighties flooded the economy with easy money and caused asset values to float to unsustainable heights at the same time spawned new financial instruments—personal pensions and endowment mortgages—that spelled loss or ruin for millions of households...

...Nevertheless, all of the think tanks—even the Center for Policy Studies, set up by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in 1975 as an explicitly Conservative foundation—found their intellectual inspiration not in any kind of conservatism, as that had been traditionally understood in Britain and in other European countries, but in classical liberalism...

...It is not too early to elicit a couple of lessons from its whimpering debacle...

...The result has been a collapse of Tory support...

...The historical possibility of serious intellectual conservatism has been closed off by the policies of the last decade and a half...

...The Tories are paying the price of attaching their fortunes to an economic philosophy that recognizes only the human interest in increased income and consumer choice and fails to perceive the weightier interest people have in limiting their personal economic risk...

...4 For many on the New Right, and certainly for Thatcher, Britain's cultural affinities lay with the United States rather than with Europe...

...q Notes I have considered the decay of the postwar British settlement during the Callaghan Labor government in more detail in my monograph The Undoing of Conservatism (London: Social Market Foundation, 1994), reprinted as Chapter 7 of my book, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995...

...they cannot for long be politically legitimated through democratic institutions...

...2 An exception might be made for the thought of Michael Oakeshott, in which a criticism of the Enlightenment is obliquely pursued...

...This shared historical context made it all the easier for American rightist thought—the thought, that is to say, of neoconservatives and libertarians—to exercise an influence over British conservatism that was decidedly anomalous in terms both of Britain's European intellectual inheritance and of its underlying public culture...

...The New Right thought that these think tanks—above all, the Institute of Economic Affairs— had incubated during a long sojourn, throughout the fifties and sixties, in the political wilderness, was neither monolithic nor even particularly coherent...

...Sir Samuel Britton, the distinguished economic commentator, is perhaps the most noteworthy among several exceptions...

...The political collapse of the New Right in Britain has many causes, including ones that are highly contingent, such as the adoption of the poll tax (which was one of the occasions of the Tory coup that toppled Thatcher) and the ignorance and hubris that led ephemeral neoliberal ideologues to proclaim in the eighties that "Labor will never rule again...

...The neoliberal project achieved a transitory political hegemony in Britain because of an unrepeatable confluence of circumstances—the bankruptcy of Laborist corporatism, the disintegration of Soviet institutions, the decline of European social democracy, and the trend to ecoFALL • 1995 • 451 Politics Abroad nomic globalization that weakened organized labor...

...In sweeping away the postwar settlement that all major parties endorsed for a generation, Thatcherism demolished the social and economic base on which conservatism in Britain stood and created the conditions for a prolonged period of Labor hegemony...

...The deregulated labor markets engineered by Thatcherism in the eighties undermined in the nineties the job security of the upwardly mobile social group—Essex man and woman—which contained Thatcherism's most electorally significant beneficiaries...

...However, though Oakeshott's thought was an object of reverence in the New Right think tanks, particularly the Center for Policy Studies, it was never an influence on policy—in the way that Hayek's was, say— and, no doubt wisely, he held himself aloof from quotidian politics...

...This is not a form of thought from which illumination or guidance can reasonably be expected...

...Neoliberal Conservative policy in Britain has damaged the ethos of institutions such as the Civil Service and the National Health Service by remodeling them on contractualist and managerialist lines...

...The key neoliberal policy framework of fiscal conservatism and its consequence, the retreat from full employment, were accordingly in place in Britain when Margaret Thatcher came to power...

...And this is a project, little short of revolutionary in its implications, that no form of conservative thought today is willing to contemplate...

...No British or other European conservative thinker has ever supposed that the principle of consumer sovereignty, together with institutions designed to prevent the capture of government by producer interests and a constitution protecting individual rights, could frame an adequate political philosophy...

...The second lesson is that there remains, in Britain at least, no historical space for coherent conservative thought...

...By contrast, the historicism and cultural relativism of British and European conservative thought, the criticisms of commercial society mounted not only by Disraeli but by Adam Smith andAdam Ferguson, by Carlyle and Southey, are absent from New Right political thought...

...The irony is that it is this group that—aside from the various constituencies of the poor that it has become fashionable to lump together under the American category of the underclass—has lost most in the nineties...

...In one of its crowning ironies, the neoliberal project in Britain, which began as a response to failing corporatist institutions, has given rise to new economic institutions, which may be termed the institutions of market corporatism...

...Indeed, the catastrophic performance of the Conservatives in the local council elections of May 1995, in which they suffered their worst electoral rout since the start of the century, suggests that the neoliberal project of permanent institutional revolution may well count its political vehicle, the Conservative party, among its casualties...

...The cost of this modernization, however, has been not only the near-destruction of much of Britain's institutional inheritance, but also the obliteration of that humane postwar liberal conservatism— embodied in such figures as Butler, Boyle, Macleod, and Macmillan—in which Tory paternalist and communitarian traditions were adapted to the conditions of a late modern industrial society...

...It was ignorance of, or perhaps refusal to accept these profound divergences that made the interventions in British public discourse of such American ideologues and publicists as Charles Murray and Michael Novak ill-judged and predictably marginal...

...Even if it were desirable to recreate it—which is more than doubtful—it is now irretrievable...

...For it is now wholly unclear what, if anything, British conservatism can coherently set itself to conserve...

...and its members, along with sitting Tory MPs, will use every means at their disposal to limit the spell in opposition, which they cannot now avert...

...Meeting these human needs— for deep and strong forms of common life, fulfilling work, and a rich public environment—demands re-embedding the market processes that neoliberal policy has emancipated from any kind of political control or accountability in the cultures and communities they exist to serve...

...Neoliberalism in Britain, for these and many other reasons, has proved a self-limiting project...

...It is worth recalling that the earlier Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-1974) had come to power with something akin to a neoliberal agenda, and that it had come to nothing...

...These institutions are not only themselves democratically unaccountable...

...The neoliberal corporate state, in Britain as in any other democratic country, is inherently politically unstable...

...It is difficult to know, however, why Conservative thinkers believe that the leisure of opposition will allow them to address the profound changes in British society that Conservative policies have engendered or reinforced...

...The self-destruction of British conservatism by New Right ideology and policies illustrates a central neoliberal (that is, Thatcherite) theme—the importance of unintended consequences in social, economic, and political life...

...The Heath government was elected on a program of reversing the postwar trend to over-extended government in Britain but it had abandoned this program long before it suffered electoral defeat in February 1974 as a result of its confrontation with the miners...

...In forgetting the truism of conservative philosophy that most human beings are risk-averse creatures, the Tories may have condemned themselves to replicating the fortunes of the Western-inspired economic liberals of the postcommunist countries, who have been swept from office by socialdemocratic parties that grasp this elementary truth...

...Within the British conservative intelligentsia it is not uncommon to fmd a period of opposition welcomed as a respite from power and an occasion for reflective thought...

...I examined the contradictions of neoliberal ideology in the Introduction to my book Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge, 1993...

...It is still too early to attempt a balanced and comprehensive historical assessment of the conflicts of interest and personality, the errors in policy and the complex interactions of closed ideology and human folly with political power that have brought the neoliberal experiment in Britain to a close...

...yet this thin gruel of economism and legalism was all that the political thought of the New Right had to offer...

...In political terms, the most the Conservatives can hope for is to turn impending catastrophe into mere defeat at the next general election...

...Yet, contrary to those on the left—by far the majority—who saw it as a blip on the screen of history, it has transformed irreversibly the social and institutional landscape of Britain...

...The social—and for that matter economic—failures of market fundamentalism are patched up, or at least obscured, by recourse to the atavistic fantasies of cultural fundamentalism...

...It contributed nothing significant to conservative political thought...

...The remaking of the Conservative party in the image of the Republican party cut the Conservatives loose from their moorings in British culture and in the history of their own party...

...Unfettered global market institutions overthrow settled communities everywhere, undermine the stability of families by imposing on their members the imperative of unceasing mobility, and dissolve traditional practices and institutions in a flood of novelty, but neoliberal conservatives are compelled to ascribe these changes to factors other than unchecked market forces...

...Its distance from its own intellectual and political tradition was widened by a further influence—that of the American right...

...In the longer perspective of history this role as a brutal and unconscious agent of modernization— including the modernization, and so the return to electability, of the Labor party—may prove to be Thatcherism's sole historic justification...

...452 • DISSENT...

...That it soon became pro-active in attempting to reshape British society and culture according to the crude abstractions of economic liberalism is to be accounted for by Thatcher's first and most fateful act of privatization—the privatization of policy making, whereby it was removed from the control of the Civil Service and contracted out to right-wing think tanks...

...The halcyon England of the fifties conjured up by Major's nostalgist rhetoric, insofar as it has any semblance of historical reality, was an artifact of the Labor-led postwar settlement that the Conservatives have destroyed...

...3 I do not mean to imply that Popper's and Hayek's thought were at all points convergent, but only that neither of them belonged to a recognizable tradition of British or European conservative thought...

...The enduring human needs that conservative philosophy once acknowledged are not now addressed by conservatives, partly because meeting them entails radical and—for today's conservatives— unwelcome changes in current economic institutions...

...During the first five years of the nineties more FALL • 1995 • 447 Politics Abroad than three hundred thousand homes have been repossessed—an eviction on a scale that is unparalleled in Britain since the highland enclosures of the 1740s...

...The hollowing out of the legitimacy of traditional institutions by economic and cultural changes that neoliberalism has accelerated makes a restorationist or revivalist policy orientation a hopeless dead end—as the farcical flirtation of the Major government with a "Back to Basics" rhetoric of family values showed...

...The pervasive influences on New Right thought in Britain in the seventies and eighties were those of classical liberal rationalism, as that has been revised in our time by such thinkers as Popper and Hayek.' New Right thought in Britain, then, was detached from the larger tradition of European conservative philosophy of which British conservative thought had always been a part...

...If Thatcher's project was the Americanization of Britain, these enduring features of British culture—which attest to its deeper affinities with the cultures of continental Europe—foredoomed it to failure...

...and the Enlightenment faith in world improvement is lacking or qualified—as all ideological claims in Britain are qualified—by an enduring skepticism...

...Thatcher may have had differences with Reagan, over the voodoo economics of self-financing tax cuts and the Strategic FALL • 1995 • 449 Politics Abroad Defense Initiative, for example, but there is no doubt that she harbored the Churchillian fantasy of a transatlanticAnglo- Saxon civilization whose ties, reinforced by conservative hegemony in both countries, would not only renew the "special relationship" but also enable Britain and the United States to follow parallel paths of development, with Britain emulating American individualist market capitalism...

...4 Not all British classical liberals were, or are, opposed to European federalism...

...and its influence on practicing Conservative politicians was slight...

...In Britain, market capitalism has never enjoyed unqualified political legitimacy, being challenged by a powerful socialist culture and accepted by Tories prior to Thatcher only with deep reservations...

...The very economic constituency that gained most from early Thatcherism has been most savaged by its longer-term effects...

...indeed, its policies have only speeded the obsolescence of conservative thought by illuminating its helplessness before the dominant economic forces of the age...

...The virtual absence in the United States of anything comparable with European conservatism, the near-ubiquity inAmerican intellectual culture of individualist, universalist, and Enlightenment themes— the fact, in other words, that in the United States conservative thought is merely a variation on classical liberal themes of limited government, individualism, and economic progress—made the kinship of the British New Right with the American right a matter of elective affinity and not merely of historical accident...

...At the same time, the Quango state built up in the wake of the Thatcherite attack on democratic local government and the Majorite policy of marketizing public services has facilitated the growth of a new class of Tory nomenklaturists, managing vast resources without any democratic accountability...

...Thatcherite policy in the early eighties was reactive in seeking to break up the triangular relations of collusion among employers, unions, and government that sustained the 448 • DISSENT Politics Abroad bankrupt British corporatism of the seventies...

...More decisively, perhaps, for the fate of the neoliberal project, Britain remains a far less individualist society than the United States, with far more negative attitudes to geographical and occupational mobility, for example...

...The neoliberal project—the project of reining back the state, extending the scope of market institutions, and securing for unfettered markets an unchallengeable legitimacy in the public culture— was adopted by the Conservatives during the years between Thatcher's succession to the leadership of the party in 1975 and the Conservative victory in 1979, the same years in which fiscal conservatism was imposed by the IMF on the Callaghan Labor government (1974-1979...

...Margaret Thatcher's principal insight was to perceive that there was, in Britain in 1979, an economic constituency for union-bashing, budget-cutting, lowtax policies—a constituency whose very existence was denied by the patrician Tory "wets," but which she made electorally decisive from the early eighties onwards...

...Conservative thought, in this new historical circumstance, is likely to be a mixture of fashionable techno-utopianism—such as the proposition, recently seriously advanced, that the virtual communities of the Internet can replace the local communities that free markets have desolated— and opportunistic fundamentalism...

...The sharp critique of the Enlightenment developed by many conservative thinkers, even Burke, is similarly lacking...

...The dissolution of the postwar settlement was under way well before Thatcher's coming to power in 1979.' Unlike corporatist institutions in Germany and Austria, which acted as pacemakers for wealth creation and guarantors of social peace, British corporatism in the sixties and seventies had produced economic stagnation, industrial and social conflict, and a fiscal crisis of the state that triggered the intervention of the International Monetary Fund (IMF...

...Only by invoking a conspiratorial elite of liberal intellectuals can the conservative intelligentsia explain to itself why—after sixteen years of neoliberal hegemony—the ordinary people it claims to speak for in Britain show every sign of consigning the Conservative party to electoral oblivion...

...It was, however, the defeat of the Heath government by the miners that most shaped the early stages of Thatcherite policy...

...If it has signally failed to secure the legitimacy of unfettered market institutions in Britain, it nevertheless has one achievement, unintended and doubtless still uncomprehended by its authors, to its credit: the destruction of Tory England...

...and the relationship of the British people to the British state remains one of wary trust rather than of suspicion or enmity...

...Either outcome spells displacement for the Tory nomenldatura that staffs the institutions of the Quango state...

...The first phase of the neoliberal project in the early eighties was not an attack on the welfare state, nor the marketization of major social institutions, but instead the abandonment of full employment as a policy objective and the development of a stable framework of public finance— both policies that diminished the power of organized labor in Britain, and both of them expressing the anticorporatist orientation of early Thatcherism...

...To be sure, if history is any guide, the Conservative party will somehow renew itself, in the normal fortunes of political life in a twopartysystem...

...The most distinctive features of New Right ideology in Britain in the seventies and eighties— its use of an abstract and rationalistic conception of homo economicus, its doctrinaire pursuit of a general theory of minimal government, its individualist and legalist conception of contractual relationships as the basis of economic and social order and its utopian preoccupation with constitutional devices—are all symptomatic of its roots in classical liberalism...

...As for Tory England—that rich network of interlocking interests, social deferences, and inherited institutions that Tory statecraft has successfully protected for over a century and a half by its skillful adaptation to democratic institutions in Britain—it is now as good as dead...

...religion is weak and society substantially post-Christian...

...Even if, in the normal fortunes of political life in Britain, the Conservative party is somehow able to renew itself, it will be in a form that cannot currently be foreseen...