Conjure up images of the good, and if you are anything like me, your mind will offer tropes as diverse as charity workers, saints, nurses, and Feargal Sharkey singing about love back in 1985.
Unless you are a particularly passionate believer in the political process, I suspect few politicians will feature in your mental parade of the morally pure.
However, some Conservatives are worried they are not thought of as good. That is why Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare have launched The Good Right, an attempt to reassert the moral basis of conservatism.
This raises two questions. First, can ‘goodness’ really be a political quality attached more to one democratic political movement than another? Second, if it can, should it be attempted?
The left certainly tends to believe the first is possible. There exists among us a persistent tendency to see our motivating principles as more noble, more pure, than that of our political opponents.
In creating the ‘good society’ we attribute to ourselves the inherent quality of the society we seek. Justice for all, fairness, equity, compassion, tolerance, these are moral, as well as political objectives. At its best, such a focus on motivating values can help reformers paint an inspiring picture of a better world. Less attractively, such self-regard can appear as pompous sanctimony that ticks off others motes, while studiously ignoring any moral beams. The Labour party can sometimes appear insufferably pleased with its own noble purpose.
Worse yet, speaking of fundamental values can lead you down the moral rabbit-hole of ends justifying means. Read the Stalin constitution of the old Soviet Union, and you find the principle, ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’. Many old radicals would have found such an assertion abominable if made by a top-hatted plutocrat, yet accepted such casual cruelty as a vital part of building the socialist utopia.
Asserting your own goodness is perhaps less valuable a project than our Conservative friends might believe. That said, the urge to be seen as morally justified is understandable when conservatives feel the opprobrium of being thought, if not quite evil, then certainly rather more unpleasant than strictly necessary. This was a self-inflicted wound. It was not Labour condemnation that made the Tories appear nasty, it was the Tories’ desperate glee in their own severity in their last, decaying years.
Still, when not trying to paint themselves harshly, here is the crucial request Conservatives can rightly make of those who oppose them. We should accept that our opponents are well intentioned, if perhaps misguided. If they choose to portray themselves as hatchet faced scrooges, that is their unforced error, not our prejudice.
This would have the useful effect of stopping our own tendency to congratulate ourselves on our wonderful values, while neglecting exactly how good we are at translating such into practical action.
Accepting that, on the whole, Conservatives are no more likely to enter into politics out of malign intent than we are also grants us the chance to make a better critique of their claims. We can stop worrying whether they are good and start wondering if they make any sense. As competence and practicality are the values Conservative voters tend to prize, unpicking this is probably more fruitful than abusing their moral scruples.
Take the text the Good Right suggests as ‘the greatest statement of conservatism’, the Twelve Cannots of William Boeckter. Here is Cannot Number Two: ‘You cannot help strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.’ Yet flip over to their 12 points and there, also at number two, is ‘Higher taxes on expensive properties and luxury goods, lower taxes on the unwaged’. This seems to convert Boeckter’s ‘cannot’ into a ‘probably should, now I come to think of it’.
Looked at like this, the Good Right agenda appears less grand statement of moral purpose than a voter pleasing wish list: here are some houses; here are tax cuts for the many, paid for the few. (Boeckter coughs, reminds Tim and Stephan that ‘you cannot help little men by tearing down big men’, and is told to shush). Is there anything particularly moral about a state that invests more in infrastructure, science and long-term research? I do not know, but I would like to see how that spending commitment impacts the next spending review.
I do not complain about the swift move from moral rearmament to goodies for all. It is rather nice to see Conservatives work out that democratic politics requires an appeal to a large wedge of the populace, and that the state can be a powerful force in delivering a fairer society, as it reinforces my prejudice that the best of modern conservatism is essentially social democracy for slow learners.
Are conservatives good? I tend to think they generally are, and even if they are not, it seems presumptuous to declare they are any worse than I am. But good or not, the interaction between founding philosophy and socially equitable policy still does not seem particularly coherent and this where modern conservatism is still, thankfully, weak.
Old or new, their best ideas are borrowed, not blue.
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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress. He tweets @HopiSen