Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield and Joseph Silke speak with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury about COVID-19 and what it means to be a conservative in modern Britain.
Who are the people who have most influenced your political philosophy?
I’d have to choose Michael Oakeshott, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, since I have written so much about them, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. The joy of political philosophy is that it continues to be a very lively area of debate and thought. I’ve just written a piece for Prospect Magazine on John Rawls and his book A Theory of Justice, which presents a remarkably useful and prescient set of philosophical tools for thinking about where we are now with COVID-19.
You’ve said that people often ask you ‘What happened to the big society?’. In your view, has the pandemic begun a revival of the ‘big society’?
That depends on how you interpret the phrase ‘big society’ — a set of ideas, a set of activities or a political programme? Considering those three, the ‘big society’ was in part an attempt to describe what was distinctive about British social and political life, with its astonishing abundance of independent institutions sitting between the individual and the state. As a political programme, much of Conservative policy between 2010 and 2015 — free schools, the returning of powers to local authorities, National Citizen Service, attempts made to devolve powers back to cities — can be brought under the ‘big society’ label. Though the Cameron Government pursued these policies it didn’t brand them together coherently as part of the ‘big society’. This meant that the ‘big society’ was vulnerable to charges that it was actually about philanthropy and volunteering, but it was about so much more than that. The institutions in Britain that make up the ‘big society ‘remain vigorous and energised. We have an astonishing record of setting up independent institutions, both inside and outside the public sector.
The extent of the expansion of the role of the state during the pandemic is something that a lot of conservatives feel deeply uncomfortable about. How easy will it be to roll back this expansion?
There have been two broad extensions of the state in response to the pandemic. First, through the spending on programmes designed to address effects of COVID-19. Second, via lockdown. People have different reactions to these expansions, they may welcome extra support from government, or worry about the longer term financial implications of that support; they may welcome lockdown as a way of suppressing the virus, or worry that it is a suppression of individual liberty. There are colleagues across the House of Commons who fall into one or more of these four categories.