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.
Do you think taxes might have to rise in the future because of the state spending during COVID-19?
Thank you for inviting me to comment on tax policy outside a fiscal event, I’m not going to do that — but nice try! Across the House of Commons it’s well understood that the level of expenditure we have undertaken with schemes designed to combat the effects of the pandemic cannot continue indefinitely. We will have to move to more selective interventions and support, and ultimately, the bill will have to be paid. We hope that the economy will return to a trend of solid growth and that tax revenues will recover as part of that.
The Conservative Party has been able to survive and thrive for so long, in part because of its ability to evolve with the times and keep its values in step with modern sensibilities. This begs the question, however: what are conservative values today?
People often misunderstand the nature of conservatism. Conservatism is an intrinsically evolutionary idea — it aims to keep the good stuff we have inherited while improving it and passing it on to the next generation. It contrasts with a reactionary position which wants nothing to change and a revolutionary position which wants everything to change immediately. The difficulty with the reactionary position is that no new, good things are absorbed or adopted, so what you are preserving gradually becomes less and less relevant to the circumstances people live in. The difficulty with the revolutionary position is that human beings are remarkably bad at making radical decisions that prove to be wise in the long term. Conservatism also means acknowledging that institutions are wiser than individuals. You could look at many institutions and call them relics of a bygone era, or you could see them for what they are, the product of innumerable compromises that contain a great deal of knowledge and wisdom. That we may fail to understand this is often due to our own limited understanding. When this approach is taken, it becomes obvious that radical change is profoundly foolish and that conservatism itself is a set of ideas that is reconciled to the reality of intelligent reform.
In 2019, the Conservative Party achieved success across socioeconomic lines. Can the Conservatives maintain a viable voter coalition, keeping ‘Red Wall’ voters happy whilst retaining voters in the South East and the support of the City of London? What shared values hold these places together?
Voter coalitions are inevitable in party politics. Many of those who voted for the Conservatives in 2019 did so because they were profoundly disenchanted with the other parties. Voters either felt they had been disingenuous in the case of the Liberal Democrats, or that they were not credible and the product of remote and elite disputes in the case of Labour. What has been fascinating is that the Conservative Party was able to draw many votes from seats which had not voted Conservative in living memory. The challenge now is to articulate a set of conservative values that encode all the good stuff the party has historically stood for, such as the family, financial soundness and the defence of the nation state, but in addition contains specific elements that acknowledge the concerns that voters had during the last election, such as completing the process of leaving the EU and ‘levelling up’ to spread prosperity and make the UK’s economic growth fully nationwide.
Within the Conservative Party there is a growing conflict between liberals and libertarians who emphasise freedom of choice and opportunity, and communitarians who emphasise civic life and interdependence. What do you think the outcome of that conflict will be?
I don’t see the argument in the way you do. Conservatism is about the freedom to live one’s life effectively and well, within a society that benefits from the rule of law, institutions, and shared anchor points of civic life such as the family or even the pub. Often the libertarian view doesn’t especially care about those things. The libertarian view is focused on the individual and removing the fetters from individuals. It’s often confused with conservatism more widely because it is associated with American conservatism, but in terms of the British tradition I’m discussing, the conservative story is about individual aspiration as enabled by society. Of course there will always be those who will be more concerned about the authority of existing institutions, and those more concerned about personal liberties. That argument has played itself out within conservative thought for hundreds of years and I don’t think anything much is going to change there.
During the early months of the pandemic, it felt as if the country was coming together after a protracted period of division over Brexit, but these divisions are resurfacing. Are they here to stay?
It’s inevitable that societies go through phases of reaction to a shock. When a shock looks like it’s clobbering a nation, there will be tremendous fellow feeling and a collective desire to resist. That is true in wartime and it has been true during the pandemic, but over a period of time people’s feelings about the threat evolve. They may feel others are doing better unfairly, that there is no longer a crisis, or that the end is in sight. If we were threatened by an existential crisis in a war, after the initial shock, there would be equally vigorous debate about how to deal with the consequences and come out the other side. Social media serves to magnify this.
You have said that you avoid negative campaigning and that politics is dying for lack of friendliness, warmth, and decency. Do you think that this Westminster problem is symbolic of a wider social malaise?
I decided many years ago not to engage in negative campaigning — I hate it and I’m useless at being rude about anyone. I might say that their ideas are hopeless or positively counterproductive, but I’m not going to be rude. The counter-argument commonly made is that negative campaigning may be painful to you, but hurts the other person more. My own view is that the British electorate is collectively extraordinarily wise and very rarely, if ever, makes mistakes in general elections. For these reasons, synthetic indignation and aggression contribute to the debasement of political life, but are unlikely to make much headway politically. My own Hereford and South Herefordshire constituency is one in which people are incredibly well grounded and community focused. We had trailed for 13 years before 2010, but we have been able to build up a majority there over time since then by tackling local issues, trying to do good things and reaching across political lines.
What do you think of Keir Starmer’s attempt to revive a sense of traditional patriotism within the Labour Party; is he taking the party in the right direction?
Of course there are people of a conservative disposition who vote Labour — there’s a Blue Labour movement led by Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman. Many have suggested that a failure to recognise a deep conservatism among many Labour voters is one of the things that doomed Mr Corbyn. When people saw an opposition leader who didn’t respect The Queen, who did not feel a sense of pride in his country or its armed forces, who was not rooting out anti-Semitism, they reacted against him and voted Conservative. I hope that the Conservative Party can continue to reach out to those people.
And, finally, is your current boss at the Treasury going to be the next Prime Minister?
What I love about your questions is that I never see them coming! Needless to say, I have no idea, but it is an enormous pleasure to work with Rishi and see him in action. The Conservative Party is blessed with many people of great talent who would potentially make a great leader. That’s a good thing because we want to generate conversation, a debate in or out of the Government that draws on and recruits as many principled, thoughtful and energetic people as possible.