Nationalism and the Conservative Basics

Opportunities to take stock are rare in the world of politics—and rarer still for the party in government. The weight of power can blind us to the need to see the bigger picture, re-evaluate priorities, and check to see if the damned thing—whatever it is—is actually working. This summer, conservatism in the United Kingdom had just such an opportunity at a three-day festival of ideas styling itself the National Conservatism conference.

The event rallied a broad spectrum of the British Centre-Right (as well as a few fellow travellers from the Left) including cabinet ministers past and present, backbenchers, journalists, academics, commentators, philosophers, theologians, has-beens, not-yets, currently ares, and people who just love their country and want to see it flourish.

What the conference was meant to do, what it actually did, how it didn’t work, and how it did work, are four things worth exploring. The event is the latest in a series of conferences which have been the brainchild of the Israeli-American academic Yoram Hazony, organised under the auspices of the Netherlands-based Edmund Burke Foundation. The first conference was held in Rome in 2020, Brussels the following year, and Florida in 2022. This year was Britain’s turn.

Hazony’s stated purpose is to re-instil national thinking into a political conservatism that has become too liberalised and separated from what he contends is a biblical approach to the nation-state as a free people governing itself and in charge of its own affairs. He opened the conference, saying that the past few decades have seen Europe and the English-speaking world flooded with the idea that it’s perfectly fine and normal for the political Right to preach individualism alienated from family, traditions and borders. “It’s a dead end,” Hazony argues. “It’s ruining Western nations and it’s brought us to cultural revolution.”

The antidote Hazony offers is to rediscover the national idea afresh, to assert the priority of a people as such, defend the interests of the nation, and advance them. “To the extent that Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for just this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all,” Hazony wrote in his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery. “Indeed, in our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys every­thing in its path.”

While Hazony praises the particularism of nationhood, it is the particular nature of the United Kingdom which makes his brand of National Conservatism so difficult to plant in our soil. Only the shallowest of observers might mistake the UK for a nation-state. The UK has always been a multi-national entity. Even old England itself included Wales, then achieved a formal union with Scotland in 1707, preserving the northern realm’s separate legal system and Calvinist national church, before including Ireland in 1801 and finally partition in 1921. Arguably the United Kingdom is the most successful multi-national state in history—and it is worth wondering whether its centuries-old multi-national comfort with difference might be one of the reasons why Britain has been more successful at integrating newcomers than other European countries.

Attempts to revive the term “nationalism” fall flat here as it is already present and used to represent radically different concepts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. If Hazony is right to recognise the particularity and difference of peoples, then any truly “national”—in the sense of UK-wide—conservatism must be a unionist conservatism, not a “nationalist” one.

Even Hazony’s own Israel, undoubtedly a Jewish state by purpose, dedication and population, contains a large Arab Muslim minority in the state proper, not to mention in the neighbouring Gaza Strip and West Bank over which Israel exerts varying and sometimes confusing levels of suzerainty.

These important caveats aside, the National Conservatism conference proved a valuable opportunity for the British Centre-Right, national or otherwise, to talk to one another in a way that had not taken place before. As Isabel Hardman wrote for the Spectator, one of the reasons the Nat Con event was “making waves” is “because it appears to be a genuine conference rather than a stage performance”.

But as Hardman elaborated further, the problem for the Conservative party is that a stage performance is more the sort of thing a party attempting to win a historic fifth term at the next general election should be aiming for—rather than a debate on the nature of conservatism and Conservatism. Discussions of this type are more usually the fruit of time in opposition, and there is a strange feeling that opposition has already set in, as if the current Conservative government is just a managerial caretaker for a coming Labour government under Sir Keir Starmer.

As a case in point, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman MP, gave a beautiful exposition of the value of conservatism in her own life and dealt with interrupting hecklers with a breezy charm. But her criticisms that we should be training British workers to pick fruit rather than granting visas for foreigners to do it rings hollow when you remember that the person responsible for granting those visas is, in fact, Suella Braverman.

While liberal voices, whether of the Left or Right, can always be found extolling the virtues of open borders, there has been a consensus amongst little-c conservatives that continued mass immigration is unwise, unwelcome and totally lacking any democratic mandate. The folly of adding hundreds of thousands of legal new immigrants (on top of the illegal ones) while building no new houses and precious little infrastructure should be obvious, yet migration figures under Braverman have set new records. (Admittedly, these figures include large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, whose arrival has been welcomed without controversy across the political spectrum.)

At the conference, panel sessions examined national identity and culture, the “biopolitics” of plummeting birthrates and delayed (or denied) family formation, foreign policy, the economics of national belonging, history and heritage, and God and country. The range of speakers was as broad as the topics covered. Thatcherite libertarians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and the former MEP Lord Hannan were present, but so were rooted Labourites like Sebastian Milbank.

Miriam Cates MP opened the conference with a robust speech pointing out that liberalism and globalism had failed to deliver a strong economy, robust national security, successful industrial policy, or a cohesive national story. Cates’s focus set the tone for the whole conference.

“I don’t care if you’re a Red Tory, a communitarian, a follower of Burke, or—heaven forbid—a libertarian free marketeer,” the first-term MP said. “None of these traditions has a future, none of our philosophical musings or policy proposals will amount to anything long-lasting unless we address the one overarching threat to British conservatism and indeed the whole of Western society … There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies.”

In the 1960s, British women had an average of 2.6 children each, which has now collapsed to 1.6. Last year for the first time ever, half of women reached their thirtieth birthday without having had a child. “There simply is no future if we do not reverse this trend,” Cates argued.

Cates’s intellectual comrade on the Tory benches, Danny Kruger MP, also spoke at Nat Con. The senior editor at First Things, Dan Hitchens, summed Kruger up best as “one of those mysterious examples, still never fully explained or investigated, of a serious political thinker who has managed to break into the House of Commons”. Kruger condemned market liberalism for eating up the very social institutions on which functioning markets depend and praised the normative family as the basic unit of any functioning society.

Kruger’s speech produced much pearl-clutching among the establishment liberal commentariat, whose reaction to the conference in general was less than intellectually astute. The website—formerly a newspaper—called the Independent bemoaned “the ultra-conservative Americans infiltrating the Tory party”. John Burn-Murdoch (that’s his surname, not necessarily his politics) of the Financial Times said “a group of hardline US conservatives” had brought the conference to London but that “it fell completely flat”. Why? Because Britain and America are completely different societies, Burn-Murdoch pointed out.

Well, obviously. But it’s no secret that the accelerating pace of cultural revolution in Great Britain is a phenomenon of American origin. Unlike the members of Britain’s media class, Nat Con attendees are people who are concerned for their own country and wary of overbearing American influence in their society.

British commentators on the whole slotted the conference into a pre-existing America-based narrative. Obsessed with the US and its bi-coastal culture, incapable of drawing their gaze away from this bright, shiny, alluring object that is the US, British commentators rely on drawing false parallels, treating everything American as the norm. According to this model, all other English-speaking countries are just aberrant versions of the United States.

Burn-Murdoch couldn’t help but interpret events in his own country as some extension of a sinister American plot—the kind his confreres across the seas at the New York Times and Washington Post would be roundly condemning as well—rather than as people whose politics he happens not to share coming together to try and figure out solutions to the country’s obvious difficulties.

Indeed the United Kingdom is not the United States. It lacks America’s advantageous dynamism as well as the specific deep-seated problems sadly rooted in American society. Britain’s problems simply aren’t America’s problems, nor the other way round, but the Left—both soft and hard—import divisive American narratives into the discourse while accusing British conservatives of wanting to open up an American-style culture war.

The deputy chairman of the Conservative party, Lee Anderson MP, pleaded for the preservation of the “Red Wall” realignment, relaying his own journey from serving as a Labour councillor in working-class Nottinghamshire to becoming a Tory MP. The conference organisers have wisely favoured transparency over discretion, and the contributions offered by the speakers are available on their YouTube channel.

“Why are so many people in Britain today so utterly disillusioned and despondent at the state of the country?” Professor Matthew Goodwin asked those who gathered at the conference. “Why do so many of us walk around with a palpable sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong, as though we are trapped in a car with the doors locked being driven to some nightmarish destination?”

Say what you will about Stasi-enforced East German communism (this is me speaking now, not Professor Goodwin) but you could get married and have kids. The obvious inhumanity of that regime led brave people to risk their lives escaping it. Many of them died in the attempt. For the majority who remained, there were few alternatives to grim and soul-destroying passive conformity to or active collaboration with the evil that ruled over them. The chemical and surgical mutilation of children being promoted in Britain today has a precedent in the revolting drugging regimen East Germany’s sporting tsars imposed on their own athletes to secure Olympic prestige. Both have resulted in irreparable damage and broken lives.

In hindsight, it’s now easy to view the comfortable dualism of the Cold War with a sense of nostalgia. Just swim the river at night, hide in a Westerner’s car boot, get over the Wall somehow and freedom is at hand. East Germans were used to turning their antennae westwards, risking official opprobrium to watch West German news broadcasts and entertainments. As Dresden sat in an area that West German television masts couldn’t reach, Easterners snidely referred to the area surrounding the city as the “Valley of the Clueless”.

For British people today, there is no comfortable or inspiring alternative vision. We cannot smugly mock the Valley of the Clueless, because it is our entire country. There are no broadcasts from further west to turn our antennae towards, as the East Germans did. If anything, some states further east like Poland and Hungary are at least making some attempt to get to grips with existential problems similar to ours. Whether their models and experience will prove fruitful remains to be seen and is worth exploring.

Social conservatism in Britain is transforming. Gone are the issue-specific causes like criticising same-sex civil marriage or condemning social liberality in popular culture. As the participants in the National Conservatism conference showed, today’s social conservatives are broad-based and hail from a wide variety of backgrounds. Often they have seen the impact of social liberalism’s destructive power in their own lives, families and friend circles. What they are rallying to defend now are not single issues but the very building blocks of any society: the ability to fall in love, form lifelong unions, work for decent pay, and to have a house and raise children in a safe environment.

If conservatives are often chided for being too focused on the past—usually, critics add, a non-existent past—it was noteworthy on how focused the speakers and attenders were on the future. A third of those at the conference were under the age of thirty. Tom Jones, a young Conservative local councillor in North Yorkshire who attended the conference, said in his commentary on it for the Critic that the British conservatism of the future “has to begin by setting out a plan of how to rebuild the foundations. That means the basics: energy, facilities, housing, reliable transport.”

There is no “National Conservatism movement” in the United Kingdom, nor will there be. But whatever its organisers’ intent, the conference did offer a chance for the Centre-Right in this country to speak openly and candidly about what the problems are and what potential solutions exist in a forum absent of leftist or liberal presumptions. There was precious little intellectual posturing, but also a lack of consensus about the way forward.

The preponderance of speakers presumed that no solution is possible without having the levers of state power. After thirteen years of Conservative government, and with the presumption that a general election will take place no later than November of next year, this conference has at least proved that there is still much life in the wide family of British conservatism, but that the total inability to translate that into the exercise of power remains a quandary to be solved.

Andrew Cusack reported on the Coronation in the June issue.