The Conservative party has abandoned its commitment to true conservation
What has the Conservative Party conserved, in recent memory? Does it even acknowledge that its name should also be a job description? How much – if any – of its instinct for preserving the traditional, the venerable and the beautiful does it retain? Do Tory MPs remember what they are supposed to be for – to restrain the reckless neophiliac passions of radicals? How many of them, in their inner hearts, still subscribe to the axiom that when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change?
The Tories are facing a huge identity crisis and they do not have much time to resolve it. There is unrest in the Shire, where the Hobbits who have long lent their allegiance to This Great Party of Ours are beginning to ask themselves if that has become a masochistic exercise. A scythe of devastation is threatening their habitat and it is being wielded by Tory hands.
Recent media headlines have highlighted the plight of one community: the medieval village of Tudeley in Kent, whose population is up in arms against a proposal to build more than 5,000 houses in the vicinity, destroying 600 acres of green-belt land, including ancient woodland. This development would represent a 500 per cent increase in housing. The consequences for the environment, the character of an ancient village and its inhabitants would be appalling.
This atrocity is being perpetrated under a Conservative government. Why? Well, it’s a matter of reasserting Margaret Thatcher’s property-owning democracy… Harold Macmillan built 300,000 houses a year and Boris is determined to do the same… We must meet the aspirations of Red Wall voters… We can’t let a bunch of NIMBYs hold back progress…
As it happens, the people of Tudeley have been at pains to demonstrate they are not NIMBYs, by identifying several brownfield sites nearby suitable for housing. They do not seem to have persuaded Tory-controlled Tunbridge Wells borough council to change its mind. Political revenge is in the air: the local Conservative councillor has already been ejected in favour of a Liberal Democrat. A senior Conservative was quoted as saying of the Tudeley proposals: “It’s one of those moments when you say to yourself – what the hell is the point of being a Tory if you can’t protect this?”
What indeed? If Tudeley were an isolated case, that question might remain academic; but the whole of England is under threat, thanks to the Planning Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech last May, widely expected to declare open season on the Green Belt. Meanwhile, the white elephant that is HS2 is ploughing its way destructively through beauty spots, family farms and wildlife habitats, with the purpose of delivering business passengers to Birmingham 20 minutes earlier, in the post-pandemic Zoom and WFH era, at a cost of more than £100bn.
So unnecessary is any major encroachment upon the Green Belt, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Tories are trampling it down as a virtue-signalling exercise to gratify Red Wall voters. But how many deprived northerners are going to migrate to live in Tudeley, in Kent? The Red Wall has nothing to do with the ravaging of southern England, though the false impression that Boris is adopting a scorched-earth policy in the shires to secure northern votes is calculated to provoke a murderous electoral backlash in constituencies that have been Tory-held since the Domesday Book was compiled.
Yet it is all completely unnecessary. England’s entire requirement of land for housebuilding could be supplied exclusively from brownfield sites for the next four years, which means beyond the next general election. Last October, a report from the CPRE (The Countryside Charity – formerly the Campaign to Protect Rural England) revealed there is enough brownfield land available to accommodate 1.3 million housing units.
All of this land is available and suitable, and there is already planning permission for 565,564 units – representing two years of the Government’s proposed housebuilding schedule. Those figures show that the planning system, so far from holding back construction, is running ahead of it. That demonstrable fact totally discredits the supposed rationale behind the Planning Bill. This legislation would instruct councils to classify their land under three categories: growth, protection or renewal. In areas arbitrarily categorised as “growth”, planning restrictions will effectively be abolished.
It is – to the point of caricature – the ultimate big-government, statist aggression against the rights of local communities. The only rational explanation for it is that Boris feels remorse at having terminated Jeremy Corbyn’s career and, in reparation, is passing a tribute statute to his defeated Marxist opponent. If the Planning Bill matures into a statute and peppers England with hundreds of vandalised Tudeleys, it should more accurately be entitled the Conservative Party Self-Harm Act 2021.
The Conservatives, in a fit of ideological schizophrenia as irrational as it is unprincipled, are behaving like an incongruous amalgam of socialist control freaks and developer-friendly rogue Thatcherites of the Leslie Titmuss and Alan B’stard genre. Leaving aside the ethical issues, how is it possible for a political party, especially a governing party, to implode into such philosophical nihilism?
Where is Edmund Burke’s sympathy and respect for the little platoons? Where is the principle of subsidiarity that underpins all traditional European conservatism? Where, above all, is that instinct, innate in the DNA of Toryism, to preserve what is worthy and beautiful – as epitomised by an unspoilt medieval village? The Conservative leadership and parliamentary party have lost touch with their roots, their purpose, their identity. They have literally lost the plot.
Philosophical incoherence descended upon the Conservative Party from the departure of Margaret Thatcher. While her term of office had given preponderant weight to the free-market aspects of Conservatism, amounting to a neo-Peelite renaissance, that was justified on pragmatic grounds by the excessive advances made by the intruder state under previous Labour governments. Traditional Disraelian Toryism had become discredited by the Labour-lite accommodation of Harold Macmillan with post-War interventionist ideology.
Post-Thatcher, Conservatism floundered in the wilderness of opposition, a hostile environment for a natural party of government, and a coherent and principled philosophy was displaced by a fatuous deference to focus groups. Within a decade the party had lost all connection with its philosophy. Nothing more vividly demonstrated that reality than the premiership of David Cameron, who presumed to redefine the principal building block of society – marriage – without the support of a majority of his party, and to divert the succession to the throne as drastically as in 1688, without a royal commission or manifesto commitment, on the back of an envelope.
The perverse message this conveyed was: vote Conservative for more radical change than you would expect from Labour. New-minted Conservative MPs arriving at Westminster described their ambitions in the inane phrase: “to make a difference”. It is not the purpose of Conservatives to make a difference: it is to defend the status quo when it is not damaging the public interest and to prevent other radical spirits from making a difference. Cameron paid the price of his hubris: although the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was overwhelmingly motivated by sovereignty and immigration concerns, it was salted with a piquant desire to pay back “Dave”.
Finally, Boris appeared to give back purpose to the Tories: to get Brexit done. On that manifesto, Labour’s Red Wall crumbled. That presented the Conservatives with an historic opportunity to revive Disraeli’s One Nation Toryism. But it is all going horribly wrong. A legitimate increase in public spending to meet the terrifying exigencies in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic has degenerated into a debauched instinct for massive spending and an attachment to big government.
Most fatally, the Conservatives have allowed a zero-sum interpretation of their electoral strategy to gain currency whereby any improvement in the interests of former Red Wall constituencies is falsely interpreted as disadvantageous to Blue Wall areas. There is no need for that to be the case at all, but heavy-handed Tory intervention in sensitive planning issues – in both the north and the south – is fuelling disaffection in their core strongholds. That is potentially lethal to the Conservatives.
Perversely, the Conservatives are abandoning their commitment to true conservation, to maintaining the cultural heritage of rural England, while simultaneously promoting the punitive agenda of climate fanatics by committing to unaffordable “Net Zero” masochism, increasing fuel bills to life-threatening levels for the elderly and impoverishing households by imposing gas-boiler fascism. Have they grown tired of being in office?
With the hubris born of an 80-seat majority, Conservative MPs tell themselves all these spats will be forgotten by the next general election. That is exactly what their predecessors told themselves after Black Wednesday in 1992, only to be unseated by the enduring resentment in 1997. Hostility towards the government, among its formerly strongest supporters, is reaching pandemic proportions; if the Chesham and Amersham variant continues to mutate, the resultant lock-out may see Tory MPs spending more time with their families.
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