National Conservatism - experiments in hope?

Bold new ideas are fermenting which will probably determine the course of conservative thought for the rest of this century.

As befits the celebration of an eighteenth century movement the National Conservatism conference has witnessed barracking, censure and popular agitation. There is raucousness both in the temper of the speeches and the strident interventions wholly appropriate to the polemical tone of Regency debate.

At stake is a vision of Britain, or perhaps England, that has been a vexing puzzle for a government with seemingly limitless reforming potential: a huge majority, cross-class endorsement and a mandate to perform Brexit, the most momentous constitutional realignment this century.

Somehow the ligament connecting popular mandate and the administrative state has become badly atrophied and has left the energies causing the 2016 referendum result ominously displaced.

As the technocratic centre has reasserted dominance after a period of insurgency, the visionaries and activists who dominated the Leave campaign have been side-lined, constrained by a relentless party management system and the eclipse of Johnson and Truss. The formal structures of power are ever less open to their rhetoric or ideals.

Therefore the irruption into right-wing discourse of this conference is timely and illuminating.

Run in collaboration with the Edward Burke Foundation, the conference is the latest in a series of events spanning Europe and America in the last few years. This London edition is distinctive because of Britain’s reputation for continuity and consensus. It is an encounter between an emerging force and an entrenched establishment.

Rapidly it becomes apparent where the balance lies as the posting of influencers and the dissident traditionalism of the speakers elicit shudders from conventional authorities (Rishi Sunak has publicly distanced himself from at least one guest).

Even the intermittent drawl of a patrician accent cannot disguise the realization that conservatism as an organized resistance to contemporary values is now outside the mainstream of British public life.

The dividend of custom and instinct, which animated the conservative tendency in the absence of more developed theories, has finally been exhausted - there is no longer a coherent narrative which people can reflexively belong to.

When John Major evoked an idyll of spinsters cycling to evensong and warm beer enjoyed to the rhythmic thud of a cricket bat in the early 1990s he wasn’t describing England as it was but as synecdoche for a shared illusion. In a slightly crude way it was an illustration of a country whose core identity could be contained in symbols of peace, leisure and a gentle eternity. This is now a failed metaphor.

Church going, military pride, village communities, even pubs are all disappearing as witnesses to a common past.

Into this absence bold new ideas are fermenting which will probably determine the course of conservative thought for the rest of this century.

Yoram Hazony, a major architect of the movement - he may yet become a household name - has an apology for the nation state that has a become a template for many commentators on the platform. Hazony circumvents liberal defences of the state in favour of more biblical archetypes, citing Israel in particular as a model to emulate.

His teleology, that Protestant nations allowed ‘national laboratories for developing and testing the institutions we now associate with the West’ is both invigorating and contentious (The Republic of Venice and Commonwealth of Poland are obvious challenges to this theory).

Nonetheless it provides a dynamic counter to both the EU and corporate internationalism which it critiques.

Crucial to his understanding of liberalism is the sense of rootlessness he perceives in supranational structures. His championing of civic obligation and the return of national service are emblematic of his thought.

Such a bracing rebuke to individualism has led to interesting new developments in the historiography of English political theory as deeper roots are sought to crystallise this sense of exceptionalism.

Both Hazony and David Starkey have drawn on the writings of John Fortescue, a fifteenth century jurist, who tried to design legal mechanisms to stall the carnage of the War of the Roses. His doctrine of mixed monarchy is seen as an early amplification of the prerogatives of representative government and the boundaries of kingship.

Finding legitimacy further back than the eighteenth century is stimulating but it poses risks, not least that medieval innovations lend only dubious support to the Act of Union of 1707. If Britain as an organic whole is be protected against emergent nationalism, further work is necessary to find an accommodation.

Predictably the conference has been misunderstood by much of the media as a sinister parade of identikit reactionaries.

In fact the event is remarkable for its diversity and breadth, with a creative dissonance rather than a united agenda.

Few will agree with every view expressed but for those of us who value uninhibited the expression of ideas and the process of debate there is much to appreciate.