Reading Conservatism in Crisis
Losing its place as a party of capital, are the Tories obsessed with hauntologies or are they busy preparing a Conservative politics of the present?
Perhaps a boring leadership election is a positive one as far as the Conservatives are concerned, but this race exhibited a Tory Party which has barely processed its collective defeat. This is certainly the view of the new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch.
I took a loss so you didn’t have to, and read the Renewal 2030 campaign’s Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class, introduced by Badenoch and eventually to be published as a book. It was tedious, poorly written and full of bloc repetition throughout the text. Yet, it offers the most clearsighted glimpse of the new Tory leadership’s Weltanschauung. As far as the Badenoch team are concerned, the key problem in global politics is the rise of a “new progressive ideology”, characterised by “twin pillars”: this ideology first prioritises the protection of “marginalised, vulnerable groups” and second preaches the “idea that bureaucrats make even better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states”. It is this ideology which has produced “identity politics”, attacks the nation state and enables ever-greater state spending and regulation. It is an ideology of a “new left”, dominated not by trade unions and calls for nationalisation, but instead by a new bureaucratic class of people located in the administration of government rules and the higher echelons of the private sector.
The rise of this bureaucratic class has been consolidated by the expansion of Higher Education and the growth of compliance and regulatory bodies such as Human Resources departments. As the report argues:
“If you work in a job where you are largely about protecting people in some sense, if your role is derived from the sprawling mass of government regulation, then you will tend to lean toward more government. The economic drivers of the bureaucratic class are related to more government, not less government.”
The report identifies an 86% increase in people employed as personnel managers between 2001 and 2023 as indicative of this class’ explosive rise and contrasts it with the low levels of productivity growth. This social cohort, in the words of the Renewal 2030 campaign, is the key obstacle to economic growth. Unthreatened by a corporate sector that has enabled its rise, this bureaucratic sector stifles economic expansion by wielding climate regulation and HR departments, socialising mental health, legitimating the rise of neurodivergence, and making concessions to marginalised groups and their claims for greater representation. One anecdote the report complains of is the Financial Conduct Authority’s insistence that firms should have at least 40% of their Board directors as women and one ethnic minority member. Scandalous!
This regulatory impulse, best typified by the seemingly atrocious fact that the number of pages on planning applications is as high as 359,866 for the Lower Thames Crossing and 44,000 for Sizewell C’s environmental impact assessment (it’s only nuclear for goodness sake!), leads large companies to “dominate even without consistently innovating and improving.” As the prospect of getting a cushty job in the corporate sector entices, the room for entrepreneurial innovation shrinks. In housing, these regulatory burdens drive up costs and restrict supply (nothing to do with property developers), in childcare, they erode informalised labour (terrible), and they inflate consumer prices (don’t mind war and climate change).
Accordingly, the new bureaucratic class has two key political effects in the eyes of Badenoch’s people. Firstly, it poses as “an alternative mechanism of power”, stymying the rights of the national demos and rivalling elected governments. And secondly, it opposes the inherently discriminatory instincts of the nation state, rejecting borders and migration controls for their creation of a divide between “(privileged) citizens within” and “marginalised (foreigners) without.” Instead of a right/left split which may have once mapped rather more neatly along lines of social class, we now see a situation whereby, in the case of the US for example, “a high density, affluent and educated urban bureaucratic class tends to vote Democratic, and the affluent suburban and non-urban (and non-graduate) market orientated class tends to vote Republican.” Putting to one side the troublesome equation that city equals elite and rural equals downtrodden, the dominance of this class has cultivated a process of historic dealignment and in response what has emerged is - in the eyes of the report’s authors - a self-defeating “negative reactionary politics”.
In an era when 6% of the population disapproved of people remaining childless, 8% disapproved of cohabitation, 29% disapprove of cannabis, 13% of people think homosexuality is morally wrong and fewer Brits would have a problem living next to immigrants (5%), people of a different race (2%) or different religion (1%) than almost any other country, there is no point in trying to articulate a nostalgic, reactionary politics of reinventing the past. Instead, Badenoch’s people claim, the task will be to dismantle:
“radical environmental politics, unpick identity politics, focus on a strong positive national identity, limit migration, streamline HR, compliance, sustainability, planning, to focus on bringing down the cost of the welfare state and much more. To roll back the quangos and ‘independent’ bodies, give power to users of public services, reverse pointless university degrees, take on the supranational bodies encroaching on democratic control.”
Ultimately, this manifesto-of-sorts is articulated as the clearest ideational rupture with David Cameron’s so-called ‘compassionate Conservatism’ and the heroic years of social neoliberalism that we have seen. In the spirit of contemporary fascist politics, it is a declaration of war which adapts the hauntological image of the left and melds it with a contemporary object of critique - namely modern liberalism. Yet, despite its calls to keep the fascist barbarians at the gates and dull down nostalgic and conspiratorial thinking, it lends itself totally to normative rightist antielitism: calling for a march in and against the institutions, denouncing woke intelligentsia figures such as Reni Eddo-Lodge and Robin DiAngelo, and demanding that the left’s dominance is overthrown.
If, as the report makes clear, the nation state is under threat as a political form, then this is the elevation of moral panic to a strategy, projecting the image of an alliance between this bureaucratic new class, climate saboteurs, woke identitarians and the historic left. In the wake of #Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the Tories are intent on repressing the claims of oppressed groups, denouncing the corporate woke agenda, celebrating Tory-voting ethnic minorities, and attacking struggles for justice and freedom such as the Palestine solidarity movement. As the radical left regroups with a Parliamentary articulation, the Tories - like Labour - are conscious of the need to ostracise this faction. Reproducing laughable notions of a Labour Party beholden to union barons, the right is insistent upon projecting the trade unions as a power above society and against growth, particularly as workers are sicker, more depressed and more likely to evade the labour market. And crucially, in the face of runaway climate change and the limits an ecologically unstable world poses to economic growth, the Tories are dogmatically intent on protecting rampant fossil fuel capital. Expect to hear more clamouring about 15-minute cities, ULEZ-esque reforms and the need to imprison climate protesters.
The absolute pit that Britain finds itself in has nothing of course to do with the brute class power of the rich against the poor, the minimal investment, the constraints of its finance and service-led economy, or over a decade of cost-cutting austerity. Nor is there any sense that there is a tension between the shallow progressive noises made by corporations over racial discrimination, environmental justice or glass-ceiling feminism, and the movement claims by antiracists, feminists and climate campaigners that these corporations are obstacles to their demands, not allies.
Politics is a messy game and the best wishes of party leaders are rarely realised as originally desired. The Conservative Party just underwent a historic disaster, losing voters on both its left and right flanks. The experience of multiculturalism and the spread of common-sense progressive views on race, gender and sexuality, particularly amongst the young, presents a longer-term attitudinal problem for the Tories. It’s ageing social base and it’s reputational damage after 14 years of austerity leave it less popular than ever. It has long been unable to represent all but the most shortsighted fractions of capital, namely finance and rentierism, and crucially, the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform has displaced the Tories in the rustbelt seats it performed so well in at the 2019 general election, just as the Liberal Democrats and Labour defeated them elsewhere.
Labour may be flailing in office, with one Britain Elects poll reporting them trailing the Tories, but this does not automatically imply Tory success. The years of Corbyn and Johnson were standout moments of voter engagement that are unlikely to return soon. Instead, it is more probable that we will face a party-political scene which is thoroughly divided and increasingly hollow in terms of representational clout. On the right, between the Tories and Reform, and on the left, between Labour, the Greens, and whatever potential formation emerges out of the Independent breakthrough.
In this scenario, socialists must devise a strategy that can challenge Reform at a grassroots level, culturally dismember the right’s radicalising fascoid agenda on a national level, and fundamentally challenge Starmer’s politics of ‘authoritarian modernisation’ today. There is a concern, as the August riots warned us, that the right’s fantasy politics chime with parts of a disenfranchised and defeated electorate. It’s our job to ensure that they do not.