Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Not long before he died in 2006, Ralph Harris told me something fascinating. The founder of the IEA, Britain’s first free-market think-tank, had watched as the Second World War crushed classical liberalism under its tank treads. Five years of mobilisation had altered the relationship between state and citizen. Voters now expected their governments to run coalmines, shipping lines, schools, steelworks, hospitals and houses.
What were free-marketeers to do? Some wanted to withdraw, like Irish monks copying out sacred texts during the Dark Ages, keeping civilization alive at the uttermost rim of the world.
But Harris was not interested in reading papers to the Mont Pelerin Society. He wanted to drive back Leviathan. The challenge was to find the right vehicle.
The dirigiste mood of the times had done for the Liberal Party. Dominant before the First World War, it collapsed to less than three per cent of the popular vote in the 1951 and 1955 elections. Labour, for its part, aimed to nationalise anything that moved. That left only the Conservatives, despite their imperialist, paternalist, and vaguely protectionist tendencies.
Harris and his friends set about educating individual Tory MPs: Nick Ridley, Geoffrey Howe, Enoch Powell and, most consequentially, Keith Joseph, who became Margaret Thatcher’s John the Baptist.
For all his contagious optimism, Ralph never kidded himself that small-staters were other than a pressure group within the Conservative Party. Even during the Thatcher years, he understood that she was there on sufferance, and that her MPs would turn on her the moment she stopped winning (as indeed they did).
Manchester liberalism never conquered the Conservative Party. Rather, it formed a qualified and unequal alliance with mainstream Toryism.
Thatcher was a tiny rider on the back of an elephant. The great beast was moved by its own instincts: patriotism, religious faith, respect for hierarchy, distaste for indecency, unease about social change. A skilled mahout might coax it, whisper in its vast ear, nudge it this way or that. But only up to a point. Thatcher knew better than to jab her goad too harshly
The free-marketeers in the Tory Party – what the Americans call FreeCons, to distinguish them from NatCons – knew that they needed allies. They consciously focused on the issues where they agreed with the NatCons, such as welfare reform and Euroscepticism, eschewing self-indulgent arguments about drugs and porn. They were, to borrow American terminology again, fusionists.
Precisely the same process was playing out on the American right at around the same time. Before the 1950s, US parties did not divide neatly along a left/right axis; they were as much regional as ideological.
The American realignment was driven by Bill Buckley, the absurdly clever, eloquent, and good-looking editor of the National Review. He brought together everyone who disliked socialism: patriots, strict constitutionalists, evangelical Christians, supporters of Israel, business people, social conservatives, libertarians.
As British Fusionism culminated in Margaret Thatcher, American Fusionism culminated in Ronald Reagan.
For those of us who came of age during the 1980s – bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven – it can be quite an effort to realise how contingent and exceptional this alignment was. For most of our previous history, Liberals and Conservatives (before them Whigs and Tories, before them Roundheads and Cavaliers) had constituted the opposite poles of our political system.
What made them bury their differences was the threat of socialism, both in the form of massed Soviet T72s and in the more insidious form of Western fifth columnists. Perhaps it should not surprise us that, with the ebbing of that threat, the Thatcher/Reagan alloy has begun to separate into its distinct Tory and Whig elements.
Yesterday morning, at the Free Market Road Show hosted by the Legatum Institute, I had the pleasure of debating James Orr, the absurdly clever, eloquent, and good-looking Cambridge professor who set up the British branch of NatCon last year. It was an away match for James, but he delivered some zingers, arguing that if “national conservatism” was tautological, “liberal conservatism” was oxymoronic.
Perhaps. But I still feel the split can be exaggerated – especially in this country where, perhaps because of the absence of the Trump factor, NatCons tend to be relatively courteous and ecumenical.
James had been kind enough to ask me to speak at the inaugural British NatCon conference last year, and I talked of how Edmund Burke, the conservative patriarch, was also a Smithian free-trader. It would never have occurred to great Irish vate that there was a contradiction between cultural nationalism and economic liberalism.
In any case, I am not at all sure that the common foe has withdrawn. “During the Cold War, we knew what victory looked like,” said James yesterday. “It meant the fall of Moscow. What is our Moscow today?”
Well, maybe our Moscow is Moscow. The authoritarian regimes that have rallied to Putin (China, Iran, North Korea) have little in common beyond their dislike of us. And, just as during the Cold War, they have their sympathisers here, especially in our universities.
Look at the face-masked students protesting against Israel. Do they strike you as having a deep interest in Islamic culture or a belief in the right of every nation to independence?
No, they are simply attacking the nasty colonialist West, just as their predecessors during my undergraduate days were not so much pro-Saddam as anti-Bush, and just as their predecessors a generation earlier, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”, were less interested in the welfare of Vietnam than the defeat of America.
Western civilisation is more fragile than we realise. Elevating the individual over the collective runs up against the deepest instincts of a tribal species. That is why, in every generation, people feel alienated by capitalism, not caring that it is obviously superior to any real-world rival.
The anti-Western impulse, whether in authoritarian regimes abroad, or in wokesters at home, cannot be permanently defeated. It comes back in every generation. And it is every bit as inimical to the conservative as to the liberal traditions.
That, ultimately, is why we must work together. As my old history tutor, Jeremy Catto, used to say, the differences between Tory and Whig are these days so small that they can safely be deferred until the grave.
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Author: Daniel Hannan
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