How the Conservatives can win again

There is a tension at the heart of conservative thinking today – one that the Conservative party must address if it wants to win again at the next general election. The National Conservatism conference, being held in Westminster this week, is a bold attempt to speak to this internal struggle: how to strike the right balance between the right to be free and the right to belong. 

Karl Marx was right in the 19th century when he said that capitalism causes all that is holy to be profaned and all that is solid to melt into air. John Gray was right in the 1980s when he said Thatcherism would eat itself – that the free market depends on social institutions and habits that the free market itself undermines. 

But it is also true that in a well-organised society, the free market – and personal responsibility, and private property – are the things that help sustain the social order.