Nat Con is the talk of Twitter, a dubious accomplishment for any movement seeking popular relevance. Progressives are having a grand old time taking offence at every tweet out of the event while others are gleeful at the prospect of the Tory party heading down an electoral dead end. Some right-wingers appear to share that fear while others are unimpressed by the lack of philosophic coherence at a conference mish-mashing natcons, tradcons, Brexit populists and some of the more hard-headed market liberals.
There is some legitimacy in all these critiques but none of them touch on a more fundamental problem. Allow me to sum it up with my take on NatCon: boy, these conservatives have a lot of ideas – just wait till they get into power!
Of course, natcons would object that this is their point, too. After 13 years and five prime ministers, the Tories have done little that would qualify as conservative, national or otherwise. Indeed, since David Cameron nudged his way into Downing Street in 2010, the UK has become less prosperous than it should be, less competitive than it should be, less united than it should be – and more highly-taxed and culturally left.
Brexit, the one achievement the Tories have to show for four election victories, has lived up to none of its promises and has entailed leaving part of the UK in the European single market. The Conservatives have presided over an explosion in mass illegal immigration and while the Prime Minister talks of ‘stopping the boats’, his government shows no indication of knowing how to do this.
But what exactly would the natcons do differently? Among the speakers at Nat Con, there have been two secretaries of state, a former secretary of state, a former minister of state, the deputy chairman of the Conservative party, and three Tory MPs, one of whom was an adviser to David Cameron and later Boris Johnson. So far from fringe ideologues, natcons hold and have held some of the most senior offices in government and the governing party.
Keynote speaker and Home Secretary Suella Braverman would appear to be a natcon. How has she brought that to bear on, say, border integrity? Former Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg is a natcon too, it would seem. What good did that do when he was sitting around the cabinet table? Lee Anderson fancies himself as a thorn in the side of the liberal establishment and the activist left, but what has he done to move the Tory party in the direction his social media fans would like to see? If natcons can and do hold power but do not shift the dial in the slightest, then what is the point of them and their movement?
True, they are outgunned by both the left and their opponents within conservatism. Most right-of-centre think tanks in Britain are not aligned with national conservatism or similar movements and while they may share natcons’ frustrations with wokism and the cultural power of the left, most remain firmly inside the parameters of mainstream Toryism. The more politically independent centre-right think tanks, such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs, are arguably as hostile to national conservatism as they are to socialism.
There is no newspaper or journal aligned with the natcon movement. Contributors to The Spectator, The Critic and UnHerd have all addressed NatCon but the Speccie is firmly liberal and the other two broad-church post-liberal, rather than specifically natcon. For a political movement to sustain itself, it needs some kind of infrastructure but the natcons have very little beyond columnists, activists and a few faces from GB News.
Even if they could erect the necessary political infrastructure or even gain more traction within the Conservative party, what would the natcons do with it? It’s hard to know because there is no generally agreed upon definition of natconism. A Rashomon philosophy, it seems to include post-liberals who cherish the common good over tax-cutting market liberalism and unrepentant Thatcherites whose fiscal convictions belong in an 1980s museum alongside Human League first presses and Sue Ellen Ewing’s shoulder pads. There are cogent natcon critiques of the status quo to be found out there, and some of them are thoughtful and nuanced. Eric Kaufman, a politics professor at Birkbeck, has done some valuable thinking in this area, but the natcon movement as a whole lacks his intellectual coherence.
This is more than a problem of intellectuals and legislators. Rank-and-file Tories who resent the right-liberalism of Rishi Sunak and those around him have no clear alternative. Indeed, in their rush to reject right-liberalism they tend to embrace rival, populist iterations of right-liberalism. Consider how many grassroots Tories, despairing of Theresa May’s failure to deliver Brexit and her interventionist economic and social policies, opted to replace her with Boris Johnson, a right-liberal who delivered a weak, compromised Brexit, high levels of legal and illegal immigration, and remained largely silent amid progressive onslaughts against British history, biological reality and freedom of speech.
Or consider those Tory voters who plan to abandon the party in next year’s general election in favour of Reform UK, a party at least as wedded to economic liberalism as Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives. The British right truly is a marketplace of ideas where voters can choose between national conservatives who cede parts of the UK to Brussels rule and populists whose only policy on tax is cutting it for corporations and the super rich.
As a liberal, it’s easy enough to sit on the sidelines and chuck bottles but I can do so because natconism is listless and disjointed. Frankly, even if it tooled up to give a kicking to liberalism, it would have to wait its turn behind progressivism. But fresh thinking on the right would be no bad thing. There’s just been very little of it at NatCon.
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