THE NEW CONSERVATISM
By QUINTIN HOGG, M.P.
IT has so happened that the fortunes of war have led me for two years far away from the political scene at a time when I seemed to be in the middle of an active political life. A long voyage, long days and nights on regimental duties when at times little seemed to be happening, some months in hospital, a solitary walk of over two hundred miles over mountain country, left me frequently very much alone, and in this loneliness I came to think a great deal about the things which I had taken previously for granted. I have been led to believe that the doubts and anxieties which I experienced during this period of reflection may be of some slight assistance, to those who, like myself, have been caused by the war to question the foundations of their political belief.
I had always been brought up a Conservative—and little enough in the creeds or in the records of other parties had tempted me to swerve from my political allegiance. But the outbreak of the war itself, our unpreparedness for it, and our early disasters, combined to make me doubt whether the party to which I belonged and which had been so long in power offered any real hope or security in the future. I swung far to the Left. In this, I found, I was in the majority. But I could find little satisfaction in the conventional formulas of the Labour politician, and was only irritated by the diatribes of the left-wing publicists—who did not think it right to assume the responsibility which can alone justify the adoption of the mantle of political prophecy. I was weaned by Transport House, im- patient of the Priestleys and the Joads, angered by the partial in- justices of Guilty Men. The Liberal Party failed to attract me by reason of its manifest ineffectiveness, although, despite modem criticism, Macaulay has always seemed to me one of the fountains of English political wisdom. Fascism always repelled me ; I think it only attracts the frustrated and embittered, and only becomes dangerous in •a defeated or embittered nation. I was impressed by the efficiency of the Communist machine ; its materialism, and its subservience to the policy of a foreign Power, however friendly, caused me to dislike it. In political independence of the party system I have never believed. If the people is to keep an adequate control of public affairs it must be asked sensible questions at a general election and these questions must relate to the desirability of potential govern- ments and comprehensive policies rather than to a series of indivi- dual men or isolated measures. The philosophy of the two-party system, stated by Macaulay in the History, has never been adequately answered, even when the practice has come in for savage and well-justified criticism. National Government, the ideal of political theorists, is an expe- dient only successful in the face of known and admitted national danger. In war it is essential, and essential also it will be found
to be to carry out a peace settlement or the demobilisation of a national army. But the moment National Government becomes a cloak to conceal differences of principle instead of a mantle enfolding national unity it becomes a source of weakness rather than strength, Moreover, National Government itself is founded on a union of the existing parties and maintained by the pressure of existing party discipline. New parties are unattractive and rarely successful. They have not sufficient backing in the country to become the vehicle of comprehensive policy. The secret of political achievement in English statecraft is to govern through the instrumentality of one of the two main political factions.
I was therefore flung back on the past for enlightenment. And the past did not play me false. The Napoleonic War affords perhaps the best parallel in modern times to the present hostilities, and the state of England following that war is surely most instructive still. Then, as now, a New Society was visibly emerging far faster than political theorists could comprehend it. Until the advent of the railways the Old Order could successfully withstand the new by isolating it. But with the growth of the railways the New Society invaded the old in its very sanctum by pushing forward into the countryside. Conservative criticism was very like Conservative criticism today—a strange compound of ignorante and fear.
Ignorance led to obscurantist opposition. Most old-fashioned gentlemen had never seen a factory and treated the railway as an unknown horror. Disraeli depicts them arguing energetically on political principles which had not been found wanting in the past because they related to an agricultural society. The new aristocracy of masters was to be deplored. Trade unionism, the cradle of an unborn aristocracy of artisans, was mistaken for .Jacobinism, as it is for Bolshevism today. To the landed gentry the new thing had all the terror of the completely unknown. Some, better instructed than the rest, passed from ignorance into fear and sought to compromise with the Juggernaut. Can the tide be bought off with the promise that it shall not proceed beyond halfway to high-water mark? It does not seem likely.
Liberalism was on terms of easy friendship 'with the New Society. It had established a reputation for being progressive by fighting for the political emancipation of the new towns, for being enlightened by embracing an already obsolescent eighteenth-century philosophy— for being virtuous by courting Nonconformist capitalists, for being in favour of the under-dog by admitting tax-free corn for the workers. But in point of fact if was too embittered with current controversy to be constructive—or even objective,—too deeply engaged with utilitarianism to be virtuous, too heavily committed with the factory owner to defend the interest of the working-class.
In these circumstances there was one man who, today it is not unpleasing to recall, was a Jew, and a very Jewish one at that, who sounded a new note in the political writing of the day. Benjamin Disraeli saw that the Conservative Party was faced, not with defeat (which does not matter), but with annihilation which in British political conditions would be a national disaster—yet saw in the Conservative Party the effective instrument for applying a new poli- tical philosophy and developing a new conception of the mission of the British peoples. He saw that the new was not really the enemy of the old, yet that if the people were not given social reform by the Parliament, the Parliament would be given social revolution• by the people ; that if our institutions were to be preserved they were to be preserved only by a rigid insistence on social justice—by welcoming the new with understanding and real gladness in the name of the old instead of with obscurantist opposition or with timid compromise. Thus he hit upon the role of Conservatism in revolutionary times —to lead and dominate revolution by superior statesmanship, instead of to oppose, it, to bypass the progressives by stepping in front of current controversy instead of engaging in it, to seek an objective study of the actual nature of social forms rather than indulge in political bromides. This is the real meaning of Coningsby.
Does it offer any hope for today? Surely it does, almost with mathematical parallelism. The New Conservative will not indulge in the outworn controversy between Internationalism or Nationalism. He sees in the United Nations a natural growth which appeals alike to his sense of justice and his dislike for constitutional experimenta- tion. He will not engage in the dispute between Nationsdisaticri and Private Enterprise. He sees in the modern extra-political forms of public control a Nationalisation which has lost its terrors, and in the larger joint-stock companies with limited liability a • private enterprise which has lost its meaning. He is not im- pressed by the fear of schemes for social security as destructive of enterprise. On the contrary, he sees in them the basis for social stability necessary to the restoration of industry. He recognises that privilege based on birth or wealth has served its end, of and he. looks forward to a classless democracy in which differences of education and technical skill have taken their place.
NO And for the careful elaboration of his principles he looks to the youth of the country, objective in outlook, and profoundly under- standing the objects of the New Society, finding in them, as did the young Disraeli, " The Trustees of Posterity."
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