The Conservative party is a natural coalition party
Nik Darlington 6.31am
Conservatives claim to be the natural party of government. The party should also be considered the ‘natural party of coalition’, based on its diverse philosophical heritage.
Take Edmund Burke. He is frequently hailed as the founding father of modern Conservatism. Yet was Burke even a Conservative? Lord Acton thought him one of the three greatest liberals, alongside Gladstone and Macaulay. Karl Marx branded him “an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois”, criticising his alleged hypocrisy in supporting the American revolutionaries but not the French some years later.
Strictly speaking, our panegyrics to Burke are anachronisms. He was neither a Conservative (such a party didn’t exist), nor a Tory. Burke the Whig, the free trader and Catholic emancipator was no friend of the Tories.
Yet Burke should still be considered a founding father of modern Conservatism because of his contradictions. To those who believe that politics should be about belief systems strictly adhered to, such as Karl Marx, Burke was indeed a hypocrite. However, Burke did have beliefs, as innate to him as any Conservative today, centred on freedom, responsibility and community. That he felt able to apply these instincts to America not France is a mark of his pragmatic appreciation of context. The French revolutionaries might have set to their task with liberte, egalite et fraternite in mind but their cause descended into murder, mayhem and misery.
The policies of parties ebb and flow with the tides of time yet certain instincts remain the same. Burke said:
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
Conservatives by instinct are not ideologues. Conservatives do not possess any scopic Weltanschauung. A former party chairman, Lord Hailsham, wrote in The Conservative Case (1959):
Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself.
Political parties steeped in dogma are congenitally ill suited to the purlieus of coalition. In order to provide Britain with the strong government needed to impel and sustain economic recovery, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats boldly cast dogma aside and coalesced into a remarkable accommodation in the national interest. The Coalition Agreement, excogitated with astonishing alacrity, is the result of Burke’s “compromise and barter”.
On Sunday, Bruce Anderson wrote in the FT about the Conservative party’s internal coalition. Last week, I commented on the rumours aired by Rachel Sylvester that Number 10 is secretly planning for coalition post-2015. Irrespective of any plans, the time will come again when the Conservative party can govern on its own. Yet it is foolish to believe that breaking with the Liberal Democrats in 2015 will be exiting coalition politics. The choice is between internal coalition and external coalition. At present, the latter allows David Cameron to quell the former - those elements referred to by Bruce Anderson as “Tory Bennites”.
Though that is just for now. The Conservative party should be aiming for outright victory in 2015, at which point Cameron will have a far more difficult coalition to manage. And then, whether the party is in external or internal coalition after May 2015, however which way the necessary “compromise and barter” falls, it should not matter because the Conservative party is the natural party of coalition.
This is an extract from an article published in the Spring 2011 edition of Reformer, the journal of the Tory Reform Group. It is available online here.
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