Victor Anderson on Conservatism
Covenant: The new politics of home, neighbourhood and nation by Danny Kruger published by Swift Press
Danny Kruger is MP for Devizes in Wiltshire and Co-chair of the New Conservatives. This book sets out his political philosophy, effectively and efficiently, in 150 pages.
The writing style is human, never bureaucratic, managerial, or wonkspeak. But the apparent clarity is deceptive: it doesn’t take much digging beneath the prose to find some really big problems about the worldview he sets out.
His philosophy is based to a dangerous extent on over-the-top pessimism. Whenever he identifies a negative trend or tendency, he denounces and exaggerates it with maximum possible alarm. The Covid lockdown period is seen as one of frightening state control, without also noticing the flowering of community mutual aid that took place, and the valuing of the people whose work society really depends on, for example in the health service and food production and distribution. Governments are, according to Kruger, now on course “to make each person as far as possible a solitary, autonomous, independent being.” “We have progressively diminished, to the point of abolition, the marriage covenant.” “We have lost the language of human relations.”
The worldview set out is truly conservative and not at all neoliberal, in the sense that he very thoroughly rejects the view that “there is no such thing as society” and the idea that we can rely on the free play of market forces to bring about optimal outcomes for all.
There are two big elephants in his room which Kruger doesn’t discuss or acknowledge. One is the question of why real conservatives such as himself share a political party with free market neoliberals who they have very little in common with, either in terms of immediate policy measures or basic philosophy. But governing parties in Britain have tended to be very broad churches.
The bigger of the two elephants is capitalism. There is already a first sign of this on page 2. After referring to the rivers which have their sources in or near his constituency as “sacred streams”, there is no trace of embarrassment or irony when he mentions their current state, “regularly flooded with raw sewage.” The fact that this has some connection with Tory privatization of monopoly suppliers, extended through weak regulation, doesn’t rate a mention. Instead, he sees “a metaphor”, reflecting “the self-destructive bent our society is on…depleted, contaminated, and at risk.”
Again and again, he identifies issues which anyone on the Left would also recognise, but he doesn’t probe their economic history or their economic causes. “It is no surprise that the great Earth system itself is in danger, with a range of catastrophic ecological tipping points now in view.” “The market for housing in the UK is a racket designed to benefit property speculators.” “These phenomena – the finance industry, the reality of foreign competition and markets, the technologies that enable market exchange – are or should be subsidiary to the actual production of value that goes on in the streets, the industrial estates and the fields near where people live.” A deep-rooted aversion to socialist ideas gets in the way of him simply investigating the predictable chains of cause and effect of having an economy geared towards maximising profit in a society where most of the power is held by the people who are making those profits.
Where he does make some connection, the key policy proposal is weak. “We need conservatives to seize the “purpose” agenda. One way would be to add to the corporate forms of “company types” that businesses can adopt, to include one that recognizes a wider set of obligations than returning profit to their owners.” Well it’s a start!
At many points the book is close to utopian. There are sentences that wouldn’t look out of place in a Green Party manifesto. There is a vision here of cosy communities, resilient local economies, lives of wellbeing not devoted to profit and production. But I am afraid that unless he and others fully address the problem of the current economic system, the great big elephant of capitalism will just come along and stomp all over his dreams.