Never mind Burke, Rishi Sunak’s illiberalism is to blame for the Tory loss

A note from me and then Dr Russell and I in the speccie on the UK election

Dear readers,

This week I have gone back to traditional press a bit - yesterday I published my take on the UK election in the Spectator Australia with my good friend from Australia Dr. Andrew Russell (you can read it below or here). Andrew is a true libertarian; an economist who did his PhD thesis on the economics of casino gambling. In our article we argue that Sunak was a right-wing nanny and that this was partly to blame for the Tory loss.

For me this was a fun line to take, as I too am a freedom lover. But for me it was also a reminder of just how much European ‘conservativism’ or the ‘right’ in Europe differs from the right in the UK and Australia.

I have written quite a few comparative pieces on Australia and Hungary on policy and although Australia has lessons to learn from the Magyars on family policy and the demography crisis for example, and on ‘culture war’ issues, there is just no way we would ever go for state intervention in the way that central Europeans, at least, seem fine with.

In this way I tend to put on my libertarian hat when thinking about Oz and the UK but remain fascinated by the dilemma central Europeans faced when, as Roger Scruton put it, ‘when freedom came, God disappeared’.  I wrote a comparative piece on Milan Kundera and Roger Scruton’s fiction for the Hungarian Conservative earlier this year that argues that the questions Europe faced after the fall of communism are questions, we are still grappling with now, and perhaps grappling with in the Anglosphere most profoundly. You can read it here for free (no paywall).

I think Scruton’s critique of both socialism and liberalism in The Meaning of Conservatism is what I will need to revisit when thinking about Europe and the Anglosphere but I will write about that another time and for now say only that in this speccie piece Andrew and I deliberately chose to avoid the question of what ‘conservativism’ now should or could look like for the Tories, and this was, for me at least, because David Frost has and continues to articulate this best. Frost’s recent Spiked! podcast with Brendan O’Neill here is brilliant on the Tory wipe-out and how the Tories can rebuild.

But first, read Dr. Russell and I in praise of freedom and on just what a mess Sunak was:

‘Not conservative enough?’ Never mind Burke, Rishi Sunak’s illiberalism is to blame for the Tory loss

In the aftermath of the UK election, there has been much discussion, and there will be more ad nauseam, on what modern British ‘conservationism’ is or should be. The Tories had, ‘…lost the trust of the British people by not delivering. That’s where it went wrong,’ Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris told the BBC. ‘We have to regroup and reconnect,’ he added, ‘and actually just be a unified Conservative Party.’

Just be a united Conservative Party – the bare minimum – indeed. How the Tories do this is anyone’s guess, but not completely alienating, if not outright enraging, both of your major electoral blocks is a start, or as David Frost put it, ‘The strategy chosen by the outgoing Tory leadership – to ignore the 2019 electoral coalition and political realignment, to pretend Brexit never happened, and to tilt leftwards away from actual conservatism – was a comfort zone plan, not one that engaged with the reality of the political situation … and the polls fell consistently as all this became more and more obvious to Conservative voters.’

That the Tories have lost any coherent conservative vision. That they are simply no longer conservative has been clear for some time, however, amongst all the talk about what conservatism is or isn’t and how the party may win back those on the right there remains an overlooked fact. Conservative or not, the leader of the party, Rishi Sunak, presided over a thoroughly illiberal government and the outcome of the election was, in large part, a rejection of this.

It was certainly more a rejection of Sunak’s illiberalism than an embrace of Starmer’s civil-service- sycophantic wokeness-meets-technocratic-managerialism, and as Tom Slater pointed out Labour’s ‘historic’ parliamentary majority goes hand in hand with a historically low turnout and vote share: ‘This Labour victory seems to have everything – except voters,’ he surmised.

So, we have a left that has effectively won by default, and although depressing for the Tories, the fact remains that like the political momentum seen against leftist elites across the rest of the Western world: the EU Parliamentary election results, rising discontent with ‘wokeness’ across the Anglosphere, and backlash against ‘green’ policies that contribute enormously to cost-of-living increases. UK voters, like the rest in the West, are not at present enthused about alienating left-wing policies. But the point to take away from all of this is a more general one. Party allegiances are a relic of a bygone era, and voters are simply, and thoroughly, fed up with elites telling them what to do, and what to think.

That they apathetically elected a government that will do that exactly that is perverse, and Starmer will very quickly prove unpopular. However, what is even more perverse – and certainly less understandable – is a centre right nanny, which is what Rishi Sunak became.

Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes bill touted by him as. ‘…evidence of the bold action that I’m prepared to take. That’s the type of Prime Minister I am. That’s the type of leadership that I bring…’ was not only a second order issue, almost identical legislation was enacted in New Zealand by Jacinta Arden only to be swiftly stubbed out, and she was voted out of office after championing it. Of all the Tory party leadership woes to behold, the idea of Sunak and Arden toasting to making smoking illegal over sav blancs and candy sticks makes one almost want to forgive Boris for his garden party. For what it’s worth we hope he lit up.

And we can’t forget Sunak’s embrace of national service, described by ex-military chief Admiral Alan West as ‘bonkers’. Not only is a levée en masse about as illiberal as you can get, as West pointed out, it would suck money out of much needed spending on defence. If Sunak did not have revolutionary France in mind when he pledged to bring back military service for 18-year-olds, he is getting a taste of it now. Trialled and executed by a landslide, it is perhaps understandable that our parliamentary equivalent of the nobles of the old regime, the Tory elite, now have Burke at the forefront of their minds.

Less understandable, in fact, monumentally stupid, was Sunak’s absence from a second world war commemorative event on the beaches of Normandy. That said, Sunak is not the first recent Tory Prime Minister to make such a monumentally stupid mistake. Theresa May decided to indulge her inner governess by extending the UK government’s restrictions on internet pornography. It seems like that, when in power, the Conservative Party gets intermittently possessed by the spectre of Mary Whitehouse.

Meanwhile, the other party of the British Right, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, won at least 14 per cent of the vote. Assuming that Reform UK won votes that would have otherwise gone to the Conservatives, it is certain that Reform UK cost the Conservatives a great number of seats. Could this have something to do with the fact that they ran on a platform with many relatively classical liberal policies? After nanny Sunak, we wouldn’t be surprised.

Reform UK promised voters; tax cuts (including cutting the corporation tax from 25 per cent to 15 per cent), healthcare reform (including voucherisation and a funding-follows-patient model similar to France), abandoning Net Zero, cutting bureaucracy, cracking down on politicised curricula in education and encouraging private schooling, abolishing the TV license fee, and leaving the lockdown-advocating World Health Organisation. We are not suggesting Reform UK is any example of doctrinaire libertarianism, but at this election they were notably libertarian in comparison to the pro-national-service pro-nanny-statist Sunak-led Tories.

The lesson here is quite clear. Substantive authoritarianism, that is, advocating or passing policies that actively abridge the civil liberties of voters, is an electoral loser for the political right. While the conservative party should and will stay conservative, when they are searching for whatever that now means they would be wise to reflect on the reality that, despite electing a Labour government, voters do not want a team of elitist nannies, lest of all right-wing ones. As such, we offer this piece advice for Sunak’s successor. When one is running to be the Prime Minister of the land which gave us John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith, it is wise to not take their ideological progeny’s votes for granted.

This article was originally published in the Spectator Australia here.

LS

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