What exactly do the leading British and Australian center-right parties stand for today?
What exactly do the leading British and Australian center-right parties stand for today?
I f there is anything that’s characterized American conservatism over the past ten years, it is ever-fiercer debates about ideas. Once-ostensibly settled positions on issues such as trade, originalism, and foreign policy have come up for discussion in ways that few anticipated. Many has been the occasion when I’ve heard some conservatives express frustration about this state of affairs. It’s a distraction, they say, from the important work of winning elections.
Elections do matter, and debates about ideas can certainly degenerate into navel-gazing exercises. But consider the alternative: a world in which conservative and classical-liberal ideas play little to no role in center-right politics.
This world has sadly become reality in other Anglosphere countries in recent years.
Take for instance Britain’s Tories. The conservative Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling once said that the business of the Conservative Party is to win elections. Among other things, this means avoiding the ideological purism that makes the perfect the enemy of the good. But if “the good” means implementing policies that reflect conservative principles, Boris Johnson’s Tory government has been doing precious little of that.
To the extent that Brexit represented successful pushback against the supra-nationalism favored by left-liberal politicians, NGOs, and internationalist bureaucrats, it was a conservative triumph. But beyond that triumph, Johnson’s government has looked distinctly devoid of any conservative vision or policy program.
Indeed, the Tories under Johnson have veered away from conservatism in many areas. They have raised National Insurance rates and corporate taxes, and shown no inclination to cut public spending. Johnson’s government has even pushed for a “green industrial revolution” that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Green New Deal. The Conservatives have also done little to halt woke takeovers of institutions such as the National Trust, and they’ve shown no signs of coming to grips with the U.K.’s growing illegal-immigration problem.
In short, there’s no indication of any major Tory commitment to things like greater economic liberty and smaller-but-strong government. Yes, there have been a few successful trade deals in Brexit’s wake. But the Tory government has still squandered a rare opportunity to steer British politics in a more conservative direction.
The Covid crisis certainly didn’t help. But nor did the government’s outsourcing of health policy for far too long to epidemiologists who never saw a lockdown they didn’t like. The Tories’ most recent straying from conservative orthodoxy was the imposition of a windfall tax on the energy sector to fund more social spending to tackle a growing cost-of-living crisis — a policy originally proposed by the Labour Party!
In short, Britain’s Conservatives increasingly look more like a Labour-lite party than a party that follows a recognizably center-right agenda. And this leaves one asking: What exactly does the Tory Party believe?
Similar questions could be asked of Australia’s conservatives, recently booted from office after nine years in power. Much of that time was wasted with in-fighting which revolved as much around personal grudges and payback as around policy differences. But it’s also true that after Prime Minister Tony Abbott was ousted by his own party in 2015, very little of what came from the PM’s office was distinctly conservative.
Nothing better summed this up than when Abbott’s deposer and successor, Malcolm Turnbull, was asked what he believed in. His response was “Australia,” which, of course, was a cop-out — what Australian prime minister wouldn’t believe in that? When asked a version of the same question on another occasion, Turnbull answered “Innovation,” which again gave no clue to as to his actual philosophical leanings.
After suffering his predecessor’s fate, Turnbull left parliament. His successor, Scott Morrison, managed to win the 2019 election, thanks partly to an overly confident Labor Party that promised to enact radical climate-change policies and raise taxes, including on pensioners.
Like Johnson’s Tories, however, Morrison’s reelected conservative coalition government didn’t prove especially good at or even interested in implementing conservative or classically liberal policies. Initially, Morrison’s government delivered some tax cuts and a free-trade agreement with Britain. It even reached an interim trade deal with India. But like Johnson, Morrison was swiftly waylaid by the Covid pandemic in 2020. Thereafter, his government found itself — much like Johnson’s — largely reacting to events rather than determining them.
All governments have to respond to unanticipated developments. But one test of any government’s quality is whether it can do so while continuing to pursue its own agenda. By that standard, Morrison failed. Part of this reflected Morrison’s inability to provide clear political direction to his government in ways that would challenge the Left’s narrative on any given policy question. On issue after issue, Morrison’s government ended up slightly to the right of the Labor Party and inner-city left-liberal sentiment. After a while, this left many conservatives and classical liberals disillusioned, while moderate voters started to ask themselves why they shouldn’t just vote for Labor, the Greens, or left-liberal independents.
Morrison’s defenders might point to the difficulties posed by his razor-thin parliamentary majority. They might also argue that he was hamstrung by the need to manage divisions between his government’s factions on issues ranging from climate change to religious liberty. But that’s a problem that all Australian center-right leaders have faced, and one that not all of them have abandoned their political principles to solve.
By any standard, the most successful center-right leaders in Britain and Australia over the past half century were Margaret Thatcher and John Howard, respectively. They, too, found themselves having to react to events, whether it was Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands or the War on Terrorism touched off by 9/11 — and they managed to have substantial success shifting their nations’ politics and policy-frameworks in conservative and free-market directions. Neither Thatcher nor Howard were intellectuals, and they both had pragmatic, deal-making streaks. But they succeeded in no small part because they had core conservative convictions, particularly on fiscal and cultural matters, which they weren’t prepared to abandon.
The disparity between then and now is stark. In the 1980s, everyone knew what the Tories stood for. Likewise, no one doubted that the Australian center-right of the late-1990s and 2000s had a broadly conservative program for the country. Neither Thatcher’s nor Howard’s governments pursued their goals perfectly; both made mistakes. Yet people understood what they believed in. By contrast, what precisely do Britain and Australia’s leading center-right parties believe in today?
Debates about ideas might seem like a distraction to those on the American right who spend most of their time thinking about how to secure political power. “We all need to be on the same page,” I’ve heard some conservative friends say on more than one occasion.
But what if that page is empty to begin with, or reflects lowest-common-denominator platitudes? What if it gets filled in later by whatever big-government expediency is deemed necessary to address the latest crisis? Few things are more discrediting than gaining political power and then being vague or uncertain about what you want to do with it, or becoming a prisoner of events.
That is the main lesson that major Anglosphere center-right parties have to offer American conservatives today: Conservative parties that stop caring about conservative ideas will either gravitate leftward or end up standing for nothing. They will then lose — and they’ll deserve it.