This week, I went on the New Statesman podcast to talk about whether or not an apparently-renascent social conservatism represents the future of Tory (and indeed British) politics. At the centre of the discussion was, inevitably, Miriam Cates MP.
Yes, the original report about fears by Cameroons of a “takeover by the religious right” led with the venerable figure of Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group of MPs.
But it’s the new guard, fronted by Cates, Danny Kruger, and their New Social Covenant Unit (NSCU), which excite attention, and lead some to suspect (indeed fear) that their line of thinking represents a possible evolution of the Party rather than just a possible self-defeating reactionary episode following a bruising election defeat.
The extent of any renaissance of social conservatism in the Party, its possible role in the future of Tory politics, and indeed what we actually mean by social conservatism, is a very big topic. But a recent row casts a useful light over its contours.
Last month, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge made a lot of headlines when she challenged the Prime Minister over the blood-curdling contents of an NSCU report into sex education in schools, which claimed that:
“…many parents and teachers have observed that, contrary to the limits of the law, inaccurate or ideological information is being delivered as fact in RSE lessons, whilst contentious and sexualising theories about how to approach relationships are being promoted.”
There was, immediately, a lot of pushback: one commentator accused Cates of “tearing up the British cross-party consensus that has governed these issues of late”; others pointed out that some of her most alarming allegations were either barely-evidenced even in the NSCU report or took place on the Isle of Man, a completely separate jurisdiction.
So, all just a needlessly-imported American moral panic? Well, not quite.
Subsequent reporting by the Times highlighted what does seem to be a genuine problem: that the content of sex-ed lessons is being provided by an opaque Oort Cloud of private providers, with little-to-no regulatory oversight, some of whom are using copyright law to prevent parents inspecting their teaching materials. The paper interviewed Cates, and in an editorial called the current system a “Wild West”.
Partly because of that opacity, it is very difficult to assess the accuracy of Cates’ claims about the extent to which inappropriate material is being taught in schools – although if it is true that she has 150 pages’ worth of material, it was a gift to her critics to lead in Parliament with specific examples that don’t seem to have withstood scrutiny.
It is also true that whatever we might want children to be learning about sex in an ideal world, sex education has to grapple with the reality that unless an individual pupil is receiving a remarkably spartan upbringing – and an exceptionally-enforced one, at that – then they have access to all the porn on the internet, and all the ugliness that attends it.
Nonetheless, the fact that Cates, Kruger, and their allies are prepared to stick their heads above the parapet is a good thing, for a few reasons.
First, because too powerful a “cross-party consensus” can hide many sins. Our adversarial Parliament depends in part on politicians scrutinising each other; when both sides are complicit in a system, the urge to police it can be thin on the ground.
In this case, there does seem to be a real problem with third-party providers and inadequate regulation of the curriculum – at least, sufficient to justify a proper investigation – and last month’s row put a spotlight on it.
Second, there is the representation point. As Ben Walker, co-founder of Britain Elects and the NS‘ polling expert, pointed out on the podcast, socially-conservative positions are much more widely held amongst the British public than amongst the political class.
I made a similar point in February, when I wrote about Lee Anderson. Talking to the NS I dubbed it the “Overton Shadow”: the gap on the right between respectable politicians and commentators, clustered at the edge of the Overton Window, and the outright zoomers all the way out in the far wilderness.
(This doesn’t necessarily map neatly onto a single left/right axis. By far the biggest unrepresented body of opinion on British politics is what in the parlance of the political compass we might call top-left: leaning left on economics but right on culture; Jeremy Driver’s now-famous “love our NHS; hang the paedos” quadrant.)
Whether or not something is good policy doesn’t depend on whether or not it’s popular. But when the existing consensus in an area is markedly out of step with observable public opinion, there can be the whiff of entitlement in the denunciations hurled at those accused of breaking it.
For that reason, I tend to be deeply suspicious of people alleging that their opponents are waging the culture war. It often seems like one of Bernard Woolley’s famous irregular verbs: “I advocate for positive social change; you indulge in the culture war; she tears up the cross-party consensus.”
Whatever you think the proper content of sex-ed classes should be, it seems bizarre to imply, as some of those dismissing Cates on such grounds seem to imply, that it isn’t a proper subject for political debate and disagreement.
(It’s telling that some commentators dismissed complaints about the impact of the Equality Act, supporters of which will readily admit has had huge and far-reaching impact, in like terms.)
Finally, it is worth considering the possibility that as an ageing population places an ever-heavier burden on the public finances, and the structural barriers to sustained economic growth (i.e. not building anything) remain popular with the voters, we may well end up in a decade or two in an environment where low-tax politics isn’t feasible, and the parties must distinguish themselves on other axes.
In those circumstances, the politics of who gets what share of an insufficient pie will inevitably involve making value judgements about the sort of society we want our state and welfare systems to support. Cates’ arguments on childcare (and perhaps too my own critique of the Treasury’s Stakhanovite attitude towards early retirees) are a flavour of what such politics might look like.
None of this, to be clear, augers a takeover by an American-style religious right. Britain is still Britain; our politics may come to more accurately reflect underlying social attitudes in a way some would rather they did not, but there is no bedrock of US-style evangelism waiting to be mobilised.
Or our politics might not change that much at all. As I argued at the NS, the key test for social conservatives is whether they can overcome the Right’s current, actively self-harming culture-warrior playbook: talking really loudly about the evils of woke whilst doing very little of anything either to address the structures driving the problem or connect social concerns to people’s material problems.