Manraj Atwal is a History undergraduate at UCL and the incoming President of its Conservative Society.
Wet, wet, wet!
Or so the cry goes up as one of the self-declared One Nation Tories peeks above ground to criticise the leadership of the day. The pattern is all too familiar to us now and has been since the 1980s. They emerge, they complain, and they scurry back to their burrows as they are howled at and declared “Lib Dems“, before the whole process repeats.
The complaints come readily enough: too radical on the ECHR, too eager to abandon arbitrary net zero targets, too willing to play tribute act to Reform. The content has changed, but the complaint – that the Conservatives must not be too divisive – stays the same.
I have a confession to make. I used to be one of these people; one of these One Nation Conservatives.
At school, I’d read about the titans of Conservative history and lo and behold, they all seemed to be One Nation Conservatives. Peel was a One Nation Conservative; Disraeli was a One Nation Conservative; Baldwin was a One Nation Conservative. And when I looked at the Conservative Party of the time, torn apart over the defenestration of Johnson, discredited after the mini budget and riven with endless factional dispute, I thought, might not the answer lie with these figures of yesterday?
In fact, it seemed ridiculous, ludicrous even, that more people weren’t One Nation Conservatives! After all who could object to the idea of reconciling “those two nations, the rich and the poor” and creating a “classless society” or championing the ‘sensible centre’ against the evils of the loony left and radical right?
And yet, most people weren’t. Despite the insistence of One Nation Tories that everyone from Macmillan to Boris Johnson were secretly or openly One Nationers, that wing of the party seemed perpetually under siege, perpetually in the minority and forever Cassandra like prophesying doom and destruction if the party and the country did not return to the right path. Everybody was a One Nation Conservative, and yet nobody was one.
Then I went to university.
I met other people, smarter than me, better versed in the history of the party than me and yet they disagreed with me! A shocking moment I assure you for any self-confident 18-year-old. And what stuck with me most was not that they weren’t One Nation Conservatives, but that they treated it as alien, as something to be denounced alongside Socialism and Liberalism.
Obviously, I wasn’t convinced. Affronted yes but not convinced. So naturally I decided to take a closer look at my stance to see if their stance had any merit; or to be more exact, re-affirm my faith.
And yet what I found disconcerted me. Looking at the leading luminaries of One Nation Conservatism today: Rory Stewart, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Gavin Barwell and so on, they weren’t so much defined by an ideology as convinced they didn’t have one. They were proud of it too, flaunting the fact under the rhetoric of “pragmatism” or “centrism.”
That is not to say they lacked doctrine. On the contrary, in fact. Try suggesting to any of them that the ECHR is a treaty like other treaties, capable of being left as it was capable of being joined, and see how much pragmatism survives the conversation. These are not positions arrived at by weighing the evidence and remaining open to persuasion; they are fixed points, exempt from the flexibility recommended to everybody else, and defended as though the question had been settled some time ago by people better qualified than the electorate.
What looks like an absence of ideology from the inside looks, from any other vantage point, like a very specific one indeed: the settled opinion of the early 2000s, preserved intact, and mistaken by its holders for the absence of opinion altogether. Like the Luddites, they looked back with fond remembrance to the days of a supposed golden age, turning their back on the issues of today to extol the virtues of a failing order. To put it bluntly, they are yesterday’s men.
The fundamental problem with One Nation Toryism, then, is not that it is corrosive as an idea. It is that it provides cover for those without ideas. It allows the settlement of today to be justified in the language of yesterday and thereby made palatable to Conservatives.
After all, Disraeli, the supposed ‘founder’ of the doctrine, never used the phrase ‘One Nation’. It was an invention in 1924 by Baldwin, seeking to justify the party in an era of rising class conflict. It was used again by R.A Butler, seeking to reconcile the Conservative Party to the welfare state. It was even used by Ed Miliband 44 times in a 2012 conference speech, with nobody finding this odd enough to stop him.
That is why there have always been so many people able to lay claim to being One Nation Conservatives. The claim costs nothing, because there is nothing to claim. And it is why the tradition fails, not occasionally but structurally: a doctrine that exists to make the present acceptable can never be a reason to want anything else
So, it was no wonder my university contemporaries had so strenuously rejected One Nation Toryism. It had nothing to say to them. No hope for the future, no way of addressing the challenges of today beyond urging moderation in the face of them, and no way of achieving anything at all, since a doctrine that exists to keep the peace can only ever tell you what to give up in order to keep it. Because the status quo they wanted so badly to return to was the one that had failed us: that saddled my generation with extraordinary debt and uncertain prospects, and that met every objection to it not as an argument to be answered but as evidence of populist contagion. They never had to listen, because they had already decided that nothing being said to them was worth hearing.
Conservatism must ask more. It must be able to say what it is conserving, and to name it precisely: not the settlement of the moment, but a constitution worth restoring and an inheritance worth handing on. That is a politics you can argue with, which is to say a politics that can lose and therefore one that can win.
So the problem is not that they are wets. It is that they are not conservatives, not because they believe the wrong things, but because the tradition they claim has never required them to believe anything at all.
Manraj Atwal is a History undergraduate at UCL and the incoming President of its Conservative Society.
Wet, wet, wet!
Or so the cry goes up as one of the self-declared One Nation Tories peeks above ground to criticise the leadership of the day. The pattern is all too familiar to us now and has been since the 1980s. They emerge, they complain, and they scurry back to their burrows as they are howled at and declared “Lib Dems“, before the whole process repeats.
The complaints come readily enough: too radical on the ECHR, too eager to abandon arbitrary net zero targets, too willing to play tribute act to Reform. The content has changed, but the complaint – that the Conservatives must not be too divisive – stays the same.
I have a confession to make. I used to be one of these people; one of these One Nation Conservatives.
At school, I’d read about the titans of Conservative history and lo and behold, they all seemed to be One Nation Conservatives. Peel was a One Nation Conservative; Disraeli was a One Nation Conservative; Baldwin was a One Nation Conservative. And when I looked at the Conservative Party of the time, torn apart over the defenestration of Johnson, discredited after the mini budget and riven with endless factional dispute, I thought, might not the answer lie with these figures of yesterday?
In fact, it seemed ridiculous, ludicrous even, that more people weren’t One Nation Conservatives! After all who could object to the idea of reconciling “those two nations, the rich and the poor” and creating a “classless society” or championing the ‘sensible centre’ against the evils of the loony left and radical right?
And yet, most people weren’t. Despite the insistence of One Nation Tories that everyone from Macmillan to Boris Johnson were secretly or openly One Nationers, that wing of the party seemed perpetually under siege, perpetually in the minority and forever Cassandra like prophesying doom and destruction if the party and the country did not return to the right path. Everybody was a One Nation Conservative, and yet nobody was one.
Then I went to university.
I met other people, smarter than me, better versed in the history of the party than me and yet they disagreed with me! A shocking moment I assure you for any self-confident 18-year-old. And what stuck with me most was not that they weren’t One Nation Conservatives, but that they treated it as alien, as something to be denounced alongside Socialism and Liberalism.
Obviously, I wasn’t convinced. Affronted yes but not convinced. So naturally I decided to take a closer look at my stance to see if their stance had any merit; or to be more exact, re-affirm my faith.
And yet what I found disconcerted me. Looking at the leading luminaries of One Nation Conservatism today: Rory Stewart, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Gavin Barwell and so on, they weren’t so much defined by an ideology as convinced they didn’t have one. They were proud of it too, flaunting the fact under the rhetoric of “pragmatism” or “centrism.”
That is not to say they lacked doctrine. On the contrary, in fact. Try suggesting to any of them that the ECHR is a treaty like other treaties, capable of being left as it was capable of being joined, and see how much pragmatism survives the conversation. These are not positions arrived at by weighing the evidence and remaining open to persuasion; they are fixed points, exempt from the flexibility recommended to everybody else, and defended as though the question had been settled some time ago by people better qualified than the electorate.
What looks like an absence of ideology from the inside looks, from any other vantage point, like a very specific one indeed: the settled opinion of the early 2000s, preserved intact, and mistaken by its holders for the absence of opinion altogether. Like the Luddites, they looked back with fond remembrance to the days of a supposed golden age, turning their back on the issues of today to extol the virtues of a failing order. To put it bluntly, they are yesterday’s men.
The fundamental problem with One Nation Toryism, then, is not that it is corrosive as an idea. It is that it provides cover for those without ideas. It allows the settlement of today to be justified in the language of yesterday and thereby made palatable to Conservatives.
After all, Disraeli, the supposed ‘founder’ of the doctrine, never used the phrase ‘One Nation’. It was an invention in 1924 by Baldwin, seeking to justify the party in an era of rising class conflict. It was used again by R.A Butler, seeking to reconcile the Conservative Party to the welfare state. It was even used by Ed Miliband 44 times in a 2012 conference speech, with nobody finding this odd enough to stop him.
That is why there have always been so many people able to lay claim to being One Nation Conservatives. The claim costs nothing, because there is nothing to claim. And it is why the tradition fails, not occasionally but structurally: a doctrine that exists to make the present acceptable can never be a reason to want anything else
So, it was no wonder my university contemporaries had so strenuously rejected One Nation Toryism. It had nothing to say to them. No hope for the future, no way of addressing the challenges of today beyond urging moderation in the face of them, and no way of achieving anything at all, since a doctrine that exists to keep the peace can only ever tell you what to give up in order to keep it. Because the status quo they wanted so badly to return to was the one that had failed us: that saddled my generation with extraordinary debt and uncertain prospects, and that met every objection to it not as an argument to be answered but as evidence of populist contagion. They never had to listen, because they had already decided that nothing being said to them was worth hearing.
Conservatism must ask more. It must be able to say what it is conserving, and to name it precisely: not the settlement of the moment, but a constitution worth restoring and an inheritance worth handing on. That is a politics you can argue with, which is to say a politics that can lose and therefore one that can win.
So the problem is not that they are wets. It is that they are not conservatives, not because they believe the wrong things, but because the tradition they claim has never required them to believe anything at all.