Neoliberal Centrist Dad, Episode 5

What does Kemi Badenoch really stand for? What are her policies and what would she do as Conservative leader? One pamphlet has all the answers

Kemi Badnoch is the presumed frontrunner over Robert Jenrick to be the next Tory leader. Some say she is the shining light of modern day conservatism, others say she is an unhinged lunatic. Are either of these descriptions fair? Luckily for all of us, Badenoch has very recently set out her prospectus for the future of the Conservative Party in long form. It’s called Conservatism in Crisis and it’s available online. I’ve read it front to back - here are my thoughts.

There have already been plenty of discussions about some aspects of this pamphlet in the press - in particular, the bits about autism essentially being a way to get your kid more free state support, as well as that part where it mixes up left and right, as in, it literally gets confused about which direction is which. But I’m not here to nitpick - I am instead here to tear apart the very soul of the whole document. I’m writing this because the core ideas in Conservatism in Crisis are so disastrously wrongheaded, they are bad news to everyone, apart from possibly the Labour Party (who will cling to power for a while yet if this pamphlet represents the future of conservatism).

First of all, it’s important to define what “a new progressive ideology” is because the idea of that is what underpins everything the pamphlet tries to set out. Interestingly, the document never once uses the word “woke”, possibly because the writer of the thing understands that the political right have destroyed the word - but this mention of a “new progressive ideology” is key. It is defined as being a mode of thought with these values at the heart of it:

“Due to ever-present, unfair power structures we need a constant focus on economic and social redistribution to support the ‘marginalised’, the ‘oppressed’, ‘victims’ and ‘the vulnerable’ – including the poor, but also certain group identities, (e.g. women, LGBT people, ethnic or religious minorities, the disabled or neuro-diverse, and migrants) as well as the natural world itself.

Progressive bureaucrats can make better decisions than individuals and democratic nation states are able to manage. Therefore, decisions should be taken away from individuals and democratic nation states and concentrated in the hands of the bureaucratic class.”

According to Conservatism in Crisis, this “new progressive ideology” is being pushed by the “bureaucratic class”, sometimes consciously, sometime unconsciously, all to the same effect: the enlarging of the state and the pushing of society to the left in every conceivable sense, in particular on social mores.

This “bureaucratic class” are the bad guys of this pamphlet, responsible for almost all of society’s ills. The good guys are the “entrepreneurs” - the people in society who make useful things. The pamphlet surmises that these two classes are in direct conflict with each other, and the bureaucrats are winning at present - the document repeatedly suggests that this is the main reason why everything isn’t working as well as it should in British society. If we just let the entrepreneurs do their thing and get rid of the bureaucrats, everything will start to improve - that is the basic thesis of Conservatism in Crisis.

It’s not like there is nothing to this idea. Yes, we need more entrepreneurs in Britain and could probably do with a lot fewer apparatchiks. But trying to reduce the whole of society’s ills into this paradigm is at best deeply flawed - at worst, actively destructive.

For a start, so many of the things the pamphlet reduces to being the result of the machinations of the bureaucratic class are in fact the exact opposite - they are products of free market capitalism. Two forces led to a more “progressive” society, everything from more women in the workforce to gay marriage, and neither of them have anything to do with bureaucracy: one, liberal democracy, in which people began to demand the right to certain things via the ballot box and won; and two, the free market, which freed up individuals to do what they wanted instead of what society demanded of them.

This gets to the heart of why the pamphlet is so dangerously wrongheaded: it is making the mistake that so many conservatives have made over the last several decades, namely, trying to act as if social conservatism and free market capitalism are one and the same thing and hang together perfectly, when in fact, they are very often in direct conflict with each other.

For instance, the pamphlet says it is obvious “how there is a world of difference, for example, between a lawyer dealing with market contracts and one focused on compliance, human rights or environmental laws” - except that it isn’t actually obvious there is a “world of difference” there. Both involve doing legal work a private company deems necessary. If the profit-driven organisation thinks it needs doing, the lawyer is then dealing with market-related concerns, whether that be around contracts or environmental compliance. All of it is being done with the goal of making the company money.

Wokeness in corporate culture is an outcome that is free market driven as well - companies that engage in DEI or have “woke” advertisements are doing so because they think (or possibly, know, based on market research) that doing these things will help them sell more of whatever it is they want to sell. That’s all there is to it - not some large-scale, Marxist conspiracy.

As ever with anything in this New Right milieu, the free market is glorified as the saviour of everything - until it has to deal with any of the reality of the free market itself, at which point they get squeamish towards it to the point of becoming quasi-Marxists. “The problem now is that profits are no longer linked to market capitalism but to fulfilling bureaucratic class whims.” This sentence from the pamphlet is completely nonsensical and bears no relationship with reality. It’s free market capitalism as seen by people with no business experience - and further, with an underlying dislike of actual business as it exists in the real world. Profits are now what they always have been - you sell things for more than you either buy them or make them for. The pamphlet could have made a salient argument about stakeholder rights superseding shareholders - but that would be about other factors to do with what large enterprises engage in becoming more important than profits, not profits themselves being “no longer linked to market capitalism”, which makes zero sense.

I could boil down the argument in Conservatism in Crisis to this: “Free markets aren’t working because they aren’t doing what we want them to do.” In other words, economic liberalism is not delivering social conservatism - it is in fact giving us the opposite. But instead of confronting this issue and trying to figure of what’s really happening, the pamphlet hides in the realms of fantasy, attempting to make 2+2 equal 15.

A great example of how the ideology of the pamphlet falls apart completely is through the prism of Brexit. Leaving the EU is seen as the ultimate triumph of the good guys in the paper - and yet, in reality, Brexit was a victory for bureaucracy and a loss for the free market. It meant we now need more bureaucrats in the UK - more civil servants to handle the competencies coming back into direct British control, more border guards and customs agents. It made the free market less free. The people who gained from Brexit are entirely within the “bureaucratic class” - and those who lost out were the entrepreneurs. Most Brexiters don’t even argue against this point, saying we left to gain sovereignty, sacrificing economic gain along the way.

The kicker to all of this is where the pamphlet inextricably leads in the end. It doesn’t have a solid conclusion and I’m fairly certain why - because in order to achieve all the things the New Right wishes to pull off, i.e., more women at home, less immigration, people having children in greater numbers, the roll back of this new progressive ideology they loathe, we would require more bureaucrats, not fewer of them. Want to make institutions less woke? The fastest and most effective way to do that would be to pump them full of right-wing ideologues - a whole new bureaucratic class, in other words. The free market isn’t going to roll back social progress, that’s for certain. Want to control immigration to a greater degree? You need way more bureaucrats on the job. The free market is inherently pro-immigration - more talent in the mix means a higher likelihood of innovation and productivity - so that’s not going to get you to the nativist utopia you crave.

But then again, why confront any of that when “2+2=15” is so much easier to cope with than the fundamental breakdown of the Conservatives’ electoral coalition?

“The progressive goal is explicitly to turn everything political and into a struggle,” the pamphlet says. Yet what Kemi Badenoch and those like her on the right don’t understand is that they themselves have turned everything political and into a struggle - just via a worldview that is a mirror image to the progressive one they hate.

Thank you for reading. If you haven’t subscribed, please do and I’ll be back as soon as someone on the right does something foolish (so, see you soon then).